discovering my free self
reflections on a month in lisbon :)
After living in New York for the last two years, I decided to spend a month abroad. So in October, I moved to Lisbon — working remotely, living (kind of) alone, and trying to immerse myself in the city.
This post is a reflection through the lens of a series of essays I wrote about the experience.
An exercise in free will
Last summer, newly 23-year-old me went on a date with a 28-year-old man who felt really fricken old to me because it felt like he had lived all these lives. While I was just a year out of college and trying to figure out the basics of living and working in New York, he had seemingly figured it out. I was inspired as he told me about his improv side gig, the ecstatic dance classes he took twice a week relgiously, and how he just got back from a year in Turkey. These endeavors felt really exciting and foreign to me, and I mentally put them in the category of things I could do by the time I turned 28, but certainly not anytime soon.
But recently, I realized I had pretty much done some version of all of those things now at 24: an improv class and show earlier this year, ecstatic dance in SF in September, and now moving out of New York and traveling the world, working in Lisbon for a month.
This Lisbon month felt like a small way of practicing free will while pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone in a safe way. I first had the desire to live in Europe earlier this year, and as the year went on it kind of just fell into place with how my work was going and my lease ending. The whole thing was way easier to coordinate than I would’ve expected.
In hindsight, I’ve had the physical freedom for a while, but in the past year I think my free will got freer and willier.
I’ve been on this trajectory all year, but pulling off this trip was another piece of evidence that I can kinda just do whatever the heck I want. I’m quite proud of myself for overcoming my fears, from having to muster up an immense amount of courage to sign up for a volleyball league earlier this year to uprooting across the world, somewhere where I didn’t speak the language or know anyone for my October in Lisbon.
Discovering my free self
My month in Lisbon has brought out my free self.
In the last few weeks, I found myself in a few unfamiliar positions. For instance, I did a handstand for the first time ever in a yoga class, despite taking weekly yoga classes in New York, where I’ve never even attempted it. I made friends with a cute Russian girl at the top of a cliff at the westernmost point in Europe, where we chatted for hours about everything from escaping the war in Russia to international boys over the luscious sounds of the ocean crashing while the sun set. And during my first week, I went on a date with a Portuguese man, frolicking around unfamiliar streets and sneaking into hospital lots to feed the chickens.
My free self is a part of me that shies away in New York, where I’m further buried in work, responsibilities, and systems that I don’t normally realize might be mentally limiting.
My free-ness is also evident in a newfound openness to experience. When I started work full-time, my work asked me if I was open to an international six-month rotation, to which I remember thinking that was crazy and not even considering it. But during my second half week in Lisbon, I found myself super open to the idea of moving across the world.
Moving to Lisbon with nothing but a singular suitcase and no plan taught me that I don’t really need much to be happy. Just a few necessities physically, and the ability to stay in touch with friends and family. This realization made me feel more alive, light, and free than I have ever felt.
Although my mission was to come to Lisbon to experience local life, I’ve embodied a freer persona than the one I usually sustain in places where I live. Perhaps the free-ness comes from the energy and culture of Lisbon, or maybe it just comes from the vacation mindset of knowing it’s all temporary anyway.
I’m really glad I got to meet my free self during this month abroad. I like her. I know that the responsibilities of life make it impossible to sustain a fairytale, but upon reflection, nothing is really stopping me from embracing this side of myself more back home long-term. I am as free from constraint as I ever will be, and maybe it doesn’t have to be a temporary persona I embodied. I suppose only time will tell, but I’d like to keep this part of me around.
Experiencing déjà vu
During my month in Lisbon, I hosted 10 friends in my apartment. A different group every few days rotating out of my second bedroom.
The groups were varied, from people I didn’t know all that well to some of my best friends and my sister. Each person brought a fun and fresh perspective to the month.
As the month went on, I started experiencing some crazy déjà vu, doing the same exact activities week after week, but with a different group. This setup was unexpectedly refreshing and helped me experience the city from different perspectives.
I really loved that each group brought such a different vibe and energy. Some people were more chill travelers, where we’d spend our days sitting around different spaces and ending the night bingeing a new series together. Others were more adventurous, where we’d pack our days and walk a bajillion steps. I did a lot of day drinking with some friends, whereas others were completely sober.
It was exceptionally fun to be liquid and morph to interact with everyone’s unique ways of being as much as I could.
It was also cool to become increasingly familiar with the city. I was experiencing the city for the first time alongside the first few groups who came to visit. But by the end, I was able to compile a guide with recommendations and tips and tricks for my last guests.
The magic of slow living
My favorite thing about leaving New York City is the pungent sense of calm I immediately feel. Lisbon was no different and actually the epitome of magical slow living.
