If you’ve found your way here after reading about my move to Italy, you might be wondering the same thing I used to ask myself.
How can a life that looks so right feel so wrong?
Because on paper, I had done everything I was supposed to. Stable career. Sensible decisions. A life built carefully and with good intentions.
And yet something didn’t fit.
The quiet feeling no one really talks about
It wasn’t dramatic. There was no single moment where everything fell apart. No obvious reason to walk away from the life I’d built.
It was much quieter than that.
A tiredness that never quite lifted, even after a good night’s sleep. A sense of going through the motions. A feeling that I was slightly outside my own life, watching it happen rather than actually living it.
I remember thinking, is this it? Not in a despairing way. Just a quiet question that kept coming back, no matter how much I tried to ignore it.
When burnout doesn’t look like burnout
For a lot of women in midlife, this is where it starts. Not with a crash, but with a slow fade.
You’re tired but you can’t explain why. Work feels harder even though you’re more experienced than ever. The things that used to bring you joy just don’t quite land anymore. And somewhere along the way, you’ve stopped noticing what you actually want.
For me, this was all tangled up with perimenopause too. The brain fog. The emotional unpredictability. The strange and unsettling feeling of not quite recognising yourself.
That last part was the hardest.
“But you have a good life…”
This is what keeps so many women stuck, including me for a long time.
Because from the outside, everything looks fine. And so you tell yourself the same thing other people would tell you. I should be grateful. Other people have it harder. This is just what life looks like now.
So you keep going. You keep showing up. You keep holding it all together.
But underneath that, something feels off. And you can’t quite shake it.
The questions midlife has a way of asking
At some point, the questions get harder to push away.
Not just what am I doing, but who am I now? What do I actually want? Do I want the next twenty years to look like the last twenty?
These aren’t small questions. And they don’t come with neat answers.
Why so many women start looking outward
This is usually where something shifts. You start imagining a different kind of life. Maybe it begins with a holiday that felt different from the others. A slower pace. A version of yourself that felt lighter somehow.
For a lot of women, that feeling gets attached to Italy.
And honestly, it’s not really about Italy. It’s about space, and time, and simplicity. It’s about wanting to feel like yourself again.
The dream of moving abroad in midlife rarely starts as a plan. It starts as a feeling.
The truth I couldn’t keep ignoring
For a long time I tried to be sensible about it. Realistic. Grateful. I told myself to push the feeling down and get on with things.
But it didn’t go away. It just got louder.
Until eventually I had to be honest with myself. The life I had built no longer fitted the woman I was becoming.
That’s not an easy thing to sit with. Because it means something has to change.
If any of this sounds familiar
You’re not broken. You’re not ungrateful. And you are absolutely not alone in this.
This is the moment a lot of women reach in their forties and fifties. The moment where you stop settling, start questioning, and quietly begin imagining something different.
That questioning, for me, eventually led somewhere. Not overnight, and not impulsively. But through a slow and honest process of realising I wanted more from my life.
Which is what ultimately led me to start again in Italy at 44.
But before any of that, there was a moment. A very specific one.
If this has resonated, the next step isn’t to book a flight or hand in your notice. It’s just to get clear.
I’ve put together a free guide that walks you through the first real steps to moving to Italy as a non-EU citizen, including the visa most people start with, the income reality you need to understand, and the biggest mistakes to avoid.
You can do everything right and still realise you want something different.
That doesn’t make you reckless. It makes you honest.
And sometimes that’s exactly where everything begins.