What I Fear in Leaving
I didn’t want to say goodbye to Buenos Aires.
Over the past year, I had tuned myself to its rhythm: quiet mornings, sprawling parks, and a pace of living that finally felt right.
I relished its walkable streets and vibrant public life. Neighbors became familiar faces, and plazas were alive with friends laughing over maté, never in a rush to be anywhere else.
The months were full. New friends, long runs, hours spent in sunlit cafés, and a steady writing schedule.
My days were unremarkable by design. I worked from home, maintained healthy routines, and spent weekends with close friends playing games, cooking dinners, and dancing (excessively).
Buenos Aires had become my home, more so than anywhere else I have lived in the U.S.
But even in a place that felt so right, I couldn’t ignore the cracks beneath the surface.
While on the surface all was rosy, I sensed cracks in the foundation. The life I built there rested on shaky ground: a precarious visa situation, inconsistent income, and work that drained more than it gave. But what scared me most wasn’t losing the lifestyle I’d built—it was losing the person I had become while living it.
Around the same time I recognized those cracks, I was fortunate enough to be presented with an opportunity to fortify that unsteady base. It was an opportunity that, if all went well, would grant me enough financial stability to address those very concerns over residency and longevity in Argentina.
The tradeoff was clear: a move back to the U.S. and an undefined timeline for returning to Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires represented the culmination of a long, unsure series of chapters in my life.
It was the tip of a pyramid, the confluence of so many projects that led to this ultimate breakthrough.
The last two years of my life had been an intense pursuit of understanding who I was and building myself into the person I wanted to be. My time as a nomad created a vacuum where I could spend quality time with myself, insulated from the distractions and expectations that had always shaped my choices.
My reliance on false idols like wealth, reputation, or achievement to shakily underpin my confidence diminished during that time. Instead, I found something truer: the recognition of who I am at my best, and the conviction to double down on that person.
I embraced those traits completely—an unpaid writer, savvy traveler, stout minimalist, curious soul, and, above all, someone adaptable to any circumstance.
By the end of 2023, I turned my attention to finding somewhere that would nurture those raw traits.
Buenos Aires bubbled up as a risky but worthy candidate. The decision wasn’t irreversible or unfamiliar—I had spent a couple of months there in 2022—but it was entirely my own, untethered to practical reasons like language learning or career advancement.
To move to Buenos Aires was to act on intuition.
Buenos Aires bubbled up as a risky but worthy candidate. The decision wasn’t irreversible or unfamiliar—I had spent a couple of months there in 2022—but it was entirely my own, a leap based not on practical reasons like language learning or career advancement but on something harder to define.
To move to Buenos Aires was to trust my intuition.
It meant trusting the truths I had uncovered during my travels and stepping outside the script. Decisions like that carry weight. If they fail, they reinforce the belief that the safest path is the only path. But for once, those fears didn’t matter.
After so much time in motion, I finally landed somewhere that fit. Buenos Aires gripped me in a way no place had before. It aligned so naturally with my envisioned lifestyle: slow living, a strong sense of community, green spaces for decompression, and an old-school charm that made everything feel intentional.
The alignment I felt in that city supercharged my existence. My writing flourished, I logged a marathon, and for the first time, I felt ready to pursue a relationship. In Buenos Aires, the life I created felt like an honest reflection of who I was striving to be.
The risk had paid off, and I was proud of the choice I had made. That made the decision to leave all the harder, like a betrayal of the life I had built and the person I had become in the process.
As my return to the U.S. approached, grief overtook me. I knew I’d revisit Buenos Aires, but a rooted life there felt indefinitely stunted.
The goodbyes hurt in ways I had anticipated: the long embraces, the heartfelt words, the small tokens exchanged with friends and my girlfriend. But beneath those moments was a quieter, sharper pain—one I hadn’t prepared for. Leaving felt like more than stepping away from a city; it felt like stepping away from the version of myself I had worked so hard to find.
Could I hold onto that person, or would leaving mean unmaking everything I had built?
I wrote the first draft of this essay while still in Buenos Aires.
It was filled with logical arguments and assurances. I wrote to myself, certain that I knew the way forward after this difficult goodbye.
But little of that draft survived in what you’re reading now.
The truth is, I still don’t have answers.
So, rather than force a resolution, I’m choosing to do this:
Pray. Journal. Work. Have faith in Him.
It’s foolish to fear the death of an ego. I can only ever be who I am in the present.
If it is God’s will for me to change, so be it. If it is to build the resilience of this personality, I will gratefully accept.
A friend once remarked how funny it is that the biggest decisions we face are the ones we have no experience in: starting a career, getting married, having a child, etc. These decisions are terrifying, but that inexperience is universal—and plenty of people succeed without it.
I used to believe that uncertainty would become less daunting the more I faced it. I’ve since realized that’s not true.
This next step might look like a departure from the life I’ve treasured. It is. I don’t know how I’ll find my way back—but I trust that I will.
This next chapter is one of faith: that the path will reveal itself.