Lisbon feels like SF to me in many ways, with the palm trees and the temperate sun, cafe working culture, the hilly streets, and colorful architecture. Heck, they even have a Golden Gate Bridge of their own…
California and Lisbon also intersect in being the perfect balance of quirky, bustling, and slow. I loved that there was so much life in the city, people walking around at all times of day, and that the streets were so rich with culture. And yet people live so slowly.
While living in Lisbon as an English-speaking American woman was really quite easy, I did notice a few cultural differences that really made the city feel more slow-paced:
Takeout is not the norm. It usually costs extra to get food, or even coffee, in a takeout container. People normally sit down and eat for hours.
On a similar note, you can sit at a cafe or restaurant for hours and no one will rush you. And that’s also the norm. Service was often super slow.
When my friends visited, they were appalled by the lack of scalability of the subway system (lol). The routes were pretty inefficient and the lines were defined by a few colors of the rainbow. A lot of times it was way faster to walk or uber, even if the subway took you there relatively directly. But still, I loved taking it places.
Most people don’t have dryers and hang their clothes outside their windows on a clothes line. I actually found myself really enjoying the physical, intentional, and meditative act of hanging each piece of clothing outside and pinning them up. I told my Portuguese date this and he laughed at me…
The routine I created for myself there was reminiscent of my routine from when I lived in LA a few years ago. I’d go to the cafe in the mornings, walk around and try a new brunch spot, stroll around the streets exploring without a plan, log onto work for a few hours from a new cafe, and then catch the sunset from a new spot every day before ending the night either out or with a cozy TV show.
One of my friends captured what I think is the essence of this slow, non-performative European living in her Lisbon reflection:
I had just recently moved to New York and immediately, I found myself alongside everyone else running on the hamster wheel, taking part in this never ending motion. It’s hard to stop once you get in this routine of motion of baseline productivity and aiming to achieve.
On my first day in Lisbon, Ashley took us to this viewpoint near her home around sunset. Like many viewpoints it was filled with ambient sounds of people chatter, smoke, and intimate conversations. People around seemed to keep pulling out guitars, strumming a beautiful melody.
When I experience music in New York, whether in subways or outside, its focused purpose seems to be more around performance. To perform well for others. But when people were playing on the guitars it was for their own enjoyment alongside their friends.
It’s so easy to be influenced by our environment. It shapes what feels normal, otherwise it feels as though we need to constantly challenge the status quo.
I too feel the same way. As I continue to integrate back into the bustling city, I’d like to see how much of my chill Lisbon routine and state of mind I can bring back into my normal life.
To write is to poop.
One of the biggest reasons I moved to Lisbon was to spend many slow European mornings writing in different cafes. Lisbon is one of the best cities for a laptop worker. There are endless cafes perfectly packed with remote workers. There were about eight great ones within a five-minute walk from my apartment.
I spent most early mornings writing at cafes before exploration and work, writing.
In October, I had been doing a writing challenge called Inktober, where I had to write an entry every day based on an assigned word of the day. It was super fun to do it this year with a foreign city as the backdrop for each piece. There are pieces that I probably never would’ve written back home without the change in environment and the different experiences. For instance, in New York, I never would’ve been frolicking around an abandoned cult church off a coastal cliff where there also just happens to be perfectly preserved dinosaur prints. I’ve never felt so inspired to write creatively about our weight of our existence as a slice of history.
I’ll treasure these Inktober entries ~ how fun is it that they came out of this fever dream of a month? In fact, many of the pieces from this zine either are directly quoted or stem from Inktober pieces I’ve written this month.
While I’ve done a lot of writing, I feel mostly dissatisfied with the depth of the writing I’ve been doing. I really came to terms with the fact that good processing and personal writing work like a digestive system: living is like eating, processing is like digesting, and writing is like pooping.
On this trip, I was doing too much living … and now I’m a bit constipated. Even though I wrote every day for Inktober and journaled a bunch, I found myself resorting to writing recaps from the days rather than the thoughts and feelings I wanted to really flesh out.
Thus, I haven’t really had the time and mental space to process my thoughts and feelings deeply enough to write as completely as I’ve been yearning to.
I’m so rich and full: all of the Inktober entries I’ve written, all of the friends I’ve been able to share this chapter with, and of course all of the novel sights and memories I’ve experienced. all while balancing the responsibilities of my 9-5.
