Straws of Endurance: My Journey through Change and Acceptance
I have had to restart my life several times. The first time was when I left my home country at 18. Despite my desire to leave, a desire that had been with me since my early teen years, I was afraid. “What if I don’t make it?” I asked my mother. This time her way of seeing things lifted the heaviness in my chest. “See it as tourism,” she replied. “If you don’t like it, you can always come back. It’s Rome, after all.”
Rome, the city center, felt like a dream. I felt like I was catapulted inside one of the documentaries I used to watch on television. However, I wouldn’t be living in the city center, and unlike Rome’s most famous university, La Sapienza, my university wasn’t located in the center either.
When we checked the campus of the university I had enrolled in, I realized it was far away from everything. “It’s in the middle of nowhere,” was my first thought. Then, I saw huge fields of grass, cows grazing, and bales of hay between the widely spaced buildings. I didn’t even attempt to hold back the tears of disappointment.
The campus was far from what I had imagined and longed for. Back then, we didn’t have Google Maps to check the nearby locations. However, the building of the Department of Economics was new, with nice architecture with lots of big windows and natural light. The lecture halls were immense and could accommodate several hundred of us in that first year.
A big chunk of that first year in Rome felt terrible. I was homesick. I missed my family and friends. Phone conversations with Albania were extremely expensive. With my family, we’d call each other every now and then to ask how we were doing. We would mostly about physical well-being. I also didn’t feel I could burden my parents with my doubts and stories of the occasional racism I would encounter.
Despite how bad that first year felt, it never occurred to me to go back to Albania. I’m glad I didn’t. In hindsight, the choice of that university was the best decision I could have made. The academic staff was excellent and welcoming. That department was then ranked as the second-best public university in Italy, and it has since become one of the best internationally.
Several years later, I had to restart my life again. This time as a Ph.D. student in Stockholm. Thanks to the academic preparation and professors I had met at my university, Tor Vergata, I got accepted to a Ph.D. program at a prestigious university in Europe: The Stockholm School of Economics.
For family reasons, especially my mother’s sickness, I wanted to stay in Europe. I never applied to any U.S. universities. Moreover, most universities requested the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a requirement I kept postponing because of my dyslexia and I was short of money to pay for it. Stockholm accepted me without the GRE results and I didn’t need any extra tests to show my English proficiency as my masters were both in English.
That acceptance was a joyful event. It was the very first Ph.D. application I ever submitted. In theory, I could have applied to many programs; in practice, however, they all demanded application fees — a non-negligible amount given my negligible income. I lacked the resources to apply to all the schools on my list. A list carefully crafted with my advisor. We concluded that this program was comparable to the others on my list. Today, I disagree with that statement.
Before moving to Stockholm, another wave of self-doubt hit. I was afraid again. In Rome, I had managed to build a life and had friends and people I could rely on. “What if I don’t make friends?” I asked my then-boyfriend, and now a good friend, Antonio. “You?” he replied and to highlight my outgoing personality added “You are able to talk with stones… ” We were on our way to our favorite pastry shop near the old dorm and that comment felt as sweet as the creme bomb (bomba alla crema) we were about to devour in a few minutes.
Both of us were right. I made good friends In Stockholm, but it took me long to manage.
The first two years in Stockholm felt more than terrible. In winter, the city was embraced by a big dark cloud, a kind of darkness I wasn’t used to. The program was intensely competitive, and my mother’s sickness was at its peak. My own (mental) health wasn’t great either. My thoughts often mirrored the darkness outside. My circadian rhythm was disrupted. From 3 p.m. to around 7 a.m., it was the same exact level of darkness. No change. I used to figure out the time by the sun’s position on the horizon, but in Stockholm, distinguishing “day” from “night” was impossible.
The darkness would fall at around 3 p.m. At 7 or 8 p.m., my body was ready to sleep. But I had to work to do, so I drank lots of coffee throughout the day to manage to stay awake. Unfortunately, this led to sleepless nights, as the caffeine from the day kept me up all night. I’d only realize I hadn’t slept when I saw light outside my windows. I was trapped in a cycle of exhaustion.
Throughout those first two years, I frequently considered dropping out of the program. (These thoughts would reemerge during my final year of the Ph.D. but more on that in another article, perhaps.) I didn’t keep my feelings and ideas a secret. I felt I wasn’t contributing to society. Being paid to study — a former dream of mine — contrasted with the harsh realities of life, including my past experiences. I felt like the Ph.D. program was an unearned privilege.
In the meantime, Antonio had moved from Rome to Madrid, so I figured I, too, would move to Spain. I was fortunate to manage a visiting period there. While many of my peers were using their exchange funding to explore prestigious U.S. universities, I once again chose a European program. My decision was driven by the need to be close to Antonio and my family in case of an emergency. It’s a choice I don’t regret at all; in fact, quite the opposite.
