My immigrant life – two decades in Madrid and Barcelona

My first proper winter coat was black, with fraying bits of thread hanging off the sleeves.

It was a loan from my friend Elsa, who for some reason had a men’s black coat hanging behind the door of her rented room when I moved to Spain.

(It might have belonged to her ex or something.)

I can vividly picture myself walking up and down Madrid’s Paseo de Extremadura in that frayed black coat, my long hair falling in my eyes, cold and lonely, a new immigrant 6000 miles from home.

I lived in that area in 2004 and 2005 – two peak years for Spanish immigration – and the economy was booming. Little did I know that I was part of a demographic shift affecting the whole country, and that Spain was changing quickly.

I was just feeling cold, and hungry, and totally alone.

Although “totally alone” wasn’t quite the case. I knew Elsa. I had her to thank for the hand-me-down coat.

But as I quickly discovered, Elsa’s whole thing was basically sitting in her room and smoking. She was from a central European country whose government heavily subsidized her. So she was on a different immigrant hustle than I was – one that involved hefty unemployment checks from back home.

She’d get jobs in cafés, under the table, and soon quit or get fired, at which point she’d go back to her room and spend several weeks more sitting on her cheap foam mattress on the floor, smoking.

I got a job teaching English – also under the table, because I didn’t have work papers. Illegality aside, it was a step up from my previous jobs, which had all paid around minimum wage, and had mostly required mopping.

The money wasn’t bad, compared to US customer service wages. And being a “teacher” was a step up for my self-image. I was on my way towards respectability.

Not bad for a college dropout from the Arizona desert.

What is immigration, anyway?

Immigration is a big topic. Immigration in Spain is a more manageable one.

My own immigrant story is small enough that I feel comfortable talking about it. But is it representative?

I don’t know. I might not be the typical immigrant. But then again, with around 250 million international migrants around the world these days, who’s typical? The phenomenon of immigration is huge, and defies stereotypes.

Spain has immigrants who come from the elites in their own countries, highly skilled and educated immigrants (like my wife Morena), low-skill knuckle-draggers like me, and everything in between. So does the US.

Whatever immigration was back in the old Ellis Island days – “give us your tired, your poor, etc” – it’s not that anymore. The line at your local immigration office has people from all walks of life. Take a number.

But back to 21-year-old me, that first cold winter abroad.

Being an immigrant changes your personality

I remember my first room down in Lucero, one of the worst neighborhoods in Madrid.

It was on the ground floor of a big building, facing the street: Paseo de Perales. At one point I bought a little cactus to remind me of home, and put it out on the windowsill, where it was promptly stolen. My one-euro cactus.

I hope its new owners attached great sentimental value to it, like I did.

That winter, I’d sit in my little room and read books, warming my hands with a cup of coffee.

I was new in Madrid, and like I said, it was cold. I’d never really been cold before – not for longer than a weekend. The climate was another layer to the adventure: there was the language, the loneliness, the semi-poverty, the fact that I had no right to be there and could (possibly) be deported… and then the weather.

(Someone from Minnesota is probably reading this right now and objecting that it’s not all that cold in Madrid, and these days I agree. On the other hand, I’m from the Arizona desert, and for my first couple of years I was – subjectively speaking – very cold.)

Fleeing from my native habitat at a young age, I noticed my personality was changing rapidly, adjusting to my new circumstances at light-speed.

I’ve always had a bit of a philosophical bent, and over that winter I came to a couple of pretty stark conclusions about life:

1. Nobody was coming to save me, and…
2. This was all my fault.

Previously, I’d been rather idealistic and I’d had high hopes that some form of rational government would one day make my life better. But that went out the window when I moved to Spain. I was illegal. What was I expecting the Spanish government to do about my problems? Not much, actually.

Also, this whole plan was nobody’s idea but mine.

I had nobody to blame but myself for whatever happened next.