These are two of my favorite inktober entries that I think captured the vibe in a certain moment of the month:
inktober day 29 - “arctic”
i’ve started to realize that there are many things i enjoy for a brief moment in time, or regularly but not constantly. the cold is one of those things. once in a while it is super nice to be freezing your butt off and then drinking a warm bowl of soup afterward. it is so nice to be inside while it snows and accumulates. or to be able to go skiing or sledding. and obviously it needs to be cold and ideally snowing on christmas and new years.
but how nice would it be if we could rotate through each of the seasons every week? if i could have bangs one day and a head of red hair another day. be different verions of myself in different environments and mix and match every single day while still keeping some threads? like we could have the same jobs and friends and overall lives but some random variations of them alternating through the storyline of our lives.
maybe one day i’ll write these desires into a short story, or at the very least iron out who what when where why i really want to be and experience and how to make that happen in ways that align with reality.
as for now though, this gap semester is certainly helping me to peer through those windows of what a different life could be like while keeping some through lines. a life in in sf, vancouver, london, and lisbon. to live love and laugh through all of the seasons of life as different people in different places.
this is a window we walked past last night on my way home as we passed by several cutie wine and cocktail bars in the neighborhood. this window felt particularly special, like a literal and metaphorical window into a place with so much life and so much going on. i wish i could capture this window on several dates and seasons over years. i wonder how the people inside, the decor, the lighting, the vibe would change throughout.
inktober day 9 - “heavy”
yesterday we went to walk to pedra de mua trail an hour out of downtown lisbon. the views were beautiful and it was a cliffside coastal dirt path. the main highlight of the trail is supposed to be these dinosaur tracks that have been well preserved in the land. for me though the highlight was the view and the ocean crashing into the rocks and the sunset we got to watch in completion from the sacred land.
on the way back we read about some of the lore of the area. there was an abandoned building there which used to be a meeting place for a cult. a lot of history went down there although there is very sparse evidence of a cohesive history. the dinosaur tracks they were to have thought to have been the virgin mary riding up from the sea on a horse.
it was cool to be in such a random spiritually and historically deep place off the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. what a beautiful spot with such rich, heavy lore, and there was no one else there. we saw less than 5 people the entire time we were there (many hours).
if i thought back to the dinosaurs and really thought about them roaming around there, was this also still by the ocean? they must have been so heavy to have indented the earth like that. how has this been preserved all this time?
and for us to be there, five kids from new york, flying drones and taking jumping photos on the dirt path left by people who must have been there before us. roaming around where dinosaurs and cults used to.
a feeling of freedom and serenity and lightness atop the heavy lore of the dinosaur track land. a beautiful place.
And one of my friends’ essays that captured how it felt to stand along historic castle walls:
In Lisbon, Castelo de São Jorge sits a top a hill next to the water with sweeping views of the entire city, while the castle was rebuilt over the years to match the look of the nearby moorish castle in Sintra (sometimes leading to it be begrudgingly being called a Disney castle), it also holds the oldest remains of settlements in Lisbon, dating back over two and a half millennia.
Standing a long the walls of this landmark, all that I could think about was that this city has been the center of peoples lives for thousands of years. For much of that time, the place where I was standing was a symbol of power or governance, inaccessible to many. The city has become so much less important to us in an age of technology, international travel, and individual opportunity. My intuition is to look at this castle as an object of historical and natural beauty, missing the fact that this site has defined the lives of the residence of Lisbon for hundreds of generations. And now I can casually walk along the walls on a random Sunday…
The memories and the feeling of being in these places are so precious and a little bit indescribable, although we certainly tried.
While I didn’t get to write as much as I would’ve liked to on this Lisbon trip, a lot of writing opportunities came out of it: personal essays based on the experience, a goal to move to the mountains of Japan to write a memoir for my mid-life crisis, and making all my visitors create a digital zine with me.
Reflections on my fairytale month
My month in Lisbon was a lot of things: a break from New York, a fairytale of a side quest, a glimpse into a different life that could relatively easily be mine long term if I wanted it to be. It was pretty random, and maybe I didn’t come back an entirely different person like I wanted to, but it was certainly at least a little bit world-expanding.
Several people questioned why I chose to stay put in Lisbon for my month abroad. But I wanted as much as possible to experience what it might be like to live in a foreign city. I still stand by that decision and am happy I stayed in one apartment the whole time. Temporarily living somewhere is still, imo, the best way to travel.
In hindsight, I don’t even think a month is nearly long enough. Rather than full immersion into the local experience, it was closer to a month-long vacation, especially because I had different people come visit every week who were seeing all the sights for the first time. Subconsciously, I think the month-long set time frame stopped me from being open to more long-term pursuits, like friendships and relationships with locals, compared to if I were staying longer.
In some ways, I did feel like I lived there by the end. I certainly had some favorite go-to restaurants and bars, and cafes for work and such. I had found a favorite place to picnic, walking routes, and a few different sunset spots, too. I went on a date and made a friend. I went to yoga regularly, and after trying two studios, stuck to the same one repeatedly. Those things were pretty immersive.
From this trip, I wish to bring back with me the warmth and freedom I felt living in Lisbon. A gentle slice of sun and a pair of X-ray googles to cut through the invisible limitations that were previously opaque.
All in all, my time in Lisbon was an epic month with some semblance of local living, even if it was a relatively temporary regularity.
ps final pastel de nata count: 11 and 2/3 :)
this was so lovely to read! i’ve never heard anyone compare lisbon to sf and now it makes me want to go even more. hope you got a lifetimes worth of pastel del natas
LOVE💗