I loved every minute of my life in Spain and the academic environment at Cemfi — an institution I feel both privileged and proud to have visited. The institution had been on the list of places to consider for my Ph.D., and my other advisor, Stefano, had visited Cemfi in the past, wholeheartedly recommending it.
Eventually, though, my health issues caught up with me, and my body shut down. I could barely get out of bed and walk. It was hard to make it to medical appointments. Vitamin D was severely lacking from the previous period spent in Sweden. I never thought of integrating it through pills; when my Swedish peers talked about integrating it this way, I thought it was a joke.
My body had been running under stress for so long that arthrosis started to develop in my late 20s, some issues with my kidneys, etc. The medical doctors couldn’t believe what the stories the charts were telling them. The rheumatologist looking at my lab results said, “You’re like a rotten apple: beautiful and healthy on the outside, but rotten on the inside. How can this even be? You are too young!”
I laughed at the joke, seeing that (red) apple in my mind’s eye, but the long list of medical appointments continued for months. For months I was also in rehabilitation for my back. It was then that I realized several health issues. (At least now I can keep some of them under control, to some extent. Thanks to those experiences, I am much more informed about medicine too, including the current research frontiers in some areas.)
Spain, and the people around us, did magic for my health and my health got better.
Upon returning to Stockholm to finish my Ph.D., I didn’t even notice the cultural and weather differences; they seemed no longer significant. This time was also different. Antonio joined me a few months later, undergoing a significant career change. He joined a Swedish meditation startup, The Mindfulness App, as a core developer.
We moved to Budapest after I finished my Ph.D. as I got a job at the Central European University (CEU). Just after accepting the offer, a law was passed, by the Hungarian government, that would make the operation of my institution impossible in Hungary. We relocated unsure of how things would unfold.
CEU was also the best institution I could have chosen given my profile. I had also attempted to be closer to my parents, once again. From Budapest, the travel time would be a few hours by flight, in comparison to the 7–9 hours it would take me to reach Tirana from Stockholm or Madrid.
However, we weren’t sure if I had made the right decision after all. I had declined offers from places like Montreal in Canada, Barcelona and Alicante in Spain, Munich in Germany, and even one from Vienna, Austria — the city CEU would soon move.
And at that time in my life, I really disliked uncertainty. I had been used to the predictability of life in Sweden. Life in Hungary, and being part of a Hungarian institution, reminded me of the culture in Albania. A culture I had long left behind.
Despite the uncertainty, life in Budapest brought some of the happiest moments of my life. I began to (re)learn how to embrace uncertainty. After the initial rounds of COVID lockdowns, it became even clearer to me that nothing can truly be certain. I had to let go of my need for predictability.
I also had to let go of another significant part of my life: 14 years into our relationship, Antonio and I parted ways before our move to Vienna. I found myself navigating a series of lockdowns and a string of medical appointments on my own in Budapest.
Budapest, also gifted me some of the hardest moments of my life so far, including an existential crisis. Reimagining life outside the relationship was possibly one of the most challenging things I have ever done in life. The city itself felt like an open-air museum of memories. This, coupled with other factors, including another move to another city during lockdowns, wasn’t smooth, to say the least.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a second real opinion. I’d ask my brother mostly or my friends. Eventually, I learned to do things fully on my own, even things I never imagined or wanted to do alone, such as picking up furniture for an empty rental apartment.
Settling in Vienna hasn’t been easy either. Two years after moving here, I still don’t feel fully settled — tomorrow I have yet another residence permit appointment, and my apartment still lacks the furniture to be fully comfortable. But Vienna was the right city at the right time.
(Note that my Viennese experience is not unique. Vienna was ranked both as the most liveable city and the most unfriendly city, as mentioned in this article by The Local.)
Unlike Madrid or Budapest, Vienna doesn’t make my heart sing, but I appreciate its predictability, cleanliness, and quietness. It’s an imperial city, full of history and culture, which I thoroughly enjoy immersing myself in. Moreover, the nature in Austria is magnificent and easily reachable.
As much as I see myself in Vienna as a base for me in the long run, I also learned not to make long-term plans.
Tell the universe your plans and it’ll laugh about them, or so they say.
Reflections through writing make me realize all the lessons life has sent my way. Every move, seatback, and each and every joyful moment in my life so far have added not one but several straws to my bales of hay. Each straw helps the bale get its imperfect shape perfectly. It carries secrets of endurance and impermanence, teaching me to embrace the beauty of the now, just like those guided meditations from Antonio’s app would instruct us to do. I’m learning to find peace in the continuous cycle of life’s creation and destruction.
And while the uncertainty of the future once weighed heavily on my mind, I now look forward to embracing it with open arms. Rather than being afraid about what’s to come, I find myself excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. In the meantime, I continue to gather those straws of hay :-)