Back in Phoenix, I could blame my parents, or “society”, for some of my shitty decisions… but my parents had never suggested moving abroad, and society had pretty strongly discouraged it.

All this made me take some responsibility for my life in a way I’d never done previously. If anything in my life was going to get better, it’d have to be because I’d set some goals or something.

Hard work, thrift, and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. It all sounded pretty obnoxious – at age 21, I thought people who talked like that were assholes.

But the other options (poverty, imprisonment, and deportation) were worse.

The old “bootstraps” cliché

My second proper winter coat was olive green, the kind of thing Spanish grandfathers wear.

I shoplifted it from a large department store outside Madrid one chilly afternoon in October. It must have been 2005. Elsa had gone back to her country to be further subsidized by her government, and had taken the frayed black coat with her.

Meanwhile, it was getting cold, and (English teaching being what it is) I hadn’t really worked all summer.

Classes had started back up in early October, but I wasn’t expecting to get paid until November 5. So I did what any cold, broke person from the desert would do: I walked into a department store, draped the first coat I saw over my arm, and walked casually back out.

Now, moren than 20 years later, I’m not proud of this. But at the time, I was doing what I had to. I couldn’t “pull myself up by my own bootstraps” if I froze to death first.

I figured that stealing from giant corporations is about as victimless as it gets, and that in fact I was in some way “sticking it to the man”. Anyway, I was an illegal immigrant.

What could they possibly do… deport me?

Sure. But that could happen anyway.

That first summer not working had been a shock to my already-strained finances. But after that, things got better.

I worked my ass off, giving all the classes I could, and trying to be a good teacher. By the next year I was prepared for the summer, with a stack of 50s in my “secret money sock” – enough to pay the rent and buy food from July until early October.

That green coat must have looked pretty dorky on me, but I didn’t care. I was a man on a mission, and fashion wasn’t a part of it.

I’d decided I was going to make my life in Spain, and I was willing to do whatever I had to in the process.

I taught as many classes as I could, read books about self-improvement, and dated a couple of Spanish girls who must have found me charismatic – they sure weren’t in it for my good looks. My lifestyle wasn’t very exciting, either – although not living with my parents gave me an advantage over the local “competition”.

Spanish guys may have had cars, and mullets, and access to their parents’ beach houses. But I had a rented room that was close to the center – the actual location was constantly changing – and an exotic foreign accent.

Plus I was excited about life. I dated around, and had some adventures. I was feeling pretty optimistic. And also – this is important – I was finally free from the social expectations of people back home.

Life was going pretty well… except for the illegality.

In fact, I remember those first couple of years as being a lot of fun. Part of that is probably because of my age and inexperience. But another part is surely the feeling that I’d escaped the system.

Back in 2002, I’d dropped out of college when I realized how stupid it was to pay good money for someone to assign me a list of books to read. I wanted to do something with my life, not take more tests.

If I’d stayed home and followed the standard path, I could have finished college at age 22 or so… and then what?

Get a job at Starbucks with my English Lit degree and $40,000 in student debt? Go to grad school and try to avoid “adult life” for another few years? Neither option seemed appealing.

I could have tried to make it work as a college dropout. I’d done just that, actually, for about two years before moving abroad: working bad coffeeshop and cashier jobs in town, seven bucks an hour plus a fistful of dollar bills and quarters from the tip jar.

I’d grown up middle-class. But riding around Phoenix on my bike in the summer heat, too broke to afford a car, with no college degree and no obvious talents – that sort of thing’ll knock the middle-class right out of you.

With a lot of luck and persistence, I could have eventually become a shift manager at a car wash, or something. And if that didn’t work out, there was always the place in front of the Safeway where I could sell plasma.

All the realistic options sounded terrible, in other words. I felt like I’d dodged a bullet by moving to Spain.

But I needed to do something about getting legal. A few years went by. Slowly but surely, I was approaching 30 – way too old to die young – and I was gonna have to get my shit together.

