Happy 11th Irishversary to me!
Eleven years ago this month I took a flight from Italy to Dublin. I did not have a grand plan, a vision board, or a carefully researched spreadsheet of rental prices. I had a job offer, a suitcase, and the quiet suspicion that I was doing something slightly insane.
Why leave? Well, the company I was working for at the time was not doing great. We were put in cassa integrazione, a sort of wage-supplement scheme for companies in financial trouble that is supposed to keep people from being fired. That was not strictly true. I had colleagues who were let go. I think that was the first time I experienced something like that, and unfortunately it was not the last.
Instead of letting me go, they offered me the option to relocate to a different country. The best option on the table, for me, was… Beijing. To be honest, I was very excited about that. China! A new language, a new continent, a version of my life I could barely picture. But life had other plans. While I was buried in the paperwork for emigrating to China, I started receiving calls from Ireland. When an offer arrived, I did the maths that only a slightly panicked Italian can do: my English was not perfect, but it was for sure better than my Chinese.
So I took that job offer and took a plane to Dublin. And I was completely unprepared for it.
In hindsight I can see what kind of leap of faith that adventure required. Even then, somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept a small escape hatch: if things were not working, I would come back to Italy after six months. A sensible plan, except that six months has a habit of becoming eleven years when you are not looking.
Beside the bureaucracy — which, to be fair, I found not as bad as the Italian one; getting a PPS number was actually pretty easy — the main struggles were the weather and the Irish pronunciation. That first winter was very gloomy, rainy, and incredibly windy. Dublin does not ease you in. It opens the door, throws a wet Atlantic gale at your face, and asks whether you have a loyalty card.
I still distinctly remember going to Eason to buy something and struggling to understand what the cashier was asking me while I was trying to pay. Spoiler: she was just asking me, over and over, if I owned an Eason fidelity card… which, obviously, I did not. At the time it felt like a language exam I had not studied for. Looking back, it was just retail. The accent was doing the heavy lifting.
But despite that, I did not give up. I slowly started making friends, going out, living my life out and proud and happy. And I started to grow as a person, which is the sort of sentence that sounds like a LinkedIn post until you realise you mean it.
It has not always been easy. Friends leave Dublin for work, for love, for rent that finally makes no sense. Looking for accommodation in this economy is its own full-time job, unpaid and poorly reviewed. There were winters that felt longer than they had any right to be, and days when the six-month escape hatch looked oddly attractive again.
It has also been full of plentitude. I met lifelong friends. I joined a choir. I took night classes in Chinese — yes, after turning down Beijing, because consistency has never been my strongest trait. I learned so much career-wise. And I proved to myself that I am not as stupid as I sometimes think I am, and that I can not only survive, but also flourish, in a foreign country.
So: eleven years, five jobs, many friends, countless trips, one pandemic, one burnout, many books, movies, games, and songs. I am still here, and I do not plan to leave any time soon.
Go raibh maith agat, Éire 🇮🇪.
— Made withCursor