I was in the last year of my college degree when I came to the realization that my home country was not the place where I wanted to kickstart my career.
After five years of studying in the comfort of my beautiful hometown I felt a screaming need for new faces, new surroundings, new challenges and overall, new experiences that would demand a new version of myself. So I figured I needed to get out of there, at least for a while.
And if you’re reading this, maybe it’s because you’ve felt it too.
Perhaps you are contemplating whether you should take that job offer close to home (yes, the one that goes hand in hand with great weekend get-togethers with your life-long friends and keeping your mother’s tasty meals close) or diving into the adventure that starting a job in a new city involves.
It might be that your heart is torn between the exciting (but daunting) decision of moving into unexplored territory and the not-so-thrilling but unarguably sweet comfort of sticking to your already established lifestyle.
If that’s the case, I get it. I’ve been there too.
And I wish I could tell you which decision is best, but… I can’t.
Truth is, it’s only up to you, your needs, and your circumstances (which by the way, are deeply personal, so if you can avoid it, try not to let too many people get involved in your decision-making).
Only you know what’s best for you, so take the driver’s seat on this one.
What I can do though, is tell you about the things I have reflected on due to my own personal experience, and hope that this will help you gain some insight into what to expect. Because expectation nourishes preparation.
And you want to be prepared.
While I can’t guarantee that your experience will take you down the same path, at least it will help provide some perspective.
Today it will be 10 months since I moved from San Sebastian, my pretty little hometown in the north of Spain, to Amsterdam, a chaotic capital city full of clashes of all kinds. And even though I am now absolutely convinced that this was the best decision I could have made for myself, I still wish that back then, when there was still uncertainty in my mind, someone would have given me a short teaser trailer of what awaited me.
So here’s the unromanticized version of the story. Here’s the good, the great, and the ugly:
My apologies for starting out with the ugly, but let’s just rip off the band-aid, shall we? Bear with me and I promise we’ll get not only to the good but also to the great.
When I first decided to move to Amsterdam for a job I thought it was going to be the second volume of my amazing exchange experience all over again. I couldn’t wait to meet new international people, build a family type of bond with them and go out together every weekend. But visiting a city temporarily and fully relocating to kickstart your professional career are completely different stories.
Little did I know that I would be spending most nights of my first month sitting all alone on a floor mattress surrounded by nothing other than silence (no wifi — no furniture).
Surprisingly friends didn’t come knocking at your door as I had expected! You had to actively go find them. You had to make an effort and put yourself out there in order to connect with people. And I’ll admit that even for an outgoing person like myself, it was no easy feat in the very beginning.
I started by reaching out to people I had met during my exchange who were still living in the city and who were generous enough to welcome me into their circle or invite me to a few parties. Something I hugely appreciated and which I will always be grateful for. It helped me expand my circle, but most importantly, exchange my reclusive evening at home for a good time with friends. For someone who has just moved into a new city, the hand of that first friend is invaluable.
So yes, there’s a chance that if you are relocating to a completely new city with no connections whatsoever, you might feel a bit lonely at first.
Sleep alone, eat dinner alone, read alone, listen to music and go explore the city alone. In the midst of it all, you will learn a lot about yourself. You will gradually start getting comfortable with that silence. You will invest in yourself and it will help you grow. And remember, it’s a process. Building a circle in a new city doesn’t happen magically overnight, so forgive yourself if your group of friends isn’t as big as you had expected or you feel out of place for a while. Go searching for opportunities that will change that.
This takes me straight to my next point:
No matter how shy you might be, at one point you’ll realize that staying at home binge-watching Netflix all day isn’t going to get you any friends, so you’ll have no other choice than to get your ass off the couch and start creating opportunities to meet people.
Instead of working from home go to a café and have a chat with the waiter (it’s quite likely that they’ve been through the same process you’re going through!). Suggest your coworkers to go out for a drink, I’m sure they’re cool people. Sign up for events, meet-ups, or workshops near you (it’s a great way to meet people with similar interests!). Use Eventbrite, Meet-up, or Tinder even! (although in this case, “Friender” might be a better fit). Take one chance after the other and you’ll slowly start connecting with people.
The good news? It gets easier as you go! Practice makes perfect, so the more you put yourself out there, the easier it becomes to socialize and meet new people.
