…This was my motto after my life turned 180 degrees at the end of 2021. All stability was suddenly gone—my apartment, my relationship, my two cats, financial security… everything that had supported me for fifteen years. All I had left was my car, my work, and a few belongings I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—part with when I moved out of my old apartment. My entire life fit into my converted van. I had an immense need to simplify my everyday life, to make it less complex. And I knew somehow that I was being drawn abroad, towards the water… 

Ending up in Belgium—right near the Meuse—wasn’t exactly what I had envisioned when thinking of “abroad by the water,” but okay. If this was the flow, I decided to trust life and believe it would take me to where I was meant to be. In the end, this flow led me to a region whose language I didn’t speak, whose rules I had to (and still have to) learn, into an environment that resembles my own culture yet feels quite foreign, into a city that, in my perception and in my reality, feels loud, dirty, and rustic.

What on earth is making me move there now?

Committing in my mid-forties to a country that doesn’t really match what I imagined, whose culture, language, and rules I still have to learn? I feel like a teenager being released into life. Everything is new. Even though what I need most is stability.

My private circle of friends and what we now call the Love-Community. What brought me to this quirky little country with three different languages, cultures, and challenges are its people. Nowhere else have I ever felt so welcome, accepted, and at home as I do here. Amid all the rustic daily life, high cost of living, taxes, and annual inspections (!!🙄), I continue to meet, every day, people who embody this very specific lifestyle I strive for: a free, self-determined life, far from the social limitations I had learned, especially regarding intimacy and human connection. Moving toward more connection, intimate and relational freedom, global human authenticity—together with people interested in growing through interpersonal challenges. People who resonate with my values, my energy, the gift I bring them. The healing I have been able—and continue—to experience here, with all the issues I’ve carried for decades that blocked me and kept me from living the life I wanted, is incredible.

Yet the transition was exhausting—four years of being torn between keeping my life in Germany: the safety of the language, knowing “how life works here,” what was expected of me, the desire to be financially independent. I wanted to simplify my life—but as sometimes happens, everything becomes more complicated before it can get easier. It cost me a lot of diesel, money, energy, and mental capacity to shuttle between these two worlds. In the end, too much. The decision-making process was awful… constantly doubting whether one choice or another would be better. But I needed that time and that process to be ready to cut the last ties. And it wasn’t just about moving elsewhere. It was the process of letting go of my fears, exposing myself to uncertainty, and learning to trust—life, and my own abilities. It took time to separate from my past, my conditioning, my patterns, my beliefs that didn’t allow me to trust myself that I could do this. Even in my mid-forties. An age when, supposedly, everything should already be settled, right?