Being seasonally employed and illegal, and living rented rooms in Madrid’s cheapest neighborhoods, was fun for a while. But eventually it was going to be pathetic.

Enter a long series of lawyers, each more incompetent than the last.

For the next few years, I gathered papers, took them to government offices, and hoped for the best.

My lawyers were sometimes a help, and sometimes a hindrance.

A letter in my files from one of those years invites me to “abandon Spanish territory within 14 days” – or else. That was a rejection for one of my visa applications, and it hurt.

But I didn’t go anywhere.

Around this time, I started getting serious about blogging. I figured that if I finally got deported, or had to leave, I could have some online income while I got back on my feet. With $800 a month, I could live it up in Costa Rica – or so I’d heard. How many pageviews would I need to make that kind of money? Millions.

Okay, well… maybe I’d come up with some other idea. Best to keep plugging away at it.

Finally, I got a work visa through arraigo social, a process that lets people legalize their situation if they’ve been in Spain for more than 3 years, and have a job offer from a legitimate company.

I went down to Aluche to pick up my national identity card in May 2012, seven and a half years after first moving to Madrid. Standing in line, I had plenty of time to look over at the barred windows of the “Immigrant Detainment Center” next door.

The police compound had a thousand people in a line snaking around the courtyard that morning, and some enterprising folks were selling tamales and Inca Kola outside the gates.

After four hours standing in the sun, I had the card – the little piece of plastic that finally granted me the legal right to be in Spain. I speed-walked back to the metro. I wasn’t even going to be late for my afternoon classes.

The Great Recession hit Spain hard.

The Spanish economy was in free fall by that time, with unemployment over 25%. Youth unemployment was twice that. A lot of Spanish people were emigrating. I was happy just to be working legally, por fin.

Around that time, the Spanish government started offering immigrants who lost their jobs lump-sum unemployment payments to just go home.

Some did. It’s unclear how many.

Madrid certainly felt a lot emptier for a while there: nobody was out spending money, businesses were closing up, or being replaced by pawn shops. The metro was strangely quiet: fewer people going to work every day.

The immigration statistics for the last couple of decades always come with a caveat: people from former Spanish colonies can get nationality after two years’ residence. After that, they’re no longer counted as immigrants. So the number of South Americans drops off quite a bit in the 2010s, but maybe not from masses of people returning to their home countries.

I hadn’t been working long enough to get unemployment benefits that summer, and besides, I had to be on contract a certain number of days a year to renew my visa. I got a shitty summer job – 8AM classes with boring executive types in offices outside town. At least the offices had A/C.

Giddy with excitement, I also swung by the health center to get some of that famous European “free healthcare”. After an hour in a waiting room with all the local grannies, I saw a doctor. She agreed to give me a blood test. When the results came back, she scowled as she handed over the papers.

“You need to stop eating cholesterol.”

“Never!” I thought. Cholesterol is a myth.

I wouldn’t see the inside of a Spanish health center again until about 9 years later, when I got Covid. And it turns out the healthcare wasn’t actually free – I was paying for it every month, right out of my meagre paycheck.

Self-help for dropouts

All this time, I was dealing with the ups and downs of immigrant life.

First of all, the language. I didn’t actually have a personality in Spanish for the longest time: with the level of an ungrammatical four-year-old, there wasn’t much I could do to express myself.

This was probably for the best. My post-teenage angst didn’t translate between cultures, so I dropped it. I spent a few years sitting around smiling and agreeing with people. “Claro.” “Por supuesto.”

Meanwhile, I read paperback books in Spanish, or pored over the local newspapers on the metro, trying to learn more. I wanted to improve my Spanish, but I was also hoping to improve myself.

One summer, in my shared flat in Vallecas – I’d moved up to the second-worst neighborhood in Madrid by this time – I downloaded a bunch of Tony Robbins audio programs from Limewire.

