This week marks six years since we left Chile to move to Berlin. I used to think that I’d retire in Berlin; that it’d be my forever place. Never thought I’d be spending this anniversary in another city, as we just moved to Madrid a few weeks ago. 

I’m a big fan of the “Archive” Instagram feature, to remember what I was up to on this day years before. As I’m writing this (January 7th), the Instagram story that popped up was a recording of a Berlin street while I was in the taxi from the airport to the first apartment we had when we arrived in Berlin. That was my first time ever in Berlin (and in Germany) and everything was new, so I was fascinated looking out of the window, although it was late and dark. I got curious and kept using the Archive feature to see all the stories that I posted after that. I viewed each and every one of them until May 2020. And that gave me a lot of insight regarding my current move. 

I’ve struggled a lot in the past month. Moving to Madrid has been one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, by far. According to sCieNcE, moving is one of the most stressful life events one can endure (more than getting a divorce, even, according to, again, sCiEncE https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/survey-finds-moving-is-more-stressful-for-many-than-getting-divorced-having-kids/). So I wasn’t expecting my move to be the exception. But again, given that I’ve had some recent experience with not only international moves, but fucking trans-Atlantic moves, I thought this would be not so terrible. Oh boy, I was wrong. Everything that could’ve gone wrong, went wrong: it was super hard to cancel all the German contracts, finding someone to take over the apartment, packing all the stuff (of which we had a lot; never be a double-income child-free household…the amount of stuff you accumulate is insane…). On top of all that, finding an international moving service was challenging (and expensive). I hired a guy with a truck to transport 15mt3 of things, which I didn’t know was linked with 800 kilos of weight. Bottom line: we were only able to transport half of our stuff…as stuff is heavy…who would’ve thought. That implied hiring a second moving service, spending double the original amount, etc. etc. etc. 

On top of all that, our male cat Robbie got sick with an acute kidney failure and we had to move everything up. We originally wanted to move around the second week of January, but we ended up moving the second week of December. Seba had to come even earlier, at the end of November, to stay in an empty apartment to stay with Robbie, who had to go through a super invasive kidney surgery (but hey, at least we had an apartment. Things can always be worse, I guess..). 

I don’t like to complain and whine about things, especially since I am aware of how privileged I am to even have this opportunity. But again, I kept thinking if we (if I, because at the end we moved because of my job) made the right decision. If moving out from our 72mt2 sound-proof-Soviet apartment in East Berlin with affordable rent, to an overpriced downtown noisy Madrid apartment was the right choice, leaving behind two German salaries and a very comfortable life.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, which relates to the whole seeing my old Instagram stories from early 2020. I kept comparing this move to the move we did from Chile to Germany. When I was questioning this choice, I wondered if we made the right choice now, especially since the Chile-Germany move was so seamless, so easy. Everything worked out by then; nothing is working out now. Everything was so easy, so straightforward then. Everything is hard and complicated now. And my conclusion is that memories betray you and that we human beings are super good at forgetting about near-traumatic experiences. 

While I was revisiting my Instagram stories, I remembered that things were not seamless, nor easy. I remembered that the pandemic started hitting a month after we arrived. That we had to find another apartment in case the tenants decided to come back earlier from their vacation in Southeast Asia (originally it was a 3-month lease, but we thought that with this mysterious virus coming from China that was starting to appear in the news in mid-February, perhaps they wanted to come back to Germany earlier, which was absolutely the case). We also had an overlap of rents between that apartment and our new apartment. Our stuff from Chile took forever to arrive. In our second, more permanent apartment, we didn’t have dishes or cutlery, pots, or pans. One of my Instagram stories was of praise for one of Seba’s colleagues, who gave us a set of two dishes and two cups when he told him that our stuff from Chile was severely delayed (I didn’t remember any of that). That apartment was also pretty small. I could hear the neighbors coughing and blowing their noses, the upstairs neighbors having sex: the walls were paper-thin. Drilling anything was mostly impossible. I posted a story on Instagram of our stuff when it arrived and it was packed, full of boxes and impossible to walk through. We slept on a shitty mattress for like two months because our actual mattress was in the move. We also didn’t have a TV for months.

And while I was reviving all those moments, I was like…wow…I didn’t remember any of that. Early 2020 was really hard for me because I was waiting for my PhD contract to start, which it took until May. My German classes were cancelled because of the pandemic. Seba worked and had to go to the office, which meant that I was basically alone at home all day. The peak of my day was to go to the supermarket as it was the only open store. It was winter and dark at 4pm. I had to spend my day watching TV (after our stuff finally arrived), and following boring workout videos on YouTube to keep myself sane. I spent 4 months basically doing nothing besides sourdough bread as the cliché I am.

In some way, I was gaslighting myself with the narrative that everything was super easy back then. Even when perhaps it was, I had blocked all the unpleasing stuff. All the moments when I had to go to the immigration office, all the stomach aches I had at the beginning trying to navigate German bureaucracy in a language that I spoke, back then, zero (now, a little better than zero but still). 

So now that I’m dealing with another migratory process, yes, it’s been hard and tedious but at least it’s in a language that I speak. People in public services are a bit more polite here than in Germany (perhaps that’s an understatement: people here have been really nice). Still, I feel that I have to remind myself every day why I made this choice; to convince myself that it was the right choice. Whenever I have doubts, I look at my cat Robbie and think that he probably wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t moved. I remind myself that at least my family lives here, so if we have a problem, we can rely on them. They’ve been a huge help and probably things would’ve been 1000% harder without them. Being a migrant is hard, and even when I stopped technically being a migrant in Germany in early 2025, when I got my German citizenship, I never achieved a true sense of belonging. The language never got easier; dealing with moody German people never became less frustrating. I also remind myself that in a few weeks, I start a position that most post-PhD folks would kill for. 

So I’m wrapping up this sad-ass, depressing blog post with a reminder to myself that moving is always hard, no matter how bad your memory is and how much you gaslight yourself into believing that it wasn’t in the past. Perhaps in six more years, I will re-read this post and think “wow I have zero recollection of any of this.” And laugh.