Building your new “squad” from scratch is just one of the first challenges you will come across when relocating to a new city, but there will be many more to come (and possibly a bit more demanding — the type you wouldn’t be able to ignore even if you wanted to): like finding accommodation (which in Amsterdam is nearly mission impossible), getting used to your new job, adapting to a completely different culture and routine, registering in the city council and getting your legal and financial situation in order… the list goes on and on. But that’s life, isn’t it? You haven’t quite yet finished figuring something out while another issue is already waiting for you around the corner!
The difference, in this case, is that you won’t have your usual supporters by your side, so you’ll have to figure it out on your own. You’ll have no other choice than to remind yourself that you have what it takes to overcome any obstacle that life throws at you, big or small. That there is no challenge you cannot conquer. Not a single goal you cannot score. And by steadily forcing yourself to overcome all minor and greater issues on your own, you’ll be proving to yourself everything you are capable of.
You will feel powerful. Strong. Independent.
I’ll admit, however, that there are also times when you can feel small, lonely, and defeated. But that’s just life. Bad days happen (both in the refuge of your home and far from it). But then you pick yourself up, and on to the next challenge, as you start seeing your self-confidence grow stronger.
And isn’t it essential to learn how to be okay on our own? We have to learn how to provide for ourselves, how to pick ourselves back up when we’re down, wipe our own tears away, and turn the situation around. Of course having people who protect and support us, who guides us, is absolutely amazing, but we can’t always depend on them.
It’s sad but it’s true. Most of the time we don’t realize how much we value something until we lose sight of it. I always loved where I lived and the people I was surrounded by, but when you get used to things, you start taking them for granted. By leaving it all behind I started to miss things that I didn’t even notice before.
The slower pace of life. My friends’ weird sense of humor. Basque food culture (bitterballen are okay but I can’t wait to treat myself to a few mouth-watering pintxos). Family get-togethers on the weekends. Hearing my mom’s awkwardly loud laugh at a very bad TV show. The softness of my bed. The smell of the ocean — because Amsterdam might be surrounded by water but canals don’t quite smell like home. Well, you get the idea.
Anyhow, every time I go back now, I notice all of these little things. They’re somehow magnified. I value them more than ever and I am automatically filled with gratitude.
Not to mention that being able to compare both lifestyles also helps me put things into perspective. Nothing is as “great” or as “bad”. Transitioning from one to another I’ve found that my mindset changes, it shifts my vision about things, and stepping out of a scene for a while allows me to see the bigger picture.
Since I came to Amsterdam until now, 10 months later, I’ve moved houses 7 times. This means that I’ve nearly been living in a different neighborhood every month, and I can assure you, from all the hoods I’ve had to live in, adulthood has been by far the most troublesome.
But it can also be exciting and rewarding.
I’m learning how to manage my personal finance, set monthly budgets, and saving objectives. I have a greater understanding of the value of things now. I remember when my mother used to tell me “Money doesn’t grow in trees, you know?”, and man, was she right. Spending is so easy. Making up for it on the other hand takes so long. But by paying more attention to what comes in and what goes out you learn to find a balance.
I’m learning how to navigate my way through incredibly frustrating bureaucratic processes. Paying the bills, fines, taxes, opening a bank account, getting health insurance, understanding and negotiating a new job and housing contract… and most of all, meticulously reading and re-reading all of the terms and conditions in any of the above (most of the times in dutch!)
So if such a disordered person like myself has been able to bear with all of the previous matters for 10 months, you can definitely get the hang of it too. Not to mention that sooner or later you’ll have to anyway, so why not start now?
“The only constant in life is change.”
HERACLITUS
My knowledge of greek philosophy might be a bit rusty since high school, but I think Heraclitus absolutely nailed this one.
Whether we like it or not, life is a series of continuous changes, one after the other. Change can happen gradually or abruptly, but there’s one thing for certain: it’s unavoidable. It will find you, challenge you and force you to reconsider how to live your life.
However, we are not so much affected by change but rather, by how we deal with change. How we confront it. Do we fear it? Do we resist it? Do we face it?
By making the choice of taking a job in a completely different city you are consciously inviting change into your life. You are embracing it. You are putting yourself in a position where you know you’ll have to go through an adaptation process. You seek it with a positive mindset because you look forward to learning from it. You hope that it will shape you, that it will teach you.
And it will.
No matter if you decide to move to a neighboring country or to the other side of the world, leaving the nest for a whole different environment is already a big deal on its own, and it will demand flexibility.
You’ll have to incorporate different routines and accommodate a different culture. There’ll be things you’ll like and things you won’t. Still, you’ll adapt.