Creating a home in Portugal
It was January, the month when things start, the month when people get things started. My plane touched the land of Portugal, my feet soon followed, and here I was, ready to start a new life, to create a new home, ready to recreate myself.
Except that I spent my first afternoon in Lisbon crying on an airbnb sofa, out of the sheer shock of a new beginning. I walked these streets before, as a tourist, admiring the slippery stones of the pavement. It was a whole different ball game to slip around the hilly paths dragging groceries home in winter showers, wondering what the hell I am doing. I looked around and saw tourists admiring the yellow trams in the soft light of dusk. I was no longer one of them. I was not one of the locals either. Yet. Ever.
I have not had home for years. I worked remotely, hopping to a different European city every month, having loud meetings in quiet Tuscany villages, and taking walks after exhausting calls along the Andalusian coast. It was as fun as it sounds, and I was as lucky as it sounds to have had an opportunity to do it. And at the same time, it meant never truly being at home, never truly feeling at home, never having a chance to create my home, physically, as a space, mentally, as a concept, for more than a few weeks. And now I could.
There was a practical side to it. Having a place to live. Learning the language. Obtaining a tax code, registering the residency, getting health insurance, changing the phone number, applying for a transport card, opening a local bank account. Finding libraries to work from. Finding a way to create a whole new social circle from scratch. Finding energy to do it all at once.
Language was a gate, and I grabbed its handle, starting with daily beginners classes, moving on to weekly intermediate ones, getting motivated by initial progress, getting desperate by the realisation of how tough it is to speak. I decided to walk 250 kilometers of Camino Portugues, partially to discover Portugal and create my relationship to it, partially to practice the language. It's fascinating how most of communication falls outside of language, or belongs to all languages - smile and nod and listen and hug. I took my fragile basics of the Portuguese language and used it to communicate with kind Portuguese people in beautiful Portuguese villages, they were eager to talk, stopping me, asking about the walk, asking how I feel about Portugal. My honesty was limited by my vocabulary. My gaze was not. Six months in, I was still not able to fully understand them, but my language was enough to express joy and appreciation, to say heartfelt hellos (not heartfelt goodbyes, I still struggle with goodbyes in Portuguese for some reason, I'm sure there's a metaphor in there as well).
Every time I stopped walking, I would get overwhelmed. Metaphorically. Literally. The weight of changes pushing hope out of my overthinking mind. On top of the country and language changes, I was changing from an employee to a student, changing fields from product management to clinical psychology, changing from a single individual to a partner in a relationship. The clear tracks of 9-5 job were abandoned, and I was out there trying to run the train, while building the tracks in front of it, without a clear map, just by a sense of intuition on where those tracks should lead.
There was a more subtle side of home building. Building communities. Or at least becoming a part of them. I started by finding yoga studios, exercising and listening to teachers' stories, accepting lemons from their gardens, accepting invitations to dinners at long communal tables. I found a book club for psychologists in Lisbon, and I saw my yoga teacher there, the circle starting to close, the circle starting to establish itself. I found a group for creative non-fiction writing, sitting down to write together - this is where I am writing this. I started a Portuguese conversation group with a colleague from the language classes, practicing what we learned in the afternoon sun of a busy park. I joined a community choir as a proud alto, rejoicing in the rhythm of voices, in the therapeutic vibrations of sound, making sound happen, feeling a part of it. Belonging.
With time I started seeing the same faces in different events, realising that there are more options of belonging than locals who have been born here and tourists who visit for a week. When it feels like I belong to a neither extreme of the spectrum, I know I am asking the wrong question, because I know there is always so much in between of extremes. There are communities for people who do not have communities. There are people in similar circumstances who crave to belong, not for the sake of conformity, but for the sake of connection, realising that we cannot rely just on ourselves, or just on our partners, or just on our families. There is beauty in expanding the circle, expanding the net, expanding our sense of self. There is joy in asking for help, proudly.
There is joy in struggle. I always start out with perfectionism, with an idealistic, flawless and hence an abstract dream, and when I come to transfer it onto the real soil, on a real day, bothered by real problems, the idealism falters and crashes, giving space to despair, to the feeling that everything is hard, is exhausting, is chaotically unsettling. And yet in a moment of reflection I realise that all good things come from unexpected chaotic changes, and that the vision of achieving your dreams in peace has always been just that, a vision, and real life requires real work and real struggle, and as much as it is terrifying. Struggle is effort and effort is progress, and that in itself feeds a sense of accomplishment and power.
We live in a global world, we are getting used to recreating ourselves much more often than before. I am starting to learn the rules of the game, it is my third iteration of it. And yet most of the rules come from our own minds and expectations. The way we see change as a disruptor. The way we see other people as disruptors. Rather than seeing everything as a constant flow of change, the other people as an extension of our own mad peopling. Moving from small separate groups, small separate islands, into one massive colourful crowd. All fighting for belonging, all struggling for a chance to create a space called home. All with a potential of finding home in each other.
Home is a sense of safety, closing doors and opening them when we are ready to dive back into the chaos. Home is a sense of order, dragging bookshelves and chocolate and pillows in, and knowing we will find them when we get back.
Except that comfort and control are misleading powers. We deserve that peace and safety - not so we can live within it, but so we can have a way to rest and recover, in between of having tremendous adventures, exploring the chaos as it unravels.
And developing that sense of daring adventure is as important as establishing a tax residency. Arguably, much more so.
