I Recorded the Podcast. But First, Help Me Figure Something Out.

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Yesterday, I recorded an episode of Quiero un Panino con Cheese with Gaia Striano. If you have not checked out her podcast yet, it is a must. Trust me.

When the episode drops, you will be the first to know. But while we wait, I need to talk through something that came up during the recording that has been living rent free in my head ever since.

Four countries in, I always end up facing the exact same question: Why do you move so much?

I gave the honest answer: life got too easy, and I am always chasing a thrill.

The moment it came out, I thought: yep, that sounds exactly as unhinged as it is. Nobody reacted badly. It was just that saying it out loud felt like admitting to a strange, volatile addiction. Which is true. But it is also not a very good explanation.

So let me try again.

I do not smoke, drink, or do extreme sports.

Getting my ass kicked in another country? That is my drug.

Photo of Jessica Gabrielzyk at the Quire Un Panino con Cheese Podcast

The flutter in your stomach when you call home a place with streets you have never walked. A language you may have never spoken. People you have never met. A culture that twists and turns your brain in ways you did not know it could bend. A bureaucracy that is a puzzle you did not ask for and cannot put down.

It is a little painful. It is occasionally infuriating. It is the kind of friction that forces you to question everything you thought you knew about yourself, the world, and what normal looks like. And I am completely hooked on it.

I do not know how to explain that without sounding reckless. Fighting for my life in a different setting is the closest I have come, but even that sounds like something you slap on a t-shirt rather than something you actually live.

The feeling of landing somewhere completely unknown and having to figure out how to exist there cannot be manufactured anywhere else. Not with adrenaline or with routine. The only thing that produces it is actually being thrown into the deep end.

So I keep diving in.

Maybe that is what the inherited scorecard never accounted for. It told me what success looked like, what stability looked like, what a good life looked like. It did not have a category for the person who builds all of that, only to realise they need to walk away and start from zero just to feel alive again.

I am still searching for a better way to explain it. If you have moved countries more than once and you know this exact itch, tell me: how do you explain it to people?

The podcast is coming soon. You will be the first to know. 💛

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

Next

The Episode Is Out.