On moving to Lisbon, and what reinvention costs

When people picture reinvention, they picture the airport, the one-way ticket, the new light, the version of you who finally got free. The months on the bathroom floor stay out of the picture. I have lived both halves, and the second one is the part I want to tell you about.

My husband and I left Denver for Lisbon because, all the way through the pandemic, journaling kept handing me the same message. I wanted a major change, a whole different life instead of a break from this one. So we did the brave thing everybody applauds and went looking for a new country and new soil. I told the story the way you are supposed to tell it, as a fresh start. What it turned out to be was an initiation, and initiations are rough by design.

The inspirational version leaves out everything that came next.

I fell into the grip of a narcissist. Immigration was brutal in a way that blindsided me. Money haemorrhaged, faster than I could track it and faster than I could replace it. My nervous system, which I had spent decades learning to steady, came apart in my hands. Sleep stopped coming. I cried every day. I got depressed in a way that frightened me. Then my body joined the protest, with chronic fatigue and skin problems and panic attacks. Every childhood trigger I thought I had retired came pounding at the door at once, and I stood there on my very last nerve.

For a while I lied to myself about it. I called it a speed bump. I told myself I would bounce back quickly, the way I always had. The bounce took years, and that was the part that scared me most, more than the money or the sleeplessness. I had done a lifetime of inner work and here I was, undone. Alone with my thoughts on the streets of a city whose language I was still learning, I kept asking why all of that work had stopped working.

What I had wrong about the question

It took me a long time to see it. The work was working. The challenge had simply got bigger, and bigger growth asks for bigger fire. I had been measuring my healing by how little pain I felt, when the real measure was whether I kept showing up for myself while the pain did its work.

Transformation is born out of pain. I knew that. I had said it from stages and written it in books. Lisbon was the first time I had to live it at that volume.

The bill, itemized

Let me be honest about the cost, because the people selling reinvention rarely are.

It costs money, usually more than you budgeted and at the worst possible moment. It costs your nervous system, because your body reads a brave choice as a threat, and it will sound every alarm it owns. It costs your old identity, the competent woman who had it all handled, and grieving her is its own private heartbreak. It costs the comfort of being understood, of walking into a room where people know your history and your jokes and your name. For a long stretch in Lisbon all of that was gone, and I felt its absence every single day.

There was a loneliness in it that caught me off guard. I would walk the streets here and watch people navigating their own uncertainty, and I could see the resilience in them, a whole city of people getting up and trying again. I wanted to belong to it. I wanted to learn the language and be known and stop being the woman who smiled and nodded because she was still hunting for the words. I was, for a long time. Belonging waits to be built, slowly, with your own two hands, on ground that still belongs to somebody else.

What the pain usually means

I used to think pain meant I had taken a wrong turn. Now I understand it usually means I am in the middle of a real change, the kind that remakes you instead of relocating you. The weeds in my garden crossed the ocean with me, and the new soil grew them tall enough that I finally had to deal with the roots.

All of this applies just as much if you stay exactly where you are. Reinvention wears a lot of costumes, a divorce after a long marriage, an empty house after the last kid leaves, a career you walk away from at fifty, a diagnosis that reorders everything, or a move across town that may as well be across an ocean. The shape changes and the cost stays the same. Every real reinvention asks you to let an old version of yourself die so a truer one can be born, and while you are inside it that death is literal. It aches. It should.

Why I came through it

Looking back, I know exactly why. I stayed with myself. Even on the worst days, especially on the worst days, I journaled. I listened to my own thoughts and feelings instead of running from them. I let the fear move through my body, and I walked myself through the fire with as much compassion and trust as I could find. Had I stopped showing up for myself, I doubt I would have found the way out.

Lisbon stayed hard the whole way through. The journaling kept me company while it remade me.

I am gentler with my heart now than I have ever been, more at peace with my life, more attuned to myself, more at home in a place that once felt like exile. If you are standing at the edge of your own reinvention, my advice is to go. Go with your eyes open and your pen close. The new chapter is worth it. Know that it asks to be paid in full, and that the payment is the point.