Making a Dream Come True

About 10 years ago, I first thought about travelling through Latin America. What started as a thought turned into a wish and slowly progressed into a dream. The journey was long: I first moved to Australia in 2019. This is the year when my desire to go to Latin America became very strong. I met so many Latinos during my time in Australia and always felt a very strong connection with them. They all recommended that I learn Spanish first. When I knew that my time in Australia would end, I started to plan to go back to Austria for a few months to save some money and go to Latin America ASAP. Covid put those plans on hold, but it didn’t break my dream. Quite the opposite: it gave me time to realise it in a smart way. My desire to not only travel there but move there completely was what made me think that moving to Spain first to learn Spanish might be smarter. But if I move to Latin America, will I ever come back? With the answer to that question unknown, the urge to visit every country in Europe I hadn’t been to yet surfaced. Every fibre in my body told me that once I went to Latin America, I might never come back, at least not for a long time. So I really felt like I wanted to be “done” with Europe. Which led me to plan my road trip visiting every country I hadn’t been to before.

Finally, I arrived in Spain and became fluent in Spanish after just three months of teaching myself. I found love, lost love, found friends, lost friends, recovered from my ED, relapsed, found therapists, left therapists, had one of the best and one of the worst years of my life. I have never learned so much about myself as I did in Valencia. I’ve grown so much as a person and found the most wonderful friendships. I’ve built a beautiful life and now I’ll once more leave it behind. Although this might be the hardest goodbye so far, it’s time to move on, and I have never felt so sure about what I have to do next.

It’s hard to explain all this to “new” people. How many times did I have to hear that I only go there because of X or Y? They cannot comprehend how long I’ve been longing to be there. How many times I’ve dreamt about being there (literally). How I know for a fact that there is something very beautiful waiting there for me without knowing what it is. Usually, I struggle to describe exactly how I’m feeling, but I can 100% name the feeling I have about Latin America: it’s a calling.