Why moving to Italy did not fix me

There’s a sort of narrative that floats around about moving abroad: That escaping these crumbling United States is the key to happiness and fulfillment. If you just get yourself to the shores of Western Europe, all will be solved.

I’m not so sure. I moved to Italy, at a time when a lot of things in my life needed fixing, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

Do I love it here? Yes! Could one make the argument that I’m thriving? Sure. But did it cure all of my ailments—mental, emotional and otherwise? Nope.  

To understand why, I need to take you back to my pre-Italy life. The year was 2025, and as spring dawned after a snowy Boston winter, I was gripped by a sudden and inexplicable spike in my anxiety.

I was no stranger to the phenomenon—therapist after therapist had slapped me with a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder—and I thought I had the tools to deal with it.

But even as I lunged for the wrenches and screwdrivers in my therapeutic toolkit, nothing helped. Days passed and, rather than improving, my anxiety intensified. It became a blanket of fear and panic through which I could see nothing except these new worries that seemed to spawn out of nowhere.

As I wriggled in bed each night, trying and failing to sleep, my mind looped relentlessly through worst-case scenarios about my career as a writer: Did I make a grave ethical mistake in that one article from years ago? Did I get that fact wrong in my book? Am I total, utter fraud as a journalist?

Dragging myself out of bed each day, after a fitful night convincing myself of my complete incompetence, it was a special kind of torture to sit down at my desk and face my work: More writing. The simplest of articles felt like minefields, rife with opportunities to repeat the perceived mistakes that I was now constantly analyzing in my head.

As these anxieties took over my brain, I turned to one of my go-to strategies: I consulted friend after friend to assuage my fears. One night, a former colleague reassured me that my concerns were utterly normal, and I laughed as the knot in my stomach loosened a bit. But that relief was short-lived, and just as I settled one topic, something new (often more dire) would crop up. It was eerie, the precision with which my mind found vulnerabilities to exploit, digging up long-forgotten moments and twisting them into urgent crises.

I didn’t know where else to turn. I had just “graduated” from a therapy-adjacent mental health program sponsored by my insurance, and was without a therapist for the first time in years, leaving me bereft of professional support.

I was, in a word, spiraling.