My 2020 Then and Now: From Portugal to Germany
This post should have happened a few weeks ago, but then coronavirus happened and my world went into a tailspin, so let’s just appreciate the fact that it’s happening at all. Because, y’all, this post is an OG loololo-style post. It’s all about change, transformation, and getting the goodness out of life. So without further ado, let’s get into the good stuff.
You see, one year ago today, I was living in Ericeira, Portugal. I had just returned from a brief, albeit magical, trip to Thailand, and despite the soul-centering hours on the beach of Khao Lak, I returned to Portugal feeling more lost than ever. A few weeks prior, I’d sat at the dinner table in the United Stated with my parents, talking about my goals and resolutions for 2020. I sheepishly revealed that my hope of all hopes was to find a way to return to Hamburg, Germany; a city where I’d always felt at home, despite never having officially lived there before. It felt selfish to say this, after having just secured a visa to live in Portugal and living a life that many people looked at as idyllic. I resided in an old, rustic apartment in the middle of a surfing village on the stunning coast of one of Europe’s most beautiful countries.
Don’t get me wrong, in 2019 I felt an immense sense of accomplishment, having transitioned from life as a performer to life with a full-time job behind a computer. But I knew I was bound for something else. It just took me a year to figure out a few things:
A- I deserved the life I dreamed about
B- The life I dreamed about was more tangible than I realized
C- Surrounding yourself with an inspiring community makes everything seem a bit more tangible and a lot less crazy
So what changed for me in 2020? Let’s take a peek at the then and now…
Living Alone
One year ago, I lived alone in a quaint apartment on the bottom floor of a 200-year-old house in Portugal. With french doors that opened to the main street in town, it was the perfect spot for friends to pass by for a coffee and a hello, for convenient evening walks through the town, and last-minute trips to the local market for fresh cheese and olives. Not to mention living 20 meters from the beach… While it was lovely, it was also kind of a creepy place to live alone. I’m convinced it was haunted, the stone floors were absolutely freezing in winter, and I never really felt “comfy” there.
Fast forward to 2021, where I’m starting the year compulsively looking at Pinterest boards for my new apartment, and walking in my front door every evening, saying “hello beautiful!” (I literally do this) to the place I’ve come to feel more at home than ever before. Finding an apartment in Hamburg might as well be an Olympic sport, which makes the victory of finding a loft-like space within my budget feel even more victorious. (As soon as the pictures are framed and the rugs are in place, I’ll take you all on a tour, just like I did with my place in Portugal.)
The common thread here is that in both Portugal and Germany, I spent a decent amount of time living alone. In Portugal, this left me feeling isolated and antsy, and in Germany, I feel at peace and completely fulfilled. Funny how the situation wasn’t the problem, but merely the setting.
Languages
Ok, in both 2020 and 2021 I was busy trying to absorb the local language of where I was living. I spent my lunch breaks twice a week in Portugal, sitting at a table with other beach-driven foreigners, trying to force impossible sounds out of my mouth and hoping it landed in the room as Portuguese. Y’all, Portuguese was not my language. It’s like the universe was pushing me to discover my happy place elsewhere, because, besides ordering a coffee or telling people I was American (which they DEFinitely knew as soon as I started speaking), I didn’t gain much more from these lessons than brainpower and some deep belly laughs.
Fast forward to 2021 in Germany, where I’m sitting down after work twice a week to focus on an entirely different language. And this one actually makes sense to my brain! Sometimes… Learning German is beastly, but I actually really like the language. I’m determined to keep taking classes as long as possible and work my way towards fluency. (Full disclosure: my chances of learning German were drastically boosted from my time as a singer on a German cruise ship, where I had private phonetics lessons, so I wouldn’t butcher the classic German tunes. If you’re craving some ridiculous clips of me singing German, leave me a comment below and I’ll send you something.)
Work
… you know that thing we all have to do?
In 2020 I was settling into a new, remote position working with YouTubers. There weren’t any conventional benefits like health insurance, sick days, etc, but this job gave me two fierce female mentors (and friends) and helped me secure the visa I needed to stay in Portugal. Better yet, it led me to my new job, working with Instagrammers (apparently social media and I are besties), and chock full of real-world benefits, PLUS a visa sponsorship in Germany. This job made my move to Hamburg possible, and I don’t for one second take that for granted.
Everything happens for a reason. Two different years. Two different jobs. One hardworking Emily excited about where her career is heading.
My People.
Without putting too many shameless references to my own blog in here, if you’ve been following along from the beginning, you know that I put a lot of effort into making friends when I first moved to Portugal. And as a result, I gained a few lifelong friends, absolutely no friends at the local spin studio despite my best efforts (just keeping it real), and an absolutely stellar yoga community, thanks to Samu and Lavinia at Almashala yoga. While I knew I wasn’t feeling settled in Portugal, I’d accepted that with my job and visa situation, it’s where I would probably be for the foreseeable future. That is, until my friend Joana mentioned moving to Berlin, casually one afternoon. Her eyes were focused on the broader horizon, and it’s safe to say she completely motivated me to look at fast-tracking my move to Germany, in a situation where I thought it to be impossible. It pays to put effort into finding the friends that inspire, motivate, and encourage you.
More on this in a post to come, but making friends in Hamburg is one of the very first things I did, and I’d say I did it with smashing success :) I’m so proud of this little community of inspiring and positive friends I have in this special city, and I come home from most socially-distanced coffee walks, or runs, feeling so stinkin’ grateful for the time I put into forcing people to hang out with me.
Home.
Despite all of the big changes I made in 2020, there are still some things I still can’t manage to shake from my life, like dealing with visa processes, a neverending urge to see new places, and a million questions (from both myself and others) about how I want my future to look. And that’s alright. At the end of the day, I look back on 2020 with nothing but pride (and a few tears), simply based on the fact that I fought for my happiness. I worked for the changes I wanted. And I refused to settle somewhere where my soul felt out of place. None of this would have been possible without the community I found, in both Portugal and Germany. But better yet, my journey to discovering the nooks and crannies of complicated, messy me helped me figure out a little more every day of exactly what makes me happy. And can I just say, the bureaucracy, logistics of moving countries, and hours of tedious language lessons were definitely frustrating in the moment. But in a year when so many things were taken away from the world, it feels momentous to look back at what I was able to accomplish for myself and my happiness over the past 365 days. So 2021 may not be starting with a trip to Thailand, but funny enough, the trips don’t seem to matter as much when your soul feels at home right where you are.