A funny thing happened while I was recording a podcast interview with Amy Stone for The Art of Imperfect Adulting.
I was telling her the story of how I ended up moving to Portugal, and at one point she said:
“So you moved to Portugal for a man.”
I immediately had this reaction inside of, “No! That’s not what happened!”
Except…
It’s also not not what happened.
It’s just not the whole story, and not how I’d tell it.
From the outside, my immigration to Portugal is wildly impractical.
I moved across an ocean to live with a man I’d only been dating for a short time. I left behind my familiar grocery stores, my routines, my people, my native language, my timezone, my comfortable understanding of how things worked.
And yes, love was part of that decision, but it wasn’t really about a relationship.
It was about following what I knew was true for me.
Something in me knew was pointing me into expansion. There was more available for me than the version of reality I’d been navigating from inside my comfort zone.
So it didn’t come for a carefully researched plan. Hell, I didn’t do any research at all.
The move to Portugal came from:
“This feels alive.”
“This feels true.”
“This doesn’t entirely make sense, but I know.”
Of course, practical realities came with it.
There were visas and finances and figuring out healthcare and finding community and (many) moments of, “What the hell am I doing?”
There were also some surprisingly beautiful discoveries.
Learning Portuguese badly in public.
Finding my pole dance studio and building friendships with locals. Discovering entirely new rhythms of life. Letting myself become a beginner again.
Amy and I talked about all of this in the episode, including the strange tension between wanting certainty and realizing life doesn’t actually offer it. Ever.
At some point, you just have to live.
At one point, I said this:
I kind of had seen enough at that point to know that if I want something different on the outside, the place to really look is in me.”
That’s become more and more true for me.
The external leap mattered, but the deeper and lasting shift was always internal.
So if you’ve been standing at the edge of some decision that doesn’t look entirely rational on paper…
A move.
A relationship.
A creative project.
A reinvention.
A dream that keeps tapping you on the shoulder…
…maybe this episode will speak to you.
🎧 Listen here:
https://imperfect-adulting.captivate.fm/listen
📺 Or watch on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/nxWoZV6uIqA
And if you listen, reply and tell me:
Have you ever made a decision that didn’t fully make sense logically, but felt deeply right anyway?
Yours in love and play,
Steph 🐲❤️
P.S. If you know someone secretly dreaming about moving abroad, starting over, following love, or blowing up their carefully organized life in pursuit of something more alive…feel free to send this to them. 😏
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