Tags
change, costa rica, expat, gypsy life, moving, spanish, travel, unemployed, wander
Exactly one month ago today, the school I was working at officially closed its doors. Teachers, students and parents all said their goodbyes. I bid farewell to my boss at the front desk and walked through the parking lot to my car, breathing a sigh of relief. DONE. I was FREE. I had no plan. I had no direction and I was about to have no income. That same evening I found myself driving around aimlessly in the dark after saying I was going to go to the grocery store. I was on the verge of tears, feeling scared and lost as hell. I was excited, but I was also worried. The voice of reason was butting heads with my version of reality. I felt liberated, no doubt, but I also felt confused. What was I going to do? How was I going to support myself? What was I going to tell people when they asked me what I do for a living? The weeks following my new-found freedom and unemployment, I was getting headaches, stomachaches, insomnia. feeling dizzy, anxious and nauseous. Suddenly, I wasn’t a societal slave and it was almost like some sort of detoxification of poisons coming out of my body in strange psychological ways. I was totally stressed out. I was running against the American current, not necessarily caring that I didn’t fit in anymore, but trying not to stick out like some sort of sore thumb in suburbia. I needed to make a plan….and quick. Destiny was giving me a get out of jail free card and I was not about to cash it in. I was going to use it… geographically.
Several months prior to losing my job, I had been thinking about moving to Costa Rica. I didn’t tell a lot of people this, but I actually had a phone interview once with a school there while I was at work one day during a lunch break. It turned out that it wasn’t a paying job, so it wasn’t going to be possible. Nevertheless, it was still on my brain. I had visions of palm trees, tropical birds, tiny coffee shops, local slang, the smell of the ocean in my hair. While my job was on its way to permanently ending, I slowly came up with an idea, which blossomed into a plan. It took me some time, and tears, to finally sort it all out, but I felt relieved to finally have a new dream. I’ll be moving there this week and will stay for a month and a half, partly to study and prepare for a new career move and partly to…live out loud. To live this one life we get.