Why You Probably Have To Move To Another Country
The invisible yes you need to obey.
You probably have to move to another country. Not because it’s brave. Not because it’s romantic. But because something in you is asking for it a soft ache under your ribs, a kind of homesickness for a place you haven’t met yet.
You’ll have to leave your family. Your friends. The familiar cafés and conversations. You don’t have to go. But if you get the chance, you probably should.
I may have picked the wrong country. I may have many more countries to live in. I’m a homebody who likes to wander a contradiction I’ve stopped trying to resolve.
In 2019, I left Canada. It wasn’t the first time I’d moved. That happened before memory, before narrative. I was born in downtown Toronto, at a hospital at College and University. Then suddenly, I was in Florida. Then California. My young mind knew palm trees and heatstroke and sand as default settings. That was the baseline. The original myth.
Then we moved again. Back to Toronto but not the city itself. We landed on the Oak Ridges Moraine. It was beautiful. And safe. And boring in a way that itched under the skin.
I plotted my escape ever since.
In 2019, amidst copious personal turmoil, I started booking flights. I couldn’t barter with myself to stay in Toronto anymore. I don’t fully know why I chose Los Angeles. I had been there as a child and hated it. The traffic. The smog. The grit. It felt like a bruise pretending to be a city.
But as my life began to smoulder and fold in on itself in 2018, Los Angeles became the only place I thought about. I’d sink into the bathtub of my 520 sq ft Toronto condo, draw the curtains, and think loudly about California.
Then it happened. Sometime in February, I booked a flight. I stayed. I came back. I booked another. The rhythm of arrival became a kind of prayer.
Life changed fast that year, though the slow moments were unbearable. The kind of agony you feel when your spirit has already left but your body hasn’t caught up.
I didn’t know anyone in LA. Not really. I felt like Alice in Wonderland chasing a rabbit that never turned around. And still, I felt safe. Opportunities kept appearing: places to live, people to know, strange things to do. The city absorbed me like sand drinking in rain.
In January, I was evacuated as part of the largest urban wildfire in American history. I drove across the desert and sat on a mountain with my dog, wondering if everything I owned was about to burn. I was one of the lucky ones. But it didn’t feel like luck. It felt like a test I hadn’t studied for.
“What is life telling you to take a chance on now?” a friend asked me.
“I think I have to leave America,” I said. “Not forever. Not for long. Just for a bit.”
I’ve had that same stirring for England, Poland, France, Spain, Italy. Maybe it all ends with Italy. Or the Mediterranean, more broadly.
My grandparents came to Canada in the 1950s from the coast of Sicily. I doubt they had even seen a photo of Toronto. Just a name on a map. They never went back.
I forget that about them. At first, they stayed for the kids. Then they stayed because it was too hard to leave.
You don’t go from the coast of Sicily to the west end of Toronto without carrying an insurmountable kind of heartbreak. You just don’t.
My grandparents are long gone now. But sometimes, I feel them in my bones, tugging me back toward where they started on both sides. Italian and British. I feel the pull to finish something they didn’t get to.
And yet, I deeply love Los Angeles. For all its chaos, its noise, its beauty, its breaking it’s been good to me. In its own brutal, cinematic way. This past year especially, it’s felt like a strange kind of pride to belong here. Even if only by helping a few stray dogs, smiling at my neighbors, or just staying put when everything said to run.
But I do think cities call us. Telepathically, even. Or maybe it’s people in those cities, casting out some invisible beacon. We never really know.
All I can say is follow the pull. That quiet yes, that whisper in your chest. That disorienting compass inside your body that doesn’t speak in complete sentences, but always points somewhere real.
Go. Even if it’s temporary. Even if it doesn’t make sense. Even if you have to leave what you love to find what you need.
Because sometimes, the place you’re looking for doesn’t exist yet.
You just have to start walking toward it anyway.