There was a lot of wind that day.

There is almost always a lot of wind in Malargüe.

My best friend was driving. We were going down Avenida Roca, somewhere near the hospital, and I was exhausted.

Not tired.

Exhausted.

Of trying.

Of making things work.

Of constantly coming up with another idea.

Of being nice.

Of pushing.

Of looking at the same reality and trying to convince myself that surely, if I just tried one more thing, something would finally change.

And then I said it.

“I’m so fucking sick of this wind and this fucking town. I’m leaving. I’m leaving for good.”

Everyone looked at me.

Which was reasonable.

I had no money.

No stable source of income.

No passport.

No plane ticket.

No actual plan to leave Argentina.

Nothing.

Just a very dramatic announcement inside a car.

But apparently, that was enough to begin.

Before leaving, I tried everything

For most of my life, I had believed in a very simple equation:

If you work hard, you get results.

I had evidence.

I had been top of my class in primary school, first national flag escort in secondary school and graduated from university with very good grades.

As a kid, I basically managed myself.

My mum was raising me alone and working two or three jobs to support us. She didn’t have time to sit next to me making sure I had done my homework.

She didn’t need to.

I knew what I had to do.

Study.

Pass.

Do well.

I don’t remember resenting that.

I wasn’t even doing it for my mum.

I was doing it because somewhere very early in life I had decided that education was my way out.

I wanted the big house.

The car.

The clothes you could buy because you liked them, not because you had calculated whether you could afford them.

I wanted to travel.

I wanted to leave Argentina and see what else existed.

So I studied.

And studied.

And then, in my mid-twenties, I graduated with a degree in Business Administration and experienced my first proper adult disappointment:

I had done everything right and it didn’t work.

I couldn’t find the kind of job I had imagined.

For some positions, I was overqualified.

For others, apparently not qualified enough.

Sometimes employers would essentially tell me: why hire someone with a Business Administration degree when we can hire an accountant who can do all of this and accounting?

And I remember thinking:

For fuck’s sake. When exactly did I choose the wrong degree?

So I kept trying.

And somehow, I became the sushi girl

One day, a friend from the gym and I were craving sushi.

There wasn’t exactly an abundance of sushi in Malargüe at the time.

So naturally, I went on YouTube and learned how to make it.

We invited some friends over.

One of them tried it and said something like:

“Mar, this is actually really good. My friend is a chef. You should sell this.”

Apparently, this was all the encouragement I required to start a business.

I drew two little Asian-style cartoon girls.

I came up with a name.

I made labels.

Canva had only recently appeared, and WhatsApp wasn’t yet the giant business machine it is today.

So my marketing strategy was extremely sophisticated:

I messaged basically every contact in my phone and my mum’s phone and told them I was selling sushi.

And people bought it.

Then they bought it again.

Thursday to Saturday, I made sushi.

Sometimes Sundays too, depending on how much money I needed.

People in my town tried sushi for the first time because of that little business.

And I did everything.

I bought the ingredients.

I managed the money.

I took the orders.

I made the food.

I sold it.

I figured things out as I went.

That became a pattern.

I organised events.

I organised parties.

At one point I even created a little cart for children’s birthday parties because apparently there was no limit to the number of businesses I was willing to invent rather than accept defeat.

Some of it worked.

Some of it didn’t.

None of it created the life I was trying to reach.

And eventually, I got tired.

Really tired.

That’s the version of me sitting in that car on Avenida Roca.

Not someone who hadn’t tried.

Someone who had tried everything she knew how to try.

And finally thought:

Maybe I need to go.

The trip that accidentally became my way out

Not long after that, my mum and I planned a holiday to Colombia.

We missed the flight.

The package was refunded.

And somehow, the money from a holiday that never happened became part of the money that would take me out of Argentina.

I decided I was going to Ireland.

In February 2019, I went to get my passport.

I booked my flights for May:

Chile.

Spain.

Ireland.

My English course was organised.

The visa was organised.

Everything was paid.

And I barely told anyone.

At the end of March and into April, I slowly started telling a few people.

Some friends.

My best friend.

I told some members of my family about two weeks before leaving.

Maybe part of me knew that if I talked about it too much, it would become too real.

Or maybe I simply didn’t want too many opinions entering a decision I had finally made for myself.

Eventually, there was nothing left to organise.

I packed my bags.

My mum and I went to Chile.

And I prepared to leave my life.

Except, naturally, even leaving wasn’t going to be straightforward.

