How to leave for good

Ok, so you decided you had enough of this place and need to move on with your life, life is about learning and you have already learned all you needed to learn from this place, there’s nothing else for you here and it’s time to leave for good.

You may come back or you may not, good thing about burning your bridges is that it allows space for new things, opportunities and experiences to come into your life, a blank page waiting to be written because the old ones ate each other up somehow. But that’s not for everyone, some need the security of knowing they can always come back here in the future if they need to.

In my case though, I prefer to think the countries where I used to live have been taken over by the Russians, my old workplace has been shut down due to upper management incompetence and my ex girlfriend died in a tornado.

If someone knows about me and about my life style, 2 questions I get asked often are “How to do it?” and “what’s the hardest part?” I am hoping this post will be an answer to both of them, how to do it?  Just keep reading, the hardest part is leaving of course, after that everything always works itself out.

This attempt of an instructional is actually a guide I’d like to use as a way to motivate myself to do what I need to do. It could maybe inspire others, or not, but I am writing it so I can read it in the future, when I need to leave a country again and don’t know where to start. Or have doubts of weather this is the right thing to do or I am making a mistake I will regret forever.

I will be listing a thing to do every day that will take you closer to your goal, but you could also replace days by hours if you want to or have to leave in a rush.

First week (or first 7 hours):

Day 1: Book a one way ticket, any ticket, to anywhere, doesn’t matter if it’s for next week or for next month, if it’s a 10 dollars ryan air/air asia ticket or a 2 dollars subway ticket from your place to the airport, what counts is to have a physical proof that your dream is slowly coming true, and the more of them you have the harder it will be to chicken out.

Day 2: Tell everyone you are leaving and you have a ticket already. This will give you pressure and motivation to do what you need to do. Don’t make a big deal out of it though, if you do, everyone will make an even bigger deal out of it and give you lots of drama, just drop it somewhere in the middle of a random conversation or as a facebook post, something casual like “Anyone In Antarctica next month?”

Day 3: Make a list of all the places you have always dreamed of going to, and why. Be honest to yourself, no one else will know and you can burn the list tomorrow.

Exmples:     Brazil - football - big butts - beaches

                  Colombia - learn Spanish - shakira - cocaine

                  New Zealand – sheep – the lord of the rings - sheep

                  Japan – ninjas – sushi - tentacles

Day 4: Choose one place and google all the stuff you are interested in, let’s say I chose Odesa in Ukraine, I could start by googling something like:

                                       “jobs in odesa”

                                       “Ukraine visas for xxx citizens”

                                       “Apartments for rent in odesa”

                                       “Best pizza in Odessa”

                                       “free Russian lessons in odesa”

                                       “best creampie in odesa”

                                       “pokemon cosplay group odesa”

                                       “two girls one cup official fan club odesa weekly meetings”

Or anything else you may be interested in, and remember, new experiences are always welcome.

Day 5: Sign up for some website that will make your life easier in the country, like couchsurfing, meetup.

Day 6: Make a plan B in case you don’t find what you were looking for in Odesa; example:

-train station in Russian is said: xxx

-the train station is here: xxx

-train/bus from odesa to Bucharest costs xxx money, it leaves at xxx every day.

-address of homeless shelter in Bucharest: xxx

Day 7: ???

Now that we made it to the end of the first week of planning, we’ll head straight to the second one in the one we will  be taking care of stuff that need to be taken care of before we leave.

Days 8, 9, 10: Getting rid of stuff you won’t be needing any more, anything you can’t take with you must go, give them away, sell them, exchange them for sexual favors, use alchemy to turn them into gold or just plain dump them in the trash.

Day 11, 12:  Packing

Day 13: Hide your stash somewhere only you can find it in the future. A good stash could be for example a clean change of clothes and some money, just in case there’s some emergency and you need to go back to that city you’ll always have something to start with from zero. And don’t forget to add some stuff to confuse archeologists from the future, something like random symbols with a strange drawing, a random key and coordinates for some random point in the middle of the ocean.

Day 14: Saying sayounara