For years I’d been hearing about something called “self help”. Most people were pretty disparaging about it. But those people also tended to be big losers. Coincidence? Probably not.

Maybe self help, I thought, would teach me how to be a better adult.

So I downloaded a few gigs worth – thanks, piracy! – then spent several sweaty weeks listening to all those audios that had probably been ripped from cassette tapes in the 80s.

Getting better every day

Tony suggested – get this – that a person could improve his (or her) life by focusing on getting a little bit better every day. He also said that you could feel better by standing up straight and focusing on your goals with a strong burning desire. Where focus goes, energy flows.

Strange: nobody had ever suggested that to me before.

Back home, people said, “your middle school grades will follow you for the rest of your life” and “everything’s going on your permanent record”. I’d almost been kicked out of every school I’d attended – except for college, which I quit. So I’d basically failed at “adulting” by age 19.

People around town had given up on me, at that point – assuming the rest was going to be a long, downhill slope. I wasn’t a rule-follower, or a mindless conformist. Therefore, I’d never be anything.

Later I’d learn that the people back home were suffering from what psychologist Angela Duckworth calls a “fixed mindset”. I guess most people probably are.

They think that if you’re not joyfully doing your homework in second grade, preparing yourself for the Ivy League, you’ll probably end up on welfare or in prison – that your abilities are fixed, and they’re not going to improve.

The opposite – what the self-help gurus like Tony Robbins were suggesting – was a “growth mindset”.

I liked Tony’s philosophy better.

Time to put that growth mindset to work.

My third winter coat had lapels and big black buttons. It cost 70€ at Zara. That seemed like a lot of money at the time, but I felt sophisticated as hell in that coat. Very European. Did I mention it had lapels? Lapels!

Nobody back on the ranch had lapels on their coat.

This journey of self improvement I was on had several aspects: expressing myself more positively, getting in shape, and dressing a bit better were just a few. I’d also learned a lot of Spanish.

I’d gotten the C2-level certificate from Instituto Cervantes at one point – again, because I thought I could have a back-up hustle as a Spanish teacher if I ever got deported.

Not all of these experiments were successful. For example, I was trying to “get over” being an introvert for a while. It didn’t work, of course, but I had a lot of fun in those years while forcing myself to socialize.

This was before dating apps were mainstream – at least in Spain – so I had to meet girls and make friends the old-fashioned way. Talking to strangers became a thing I did regularly.

Dating the Spaniards – a mixed bag

One girl I dated, from somewhere in La Mancha, was studying for a civil service exam.

She was a bit difficult to pin down on weekends – she’d usually be back in her village, eating her mom’s food and having her laundry done. One time she stuck around, though, and wanted to hang out.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m working.”

“Working on Sunday? Why!?”

Immigrant life was why.

I’m hardly a workaholic, but my drive to accomplish something was hard to understand for the girls I dated. Then again, I didn’t have parents I could just count on to pay my rent and do my laundry if things went badly for me.

I don’t even consider myself ambitious, really – but I’d spent some time scraping by near the bottom edge of society, and now I wanted to put a large distance between myself and that whole situation.

Living highly subsidized lives, like a lot of European people do, tends to create dependence, and a feeling of learned helplessness.

As a result, many people out here don’t understand the hustle. They want to do the minimum to get by. “Entrepreneur” is sort of a dirty word. The ideal job for most Spaniards is to work for the government.

Working through the Great Recession

The economic crisis was good for language teaching, more or less.

A lot of people wanted to learn English (or German) so that they could emigrate. Spanish emigration is a whole topic of its own – the “locals” were leaving in droves, going up to the UK, or to Germany, or to Scandinavia.

Sometimes they’d end up working as waiters, or folding sweaters in a Zara far from home – the local Zara having refused to hire them, because they didn’t speak English.

I could relate. I’d never gotten a call when I applied at the McDonald’s back home.

And so, here I was, living my immigrant life far away.