“Mum, I can’t go”

At the airport, they asked me for my return ticket.

I didn’t have one.

I had researched everything.

The English course.

The visa.

Ireland.

Documents.

Requirements.

Everything.

Except apparently this.

And I remember immediately thinking:

That’s it. I’m not going.

My mum looked at me like I had lost my mind.

“How are you not going? Your English course is already paid. Everything is paid. You’re going.”

“Mum, there is no money.”

I wasn’t being dramatic.

There genuinely wasn’t money sitting around for surprise international plane tickets.

But she found a way.

She bought me a return ticket with an option that allowed us to get the money back later.

Problem solved.

For approximately five minutes.

Then immigration asked why my passport hadn’t been stamped when I crossed from Argentina into Chile.

For fuck’s sake.

There was my mum again, running towards me.

We hadn’t received a passport stamp at the border. We had been given a separate immigration slip.

She had it.

Another problem solved.

And finally, after all of that—

I got on the plane.

The eleven hours when I belonged nowhere

I cried.

I cried so much on that flight that eventually I fell asleep from exhaustion.

Because suddenly this wasn’t an idea anymore.

I had spent months saying:

I’m going.

I’m leaving.

I’m moving to Ireland.

And now the plane was actually moving.

My mum was getting smaller somewhere behind me.

So were my dogs.

My friends.

My town.

My language.

My routines.

Everything familiar.

And somewhere over the Atlantic, I realised I wasn’t only leaving my home.

I was leaving the Marcia I knew.

That scared me in a completely different way.

Because I knew exactly who I had been until that point.

I had absolutely no idea who I was going to become.

There is a strange moment when you move abroad where your old life has already ended but your new one hasn’t started yet.

For me, that moment lasted eleven hours.

And then Barcelona.

The life I wanted was sitting at the next table

I had a layover of around 19 hours in Barcelona.

Nineteen hours.

In Barcelona.

And I didn’t leave the airport.

Today, this sounds insane to me.

At the time, leaving sounded insane.

I came from a small town in Argentina. I had barely started this enormous journey and suddenly I was supposed to confidently navigate Barcelona alone?

What if I got lost?

What if I missed the flight?

What if something happened?

I didn’t know how far anything was.

I didn’t trust myself enough yet to find out.

So I stayed.

I remained awake for practically the entire layover because I was scared something would happen if I fell asleep.

At some point, I was sitting there having a coffee when I heard four women talking nearby.

They were older than me.

They were chatting about travelling.

One said something about a trip they had taken to Mallorca.

They laughed.

Remembered things.

And then, as casually as if they were deciding where to have lunch, they started talking about their next trip.

Australia.

I listened to them.

Four women.

Friends.

Travelling together.

Planning another adventure.

Free.

And I took out my notebook.

I wrote:

This is the life I want.

To have friends.

To travel.

To discover places.

To be free.

I don’t know who those women were.

They have no idea I remember them.

They certainly have no idea that their completely ordinary airport conversation became part of one of the biggest days of my life.

But I think about that scene sometimes.

Because I was sitting there terrified.

I hadn’t even arrived at my destination.

I didn’t know whether moving to Ireland would work.

I didn’t know whether I would stay.

I didn’t know who I would meet.

I didn’t know what jobs I would have.

I didn’t know what kind of woman I would become there.

And for a few minutes, the life I wanted was sitting at the next table.

You don’t always leave because you’re brave

I wish I could tell you I got on that plane because I was fearless.

I wasn’t.

I was terrified.

I wish I could say I had carefully calculated that moving abroad was the optimal next step in my five-year plan.

Absolutely not.

I was tired.

I was frustrated.

I wanted more.

And at some point, the fear of staying became bigger than the fear of leaving.

Maybe that’s a kind of courage too.

Not feeling ready.

Not knowing whether you’re making the right decision.

Not having proof that the next life will be better than this one.

But recognising that you can’t keep asking the current version of your life to become something it isn’t.

So you move.

Sometimes literally.

A few hours after listening to those women in Barcelona, I boarded another plane.

Less than two hours later, I looked out the window and saw Ireland.

Dublin.

The Emerald City.

I had made it.

Although, of course, I had absolutely no idea what it was yet.

I arrived with my suitcases, my English course, whatever money I had left and a version of myself that was already disappearing.

My entire life was behind me.

My next life was somewhere outside that airport.

And for the first time, I had no idea what I was supposed to do next.

Have you ever had to leave a version of your life before knowing what would replace it?