Leaping into the Unknown

MY PERSONAL STORY OF CHANGE, HEARTBREAK AND TRANSFORMATION

“It’s time.” I told my husband. “Put it on the market.” And in one brief sentence, our whole world was catapulted into a maelstrom from which there was no return. In one week, our house sold; in two months we were on a ferry carrying us towards Montenegro - a place we had barely heard of, let alone visited. I thought I was embracing a life as a digital nomad, free from ties.

Instead, I faced the one thing that I had spent my life controlling or avoiding: relationships.

I was around nine years old when I began intensively masking my ‘weirdness’, or what I now know as AutADHD. Due to my constant work on myself as a hypno psychotherapist, I could not only pass through the world unremarked, I was actually thriving. It just so happened that none of my close friends saw me for more than a couple of hours at a time, and then only a few times a year.

When you have the same routine, it’s easy to convince yourself that you have everything under control. It was only when we moved to a farm in the Montenegrin countryside, and shared our lives with a family of nine, spanning three generations, that the cracks began to show.

We left the UK without a plan. The first few weeks felt as if the three of us had been orphaned, hopping from one holiday rental to another. The responsibility to make things work for our daughter’s sake was crushing. We were looking for a ‘village to raise a child’. We found it sooner than I expected, at Haj Nehaj farm, in the south of Montenegro. This was where our deepest journey began.

Embracing a new culture

Coffee is drunk in Montenegro for many reasons. To start the day, to break from work, to celebrate togetherness, to punctuate a gathering or to lend gravitas to a business meeting. And so I found myself nursing a tiny coffee, whilst Melica and I waited to see which room ‘the men folk’ of the farm would choose to become my family’s new lounge.

I carried out negotiations with all the grace of a bull in a china shop, so my husband was called in to discuss it with the men (I now realise this is what they expected). Melica and I watched with amusement as they wandered from room to room discussing the drawbacks and possibilities of each room in turn; our eyes followed them through the open windows as if we were watching a tennis match.

Weeks later, Tony and I watched the sun go down from our terrace and reflected on the appeal of the place. A large family surrounded us; our apartment was in the centre of their yard. Their steps ran up and down until late into the night; we seemed to be at the centre of something and it felt good after living on the margins since we had arrived. But what happens when the honeymoon period is over, I wondered.

Before three months had passed, I found out.

So close and yet so far

When immersing yourself in a culture, you see only similarities, and delight over each one. Danica, our neighbour, shared so many values with me. We took coffee together, lingering over intense dissections of the meaning of life, glowing with our shared purpose. At the end of each one, I felt elated but utterly drained - this level of closeness was proving hard for me to maintain.

Soon, there were comments from the matriarch, Melica, about how we ran our household, how long we were in bed, and how often we cleaned. We seemed trapped in a family we had not chosen. When she began to let herself into our apartment, we realised we had to leave.

Christmas was fast approaching. And so, a rift appeared. We had not behaved in a way that they understood or expected; we felt equally baffled at their responses. We could say nothing to anyone, blanketed in a centuries old silence that we could not fathom. My anxiety increased. So we moved house, almost overnight, to a new town where a sense of failure bloomed.

Time to wise up

I had a stark choice: continue avoiding relationships or face my sense of failure. I travelled the two hour journey and spent a day with Danica. I listened to her pain and incomprehension at our leaving and attempted to explain our choices. We grew closer on that day, and I grew stronger, knowing I had experienced what I had avoided my whole life: presence with my shortcomings and the ability to sit with irreparable damage.

The friendship has never truly mended, but I have deep gratitude for Danica’s insistence that I look at the pain. For the first time in my life, I have strong, close, female friendships. I have experienced betrayal; I believe I too have betrayed unintentionally. I have got it wrong on numerous occasions, and I have struggled against Balkan expectations of friendship. But ultimately, I have learned to forgive myself.

Two Years Later

Sitting in my apartment in Bansko, Bulgaria, looking at the mountains, I reflect on these early pains which were so unbearable and consider how they have informed my work, my choices, and the possibilities available to me. Every day my world grows larger and it bears no resemblance to the images of digital nomads sipping margaritas under palm trees. No, it is about connection- deep and lasting connection, with the people and the lands that I engage with.

It is also about never being so afraid of life that you blind yourself to how small and manageable you make your relationships and situations. Now I embrace uncertainty. Does it still unsettle me? Of course. But on some level I welcome the discomfort as growing pains. I hope the same for you.

Jessica Summers is a Hypno-psychotherapist and Coach specialising in enriching and expanding the lives of Highly Sensitive People and ADHD. She discovered that her clients’ problems would disappear when they were choosing to live a big enough life, in line with their deep desires and values. She also discovered that many of them didn’t want to. From this, the MAKE THE LEAP system of coaching was born. Jessica realised that people needed to deeply trust their own desires before they would ‘leap’ into them.

She is passionate about living her philosophies: in June 2021 she packed up her car with her family and all their belongings, put their house on the market and travelled across the world to Montenegro - a place she knew nothing about. She now lives in Bansko, Bulgaria with her husband and daughter.

This was adapted from a published article in Wander Mag, The Lost and Found Issue