What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Turned My Life Upside Down

On moving countries, sitting with discomfort, and why that’s exactly how it’s supposed to feel

When people find out I moved to Spain, the reaction is almost always the same. A kind of wistful admiration. That’s so brave. I’ve always wanted to do something like that. You must love it there.

And I do. But that’s not the whole story — and I think the edited version, the one where the big move is just sunshine and a fresh start and everything clicking into place, does a quiet disservice to anyone who’s seriously considering turning their own life upside down.

So here’s the version I wish someone had handed me before I packed up everything I knew and landed in Marbella with a full life to rebuild and absolutely no roadmap for how to do it.

The fantasy is real. So is everything else.

There is something genuinely intoxicating about the idea of a clean break. New country, new climate, new daily rhythms, new version of yourself walking into a life that feels more like you than the one you left behind.

I felt that. I still feel it, on the mornings when the light hits the water a certain way and I think — yes, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.

But Marbella didn’t fix me. What it did was show me, with surprising efficiency, exactly what still needed fixing.

Because here’s what a big external change does: it strips away the familiar. The routines, the relationships, the social structures, the professional identity, the hundred small things that quietly tell you who you are and where you belong. And when those things are gone, when you’re standing in a new place with none of your usual scaffolding, what’s left is just you. Stripped bare. With nowhere to hide.

That part nobody puts in the Instagram caption.

What I didn’t expect to feel

I expected some loneliness. I expected the bureaucratic nightmare of building a life in a new country from scratch (and I got that, in full). I expected to miss people.

What I didn’t expect was to miss myself. Or more accurately — to suddenly not be quite sure who I was without the context I’d always existed in.

Back home, I knew my place in things. I had history, reputation, a role in people’s lives. I knew how rooms felt when I walked into them. I knew what I was good at and where I belonged and what people expected of me — which, as I’ve written about before, had its own complicated costs... But at least it was familiar.

In Spain, I was nobody in particular. Just a woman who’d made an unusual choice and was now living with the full weight of it. And some days that felt like freedom. And some days it felt like standing in an airport where all the signs are in a language you’re still learning and you’re not entirely sure you got on the right flight.

The discomfort wasn’t a sign I’d made a mistake. It was just what change actually feels like when it’s real, when something is genuinely shifting rather than just rearranging the surface.

You can’t outrun yourself. But you can meet yourself.

This is the thing I most wish I’d understood going in: the version of you that boards the plane is the version that lands. Your patterns come with you. Your fears come with you. The ways you’ve learned to protect yourself, the stories you tell about who you are and what you’re capable of — all of it makes the trip.

I had done a lot of work on myself before the move. Coaching, honest self-examination, years of slowly getting clearer on who I actually was underneath the roles I’d played. And I thought — naively, it turns out — that I’d done enough of that work that the move would feel mostly clean. Mostly forward.

What actually happened was that the move created the conditions for a whole new layer of that work. New environment, same Eva. But also, and this took time to see, a version of Eva with far less to hide behind. Which meant the things that needed attention were suddenly harder to avoid.

I had to get comfortable being uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t had to before. Had to learn to build belonging from scratch rather than inheriting it. Had to sit with not knowing how things would turn out (for months, not days) without defaulting to my usual move of pushing harder until something gave.

That was the real work. And I wouldn’t trade it.

What change is actually asking of you

If you’re considering a major shift — a move, a career change, the end of something, the beginning of something else — I want to offer you a reframe that might make the uncomfortable parts easier to be in.

The discomfort is not a signal that you’ve done something wrong. It’s not evidence that you made the wrong call, or that you’re not cut out for this, or that you should have stayed where it was safe. It’s what growth actually feels like from the inside. And the bigger the change, the more of it there tends to be.

What change is asking of you is not to feel ready. You won’t feel ready. It’s asking you to go anyway — and to stay curious about what surfaces when your usual context is gone.

Because what tends to surface is true. The things that come up when you strip away the familiar — the fears, the patterns, the questions you’d been too busy to hear — those are worth paying attention to.

They’re not obstacles to the new life. They’re part of building it.

What Marbella actually gave me

The sunshine is real. The food is real. The slower pace and the light and the particular quality of life here — all real, and genuinely good for me in ways I didn’t fully anticipate.

But the more significant gift was the clarity. Not the comfortable kind — the kind that comes when everything’s fine and you have time to reflect. The uncomfortable kind. The kind that comes from being stripped back far enough that you can’t pretend anymore.

I know myself better now than I did before I moved. Not because Spain is magic, but because discomfort, when you stop fighting it, is one of the most honest mirrors there is.

The move didn’t give me a fresh start. It gave me a real one. Those are different things. A fresh start implies you left the old stuff behind. A real start means you brought it all with you — and finally dealt with it.

That’s the version I’d recommend.

If you’re standing on the edge of something

If you’re reading this and you’re close to a big decision — a move, a leap, a change you’ve been circling for longer than is comfortable — here’s what I want to leave you with.

It will probably be harder than you think. And better than you think. Usually at the same time.

The discomfort is not a detour. It’s the road.

And the version of you that comes out the other side of it will know things about themselves that the version standing here right now simply cannot access yet.

That’s worth something. That might be worth everything.

– Eva

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If you’re in that “edge” place right now and you want help sorting what’s real — not with hype, just with clarity — here are two gentle next steps:

• Try The Next Step Reset (self-paced, private)
  

• Book a Clarity Session (talk it through out loud)