The Realities of Moving Abroad at 20

There’s no amount of advice you can read or preparation you can do that makes that moment any easier: letting go of your family from that last hug at the airport and stepping willingly and alone into the new adventure of transporting you and your life to another country.

There are a million metaphors that are used to describe the process. Pop culture is oozing with stories of self discovery and life-changing journeys that all begin with this moment of simultaneous ending and beginning (see: every rom com ever where the female character takes a brave new plunge out of her comfort zone). For me, the plunge is into a compulsory year abroad in Germany as part of my university course. For a lot of the women in the films I mean, it’s a plunge into a fantastic new chapter of their lives they wish they had discovered sooner. It’s laced with privilege — the very notion of being able to comfortably uproot your life as a solution to one’s problems is certainly unique to a particular demographic, and it arguably undermines the visceral stories of ‘moving’ out of necessity. Elle Woods of Legally Blonde understandably falls flat to those who move because they are fleeing severe threats and not the realisation that, actually, they have been dumped and not proposed to.

Naively, leading up to my departure, I relied on the artificial presentations of these moments to calm me like those little tongue drops from The Body Shop. When I would feel dread churn and curdle in my stomach at the thought of making such a daunting change, I re-watched Wild, Eat, Pray, Love and 2019’s cheesy addition to the already certified cheddar mix — Netflix’s Falling Inn Love. I assured myself that I would be just like Reese and Julia, and my move to Germany would alert me to what I truly want out of life. But the crucial difference between my own story and the ones I absorbed from the silver screen, besides the fact that mine was real and those were Hollywood, was me.

At 20, halfway through my degree and fresh from a summer spent waitressing at Alton Towers, it’s no secret that I am a far cry from the characters who are all either recently divorced or recently at a standstill in their moderately satisfactory lives. My plunge moment loomed before me when I 1) did not (and do not) have any substantial amount of life experience, 2) was more than happy to be living at home and looked after by my mum and dad and 3) had never done anything like this before. I have no experience of living alone or working a “real job”, and no clue of how to budget anything other than my student loan and monthly instalments of a £6.60 an hour wage (plus tips!)

It goes without saying that, unlike the movies, moving to the Baltic coast for me wasn’t a radical break from my suburban life with cheating bastard ex-husband and job where I am under-appreciated (although I can maybe tick off this one). I wasn’t running away from a shock or a life-altering event, but rather I was bringing the life-altering on myself.

So, flash back to my plunge moment, 6.00 am in Manchester Airport Terminal 3 Departures, with the scariest thing I’ve ever done a few metres one way, and the epitome of my safety net and comfort zone a few metres the other. Ironically, I am describing it all rather poetically, when the point is that it was far from that. Think less ‘young fledgling leaving the nest and taking flight’ and more ‘scared and shattered barely-adult is absolutely bricking it’. Everyone can tell you that “you’ll be back for Christmas” and there’s those annoying year abroad kids that tell you incessantly “it’s the best year of your life!!!!” but none of those false pretences can really do much to mask the real fear, regret and sadness when that moment arrives and, shit, you really are going and you’re going right now.

I think that’s why I hugged everybody for so long, to put off the real leaving I was about to do, and stay as long as possible under the comfort blanket of my mum making tea, my dad telling rubbish jokes and giving me lifts, of my brother telling me what songs to listen to and then singing them to me and all four of us watching Manifest in the living room. It was like I could feel all those things that were warming and familiar in the hugs they gave me, and to break away from the embraces was to turn my back on and abandon them. While Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love had already been left and so had little to leave, all I could think about was who and what I was letting go.

But I did it — I pulled away and cried a bit and picked up one foot at a time as I headed towards airport security, thinking that it was all a bit tricky and sad, and not very Eat, Pray, Love. I know now that’s a good thing, although I do wish my flight could have been a 30 second montage of me staring wistfully out of the window, contemplating my new life. In reality I was sat next to a baby.

It has taken me four weeks of being here to realise and process and put into words why I’m glad I didn’t have a glamorous and whimsical goodbye. I think if my plunge moment had been any more cinematic, then it would have also been less human, and the fact that it was so hard makes me feel grateful for the support system and comfort zone my home and family are. The guilt and regret of leaving have also faded the more I have realised that the internet exists and I can still talk to people every day because I am just abroad, not dead.

In my moments of doubt and worry, I am remembering how my mum and I each looked back and waved five times before we were out of sight, and as for whether this experience will be the best of my life, I still have a year’s worth of figuring out to do. Focussing so closely on the goodbye ironically meant I left out worrying about the hardest part — everything that comes after.

However, if it turns out like my plunge moment, not what I expected but somehow just right, I might have my rom com happy ending after all.