Update: I’ve moved the format of the interviews to podcast so that you can easily listen to them on podcast applications. I will continue to include an unedited transcript at the bottom of the post. If you experience any technical issues, please email my assistant Linda at Linda@kirstenpowers.com
When I published my essay about why I was moving to Italy, one of the many people I heard from was Zerlina Maxwell, who you may know from her political commentary on MSNBC, her Sirius-XM show, or her important book, The End of White Politics: How to Heal our Liberal Divide.
Zerlina said that she related to so much of what I said in that piece and shared that she was headed to Rome very soon for many of the same reasons my husband and I had purchased property in Southern Italy.
Interestingly, like me1, the first person who seriously encouraged Zerlina to relocate to Italy was her therapist. I think it's telling that the people who were responsible for helping us with our mental health were the first to recognize that living in the United States was taking a unique toll on us and that our visits to Italy brought us a kind of ease and joy that was otherwise missing in our lives.
After watching Zerlina's joyful journey unfold on Instagram, I was thrilled to get a chance to interview her about how her time in Italy had impacted her. (Spoiler alert: she's moving there permanently). As she said in our interview:
It was maybe…the middle of the third week when I was like, "I don't think I should go back right now because I hadn't felt that content in maybe 20 years."
[I] began to recognize, wait a minute, there's a way to live where you're not walking around a ball of stress all the time. And people are present in a way, from my observation, that they are not in the United States. We are always going from one thing to the next. And that's really how I've lived my life and my adulthood and how I lived through my twenties and my thirties.
Zerlina started getting feedback from her audience and her boss that she seemed so much happier. That she was glowing.
In the interview, we get into the specifics of what Zerlina has found so healing about living in Italy, how drastically different the way of life is there from the United States, and how shocked she was to learn how much less expensive it is to live in Rome than New York City (where she resided in the US).
Moving abroad isn't for everyone, but if you can work remotely or if you work for a company that will allow you to relocate to an international office, it can be a great option if you are looking for a slower, more affordable, and less stressful life in a culture that isn't organized around consumerism and nonstop work and accomplishment.
Even if it seems impossible, if this kind of life seems attractive to you, start investigating. You don't know what you will find. Initially, Zerlina planned to spend just a few months in Rome, but she discovered that her employer was willing to make it work for her to relocate there. Until we take the first step, we often don't know what is possible.
If you are new here and have yet to read my other essays and interviews on the topic of leaving the United States, please do that before commenting. It can be exhausting dealing with people claiming I'm making arguments I'm not making (Italy is not perfect, and I've never suggested it is) or saying things that are just demonstrably false (moving to Italy is only for rich people) or how I don't talk about fixing the systemic issues in the US, even though I write about the United States’ systemic problems constantly.
Indeed, my entire America is not normal essay was how overwhelming the systemic issues in the United States have become.
I hope you enjoy the interview with Zerlina!
Check out my interview with my former therapist, Courtney Leak, about her move to Panama from the US and the role she played in my move to Italy:
When Prioritizing Your Mental Health Means Leaving the U.S.