Moving on to the next thing… in Italian

Letting go of the comfortable thing is hard. Stepping into a new place where you don’t know your way around is scary. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, but you need to go where no one knows who the fuck you are.

I’ve been on the edge of this need for awhile now. In fact, I’ve been clinging to the known with my bare and bloody fingertips for years. Being scouted for the contract at sea was the universe giving me that not so gentle first push. It forced me to imagine a different way of being; less connected to my things, my places, my routines. It forced me to recognize the people who were the real ones, who cared about me enough to download WhatsApp and turn on their notifications.

Over the course of the last four years as I’ve been away from home six months at a time, something not very surprising happened. My place stopped being my place. The home I’d built over the last 20 plus years loosened it’s grip. The working relationships I’d tirelessly developed exhaled and let go. The city I’d made mine moved on. The only thing about New York you can rely on is that it will always change, whether you are there or not. If you want to hang, hang tight. It’s an addictive dance, because when you’re in it you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt. It’s not until you step away that you notice how hard you were working to keep up.

The ship isn’t my place either. I’m not a lifer. This job was meant to be more temporary than it’s ended up being. My time here is also nearing it’s end, so I’m left with that big, universal, never ending, existential question: what’s next?

Yesterday I visited La Spezia, a small maritime city in Liguria Italy. It is the jumping off point to Cinque Terre, a beautiful and popular string of five fishing villages on Italy’s northern coast. I had an incredible day with some of my ship friends, taking the train to three of the five small towns, swimming in the perfect crisp blue water, sipping cappuccinos, ripping apart sea bream with my fingers, sampling pizza, sharing a carafe of the house white and nearly succumbing to death on an unexpectedly steep hike from Manarola to Riomaggiore with a sprained ankle. I loved it all.

This is just one of many charming and absolutely life affirming stories I could tell you about my visits to Italy. I have felt alive and at home in Palermo, Roma, Firenze, Turino, Venezia, Lago D’Orta, Catania and so on and on. My soul sings here. Typical American, I know. Visiting Italy with nothing but time to wander and enjoy and falling in love with the place. But I’ve visited many places and not felt the same pull, Spain, France, England, Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, Australia, Greece, Denmark… none of them have called to me quite the way Italy does.

Many Americans feel burdened with a desire to get out, to run from the tide of fascism being cranked up by a mad man who somehow gets to make decisions for me against my will. But it turns out you can’t just leave your home country and go live somewhere else whenever you want (which is fucking dumb by the way because citizenship and countries and borders are all literally made up and no one owns the earth you know what I mean and no while we’re at it I don’t think Isreal has a right to exist come at me bro). So how to leave? The answer came in a quiet and unexpected form.

School.

I never got my bachelor’s degree. At eighteen I was absolutely fed up with the training wheels of education. I was ready to LIVE. I did not want to put myself and my parents thousands of dollars in debt for an acting degree that I definitely did not think I needed. So I took the first divinely inspired leap of my life and I dropped out of college to move to NYC with no plan, no job and no money. It was awesome and I don’t regret it one bit.

Now here I am, 40 whatever, with decades of professional and street experience under my belt and a sudden need for a new path. Do you know how much more affordable universities are in Europe than they are in the US? Do you know that if you get accepted to an EU university, it comes with a visa?? MWAHAHAHA! (shoutout to my friendspiration Daphne Always for falling in love with Iceland and figuring out that the only way to move there was to go to college there).

I started learning Italian a few years ago after living in Civitavecchia for a month at the start of my first contract. It’s been slow going because I’m lazy, but I never lost interest. I kept chipping away at it without having any idea why. Divine inspiration perhaps?

Slowly the path begins to emerge. I’ve been hesitant to share this idea with many people for fear that sharing it drains it of it’s potency, but now I think maybe the opposite is true. Maybe if I keep talking about it I make it more real with each recitation. Any number of unexpected life events could derail this plan. I secretly hope some incredible opportunity jumps in the way so that I get a little bit more time in my beloved home city. NYC is such a unique happiness bubble in America right now with Mamdani, the Knicks, the constant flow of anti-trump rhetoric, I’m curious how long it will last. “New Yorker” is a hard earned merit badge I’m resistant to give up.

But maybe that’s fear talking.

At this point I’m ready for anything. Sell that project I’ve been developing, get a call from that casting director I keep submitting to, meet my soulmate and get my EU citizenship via marriage, WHO KNOWS! Whatever happens, I have a plan now and having a plan is empowering, I haven’t had one of those in a long time. Especially not one that makes me feel this excited, this lit up, this engaged.

As I read the works of psychological and spiritual writers like Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Eckhart Tolle, I am learning how to listen to and connect with my instinct again. Something many of us unlearn at a young age and must relearn later. When I researched a potential degree program at the university I’m eyeing, I experienced such a full body yes I almost gasped. It was practically euphoric. That is a strong magnetic pull from the universal compass telling me which way to go.

Who am I to resist?