For a while, during the recession, I’d considered moving to a new country myself – all the articles about Brain Drain had me thinking that the smart people were getting out. If I stayed, maybe that meant I wasn’t as smart as I thought.

But having a work visa changed everything. By 2012, I was in Spain through thick and thin.

Staying legal in Spain

Now I just needed to work enough on-contract hours to be able to renew my card for a few years. This involved taking a pay cut, thanks to Social Security and taxes, but it was worth it. For a long time, my biggest dream had been to become a normal taxpaying citizen, with rights. And now I was one. It felt great.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis dragged on. Things got worse, then worse, then slowly better.

Nobody’s salaries were increasing, but at least I had a job, and my only expenses were food and a rented room. A lot of people who’d bought houses when times were good were now regretting their decision – and also unable to sell.

All through these years, I was writing books for English learners, in addition to teaching as many hours as I could. I’d sell the books on my blogs, and on YouTube. Soon I was making a bit of extra income, then a bit more.

Eventually, I’d done all the on-contract hours I needed, and I was able to quit one of my day jobs – the one with the boss up in Barcelona who would call to harass me for my lesson plans, and tell me what Ester in HR thought about my teaching style. I quit by email, an hour before I was supposed to be in class, and suddenly felt lighter.

Victory! Or at least a small taste of it.

A lot of life happened in the middle of the recession. I dated a few girls, turned 30, and got thoroughly sick of doing the same thing every day for 11 euros an hour. But my online business was steadily improving.

By 2014 I could afford to live alone – real estate prices had been crashing for about 5 years by that point. When times were good, half the landlords would just hang up the phone when they heard a foreign accent. Now, people were practically begging you to rent places.

I moved out of Vallecas, into a much nicer neighborhood in the north.

Spain was in crisis, but I was doing pretty well.

Movin’ on up (to the north side)…

My fourth winter coat was a grey ski jacket from The North Face. A student at one of my company classes had a nice North Face coat, and seemed to be a cool guy as well.

It was aspirational: I’d get a nice coat, and be a cool middle-class guy.

I don’t remember how much that coat cost, but I had to take the train all the way up to Las Rozas to get it at the outlet mall. Buying brand names at full price still seemed absurd to me, even though I’d doubled my income.

Finally, I renewed the last of my temporary visas. I was 33 years old, had a steady job, no roommates, and I was a permanent resident – living the Spanish dream!

But my new plan was to quit my day jobs entirely. I was making good money online – at least some months. Now it was time to declare victory over the Spanish labor market once and for all.

I circled a date on the calendar: June 30th, 2015, was Victory in Europe Day – I’d be finishing the school year, and have the whole summer to build up my business… plus every month after that.

I swore an oath to myself: no more English lessons. No more 11 bucks an hour. That spring, I travelled to the UK and to the Netherlands – getting some mileage out of the new coat, plus the fact that I could finally afford to be a tourist in more expensive countries.

June 30th came. I cashed my final paycheck, and was free. If you’d told Daniel from 2005 about this, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible. But that’s the power of improving things just a little, day by day.

With that, I was done with the Spanish labor market.

I also thought I was done with immigration – little did I know.

Hanging with highly-skilled immigrants

Morena came to Spain from the tropics, in South India, for a PhD program.

When we met she had enough money to pay her rent and go to the giant Carrefour for groceries, but not enough to stay warm. Buying a comforter for her bed when she arrived, she told me, had almost bankrupted her.

On our first date, she told me she’d just been to the dentist. I later found out she didn’t have money to fill her cavities. Still, when I told her I was a blogger, she pitied me, and bought me a beer.

The rest, as they say, is history. (We’re married now.)

In any case, she was on the “highly skilled” end of the immigration spectrum, with an international science grant paying for her to do a PhD in Spain. She worked in a lab, putting cells on tiny censors, or something. Presumably, this would keep her here for a few years, then she’d go off to be a scientist somewhere else.

