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One year and a half ago, I had the life I thought I always wanted.
I had just graduated. Everyone told me it would be hard to find a job, especially one related to what I studied. Everyone was saying that it doesn’t come easy, and that I would have to settle for something entirely different, at least for a while.
For me, things came together almost too easily. After only a month of job-searching, I got the position I actually wanted, in a field I had studied for, and in a healthy work environment (rare in Spain, if you ask me).
My boss valued me. We had a good relationship, and she even mentioned promoting me the following year. It was perfect, right? Right after graduation I had a stable job, I was close to my family and I could meet with my friends every week.
But something felt… off. I felt weird, like wearing a sweater that makes you uncomfortable and you don’t know what it is exactly that is not feeling right. Is it the fabric? The temperature? The smell? Do I need to wash it, or should I get a new one? Am I just being overly sensitive?
Whatever it was, it started to weigh on me.
Slowly, my light started to dim, and I didn’t truly notice until I won a literary contest that sent me on a free trip to South Korea, awards ceremony and all.
That trip changed everything.
It was just a few days, but they cracked something open in me. I got a glimpse of a different kind of life—one where I didn’t just wait for things to happen to me, but I actually made them happen.
It was exactly what I needed to see the life that was waiting for me behind the walls of comfort.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of the end. That’s when I realized what I experienced in Korea was realhappiness, and what I was living at home was just a state of apathy that I didn’t know how to run from because it gave me the comfort I had worked so hard for.
One day, I was having dinner with a friend, and I was trying to convince both of us that everything was okay and I was happy: ‘I am okay here’, I remember telling her. ‘I see myself settling down. Maybe saving to move closer to work…’
I will never forget the disappointment in her face when she looked at me. ‘This is not you’, she replied. ‘You used to have so many dreams’.
Her words made something twist in my stomach.
The literary contest that landed me in South Korea was the first step to open my eyes, but that dinner pushed me to admit what I already knew:
I was dissolving into a routine that looked perfect from the outside, but no longer fit the person I was becoming.
That’s when I realized I needed to make a change.
I left my job, my country, the people I loved, and the version of a life I thought I wanted.
Not because it was bad.
But because it no longer felt like mine.
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Stage 1: The shift
Stage 2: The grief
Stage 3: The in-between
Stage 4: The jump
Stage 5: The endless cycle of rebuilding yourself
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