The Day I Knew I Was Quitting and Moving to Portugal

Cheyanne Johnson is contributing author for Close Cohen Career Consulting and ex-AWS leader who moved with her family to Portugal for a slower and intentional lifestyle. Cheyanne lives with her husband and two young sons in Porto and is a huge advocate for working parents.

What good is a life if you don’t make potentially insane leaps every once in a while? At minimum, this story will make for a memorable party ice-breaker

First break at three in the afternoon, not great, but I’ve had worse. I emerged from my home office for a snack before heading down to the basement. Fingers crossed my husband’s break  lined up with mine. Before I turned the corner, I caught a glimpse of melted metal on the stovetop. WTF?

Perks of working from home with your husband: he can’t really say no to your midday vent sessions. When you have no one else in the house, you quickly become each other’s work therapists. But today, office updates were not on my mind.

A couple of weeks prior my sister finally persuaded me to do a desire-pulling exercise. It sounds way more exciting and hippie than it really is.

3 Steps to Desire-Pulling:

Find a person you trust who can tune into your deeper desires and look past the superficial responses.

If my sister gave you a recap, she’d say I had a lovely (obviously), yet random assortment of answers. It probably ranged from tacos, to having healthy kids, to travel, to be successful, to leave an impact, etc. But, at some point, the easy answers run out. Tired after only six minutes, I probably muttered. “I’d love for you to stop asking me this stupid question.” Fifteen minutes is longer than you think.

When you finally run out of drama and whatever is within easy reach, you hit a few deep nerves. This entire exercise is designed to tease out those desires. The ones you don’t speak of or possibly aren’t consciously aware of. When the timer chimed and the interrogation was over. She zeroed in on one statement that I whispered – “to quit my job and move to Europe.” It seemed absolutely ridiculous at the time. In my defense, if you’ve ever read Eat, Pray, Love, isn’t that everyone’s dream?

So, on this random weekday, four months pregnant with our second, I sat on the stairs waiting for the opportune moment to spring the idea of completely upending our lives on my husband. I was so convinced that unemployment in Europe with two babies was a nonstarter that I didn’t even prep talking points.

I waited for a pause in his typing and casually threw out, “hey Josh, what do you think about quitting our jobs and moving to Europe?” In seconds, he responded, “yeah, let’s do it.” No hotly debating the topic. No talking him into it. No thinking through how insane the proposition was.

That was it.

Turns out, I bugged my husband on the day he tried to burn down the kitchen during his own back-to-back meeting marathon. The pool of metal on my stove? Yeah, that was the metal he melted off the pan while incinerating lunch and setting off the fire alarm. He needed a change of pace too.

Two rational individuals in mere seconds decided to quit their jobs, take a year long sabbatical, and move to a country they’ve never even been to before, with a toddler and baby in tow. I keep hearing how brave this decision is. But, to me, it shows how urgently and desperately we needed significant change in our lives.

Every time I replay what has happened to my life since that conversation, I still don’t believe it. I intentionally worked my ass off to build the career and life that I had – that’s actually how I met Laura Close when I made a leap from mortgage to tech (more on that another time). Five years later, I’ve made an epic leap off the cliff to who knows where.