After a few months, though, she quit her job at the lab. Back to the immigration drawing board – a new series of lawyers told us she’d have to figure out another way to stay in Spain. Her highly-skilled visa was only valid for that one PhD program, so officially, she wasn’t supposed to be here anymore.

The lawyers said it was unlikely, but that they might send her a letter, inviting her to leave the country.

In the meantime, we had a year and a half before her National ID card expired.

She briefly got a job at a university lab, which lasted about a week. Then she spent a few months taking tourists on Segway tours around Plaza Mayor. Finally, a bit desperate, she asked me for career advice.

“You like talking,” I said. “Why don’t you try sales?”

Fateful words, those. Soon, she had a job interview up in Barcelona, and a few weeks later, we were moving here so she could start her first sales job.

I was less than thrilled with this, but assumed it would be temporary. We got a tiny one-bedroom flat near the beach, over a small plaza full of schizophrenics.

After all those years in Madrid, it was time for a new adventure.

How bad could it be?

Morena called me on her lunch break her first day on the job. She was having a bit of a freakout.

Apparently, the job she’d moved here for required cold-calling CEOs to sell some sort of high-ticket event. There were no leads. So in practice, this meant finding companies online, looking for a phone number, and then calling and trying to get through to the CEO. Not an easy task.

If she did get through to the CEO, she was supposed to ask for 32,000€.

I could see why she was freaking out.

Back in my teaching days, I’d given classes to some salespeople. They’d told me that your first couple of years are all about cold calling and getting rejected over and over. If you’re still in the game after that, you’ll be just fine.

I told this to Morena. It didn’t help. Those were some difficult years.

In the middle, she had to go back to India while we got her new visa sorted out. We got the visa through “pareja de hecho” with the help of an expensive lawyer here in Barcelona. It was a slow and difficult process – and I guess it could have gone either way – but it was manageable now that I was making good money with my online business.

Work-from-homers of the world, unite!

Then there was a global pandemic.

Morena made it back to Spain just a few days before everything locked down, in 2020.

Working from home in our tiny flat, she got a couple more sales jobs, cold-calling CEOs with various pitches. One company had her looking for counterfeit goods on Amazon, then calling up the legitimate owner of the brand and trying to sell a software solution to protect their intellectual property.

The next company was an HR startup with little in the way of an actual product.

After a couple of years, she moved to a legit multinational company. One thing we both discovered, while dealing with work culture in Spain, is that around half of the workforce is trying to avoid any sort of work at all.

The pandemic only gave office types extra excuses to be lazy. If before they were forced to get out of bed and get dressed in order to go to the office and avoid work, during the “work from home” period people would take occasional meetings in bed and otherwise make little pretense of working.

Just by doing her job, she ended up outperforming the average. Once she started working harder, she was quickly promoted to management, then promoted again, then promoted again. She currently leads a team of 18 people.

It’s been quite a journey for both of us – and perhaps not typical.

But who’s got a monopoly on typical?

Morena and I both moved to Spain, hoping to improve our lives. Despite wildly different backgrounds, we did. It took a lot of hard work, some long struggles with bureaucracy, and a willingness to do what had to be done – often, in difficult circumstances.

In a way, it sounds like the same story that immigrants everywhere hope to be able to tell someday.

It’s the dream of a lot of people in shitty situations: to move somewhere better, and make it work, despite the obstacles.

And I haven’t mentioned it elsewhere, but I had plenty of help along the way: the bosses at the language school who sponsored my first work visa, some older Spanish friends who took me into their homes and introduced me to all kinds of Spanish cuisine and culture. Successful students who told me about their lives, expanding my ideas of what was possible for a motivated person to achieve.

Most of my inspiration for writing this, though, comes from Morena. She gets phone calls from time to time from people in her town who want to make the move to Europe.

Most of the time, her advice is “It’s not worth it. Just stay home!”

