No One Told Me It Would Feel Like This

Unspoken Conversations, No. 1

I never planned to leave Slovenia. It’s strange to type that now, considering how many countries I’ve lived in since. But back then, my life was full in all the ways I thought mattered: A career in journalism. A circle of women who felt like my spine. A small but steady rhythm that told me: this is who you are. There was no dream of going somewhere else. I didn’t fantasize about “starting over.” I didn’t crave reinvention. And yet, I left.

What pulled me wasn’t a dramatic moment, but something quieter—a friendship that grew slowly across time zones and email threads. He was kind. He listened. He saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself yet. A year after we met in Sarajevo in Bosnia, I stepped into a new country. -Jordan. I carried a suitcase - really, not much in it, and a thousand invisible questions.

No one told me it would feel like this. Not like a clean slate. Not like freedom. More like floating between languages, between identities, between versions of myself I didn’t yet recognize. I couldn’t explain who I was in the local language. I didn’t know how to show up in a culture that didn’t know my name, my history, my hunger. I found myself shrinking in small, imperceptible ways just to fit. Just to be understood.

I'm wondering if you’re curious to ask what the most challenging part was? It wasn’t the loneliness, which for the longest time I thought it was. It wasn’t the culture shock. It was feeling like I couldn’t even speak myself.

I think about that woman now—me, then. How she stood in the middle of her life, holding the past in one hand and possibility in the other.

How she left anyway. She wasn’t fearless. But she listened.

There’s a moment, I think, in every woman’s life where she has to decide: Will I stay in what I’ve built—or will I follow the version of me that hasn’t yet arrived?

We rarely talk about how disorienting that moment is. How it doesn’t come with a manual. How brave doesn’t always feel like brave. It feels like heartbreak. Like silence. Like doubt.

This is the first of many stories I’ve been keeping close—stories I’m finally ready to share in this series called Unspoken Conversations. These stories are all part of my new art collection. Each one traces a step in the long walk back to myself.

Some began with leaving. Others with staying. All of them with listening.

If any part of this feels familiar, I hope you’ll stay with me.

We all have conversations we never got to say out loud.

This is where I start saying mine.

With love,

Ana.