Curious, I asked if she thought the “moving to Spain” experience was worth it for her.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “A million percent!”

“So why are you telling people not to come?”

“Because they have to know the downsides!”

It’s true, and it’s a bit of a dilemma.

Neither of us knew the downsides of living as an immigrant. And, in hindsight, it was totally worth it.

But it would be very dishonest to tell people to just hop on a plane and come to Europe, without giving them a feel for the reality of immigrant life.

Being cold for nine months a year, mostly (or completely) alone, and unable to afford any foods you like – don’t underestimate what that’ll do to your sense of optimism.

And what about the language?

Learning a new language in school is one thing – being surrounded by it 24 hours a day, and unable to speak your native language is another. A part of your personality withers and dies, far from home. For me that’s less of a problem. But for Morena and her native language – you’ve never heard of it – it’s a real issue.

And then there’s the bureaucracy, and the flirting with poverty, and the fact that you don’t know how the legal system works, and there’s the shady landlords, and the trying to rent a room when you don’t speak the language and don’t have money for a deposit or anyone local to vouch for you…

And the shitty jobs and the moldy flats and the short-term relationships and the feeling of being an outsider and the fact that you’re definitely missing out on life back home so somehow or other you’d better make this worth it.

And there’s the darkness in winter. And the struggle. And the despair. And the cold.

The cold, of course, is subjective. But have I mentioned the cold?

So… to emigrate, or to stay where you are?

I wouldn’t wish my 7 years of illegality on anyone. Also, those were some of the best years of my life. It’s a bit of a contradiction, isn’t it?

Morena and I both agree that if we’d known what we were getting into, we never would have done this.

Then again, if you really want to make a life for yourself abroad, you’re going to have to ignore all the well-meaning advice from people back home anyway. That’s what I did, and it worked out fine.

Most people back on the ranch didn’t know anything about Spain. But they still had plenty of advice. “Couldn’t you just move to Portland?” they’d say.

Or better yet, “Have you considered seeing a psychologist?”

I heard that one quite a lot. But I’d been dealing with “reasonable adults” for some time, at that point, and I knew they were wrong about almost everything.

For about a decade, I made it my life’s mission to prove that they were wrong about me, as well.

And it worked – the whole bootstraps cliché.

Immigrant life isn’t easy.

There’s still a certain park in Poblenou that we walk past from time to time and Morena says, “this is where I’d come to cry on my lunch breaks, back when I was at my first sales job”.

I call it “emotional geography”. The way places etch themselves into your brain, so that a non-descript patch of grass or cement can take you on a mental journey to another time.

Back in Madrid, I have the sreetcorners in Vallecas where I walked during the recession, looking for cheap protein, or the hotel bars where I’d go to work on my laptop while I was feeling down about building my business – I figured looking at successful people while I worked might rub off on me, somehow.

And maybe it did.

All this to say, living abroad isn’t for everyone.

These days, Morena and I are the reasonable adults, telling people they’re better off just staying home.

It’s discouraging for them. But if you’re plunged into despair by some gentle discouragement, you’re really not going to like all the shit that immigrant life throws at you.

On the other hand, life isn’t supposed to be easy. And struggling bravely to achieve your goals beats sitting on your ass, watching Netflix and wondering what might have been.

Life is short. Make something happen.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. These days, immigration is a hot topic in politics. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last couple of decades, it’s that there are many different kinds of immigrants, with many different goals. Sweeping generalizations like “immigration is good” (or “immigration is bad”) are far too simplistic. Just like everyone, some immigrants are going to be a net positive for society, and others are not. But that’s not a very good slogan.

P.P.S. I’ve written quite a bit about the pros and cons of living abroad. For example, Is Spain overrated? is one of the latest. I also wrote about being in Spain for 20 years and about why Americans love Spain. Check those out if you’re so inclined. They’re also episodes of the podcast, which is on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. Enjoy!