When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Limoncello: Italian Citizenship and Moving to the EU

Ok, so where the heck have I been for the past few months?

I’ve been pretty quiet since May. Usually I’m known for being vocal about all things business and giving regular updates about my life, but this year we were hit with a bunch of supersonic curveballs from space, forcing me to rethink my life, my business, and my values.

The beginning is a terrible place to start, so picture this:

Your husband has just been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at the same time that a global pandemic hits. He’s supposed to start medication the same month that everything goes into lockdown. These meds will make him immune compromised, and no one has any idea whether the virus has any interactions with Crohn’s yet. It’s just too new.

You’ve also just come to the realization that the meds your husband needs are $6,000/mo out of pocket. He’d also need specialty meds for any hospital visit he goes to. Months of research into US healthcare plans have shown that insurance companies actively try and scam their members by pulling stunts like covering medicine but not the cost of the nurse required to administer said medicine.

You realize fully covering your husband’s needs will cost you $20,000/year out of pocket. You don’t quite make enough to pay that right now. Medicaid is fabulous because it fully covers everything, but you’d have to adjust your life to a $2,000/mo income limit. After student loans and food, you two are basically broke.

So here are your options. Do you:

A) Give up your business in favor of a government or Fortune 500 job?

You will likely have your medical insurance needs covered, but you’d be working 9-5 for someone else and will always be at the mercy of their medical coverage options. You realize that this will probably immediately put you back into that depression you just beat. 

B) Pour every possible fiber of your being into your business without pay until you cross the threshold you need to pay that extra $20k/yr comfortably?

This sounds like a great choice, but when you start acting on it you realize the sheer stress of the financial backflips you’re doing to make it work have killed every motivation you have to actually work in the business you love. Choosing this option means everything takes twice as long as you expect.

C) Take a simple part-time job that pays you exactly $1,950/mo to take the pressure off needing to balance your business income so closely while trying to figure out if there is any possible way for you to come up with another option?

This isn’t an actual solution, but it does buy you time. Buying time might be exactly what you need since there is an ongoing pandemic anyhow, right?

D) Remember that you qualify for Italian Citizenship and start digging into whether you really want to stay in a country that actively keeps you in a broken system.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I did all of these, in the order presented. Back in May was when we got serious about Italy. I’d made the appointment with the consulate over a year ago, but suddenly plan D was now plan A.

We’re moving to the EU.

I cried when I found out that Italy guarantees healthcare for its citizens in their constitution last month. That’s how much pressure we’ve been under. Originally I saw Italian citizenship as a nice way to travel the EU more easily. I’d never considered moving there for a second. I always figured Kyle and I would land somewhere in Asia if we ever left the US. Our strongest ties are to Singapore, after all.

Then I had a pregnancy scare (don’t worry: I just had very mild food poisoning, but we needed to rule everything out). Most people that know me know that I’ve never been big on having kids, but in that moment while we were waiting for test results I was forced to consider what it would be like to have a family. 

Let me be clear: I still don’t want kids anytime soon. In that moment of panic, however, I was slapped in the face with the coldest reality I’ve experienced. I cannot have a family here. I do not want to have a family here. Further still, I literally cannot picture a future of any kind in the United States anymore. The American Dream has died for me.

I feel bitter, exhausted, and betrayed. For someone raised in a typical Maryland suburb, it’s kind of like I woke up and found out everything I thought to be true was a lie. Dramatic, I know, but when you’ve had to refuse multiple opportunities where you can make more money in the last month because it could kill your husband a lot faster, it hits you hard.

And then Kyle starts his Crohn’s medication.

For those of you who are married or have a long term partner: do you know how great it is to have someone else who can help make decisions and generally help you take on the burdens of life? Yeah. I didn’t.

Kyle has had massive brain fog for almost 15 years. He’s had enough clear moments that I’ve always known who he is as a person, but I had just kind of assumed I’d always have to pick up slack in the day-to-day of our relationship. I’ve had to be at every doctor’s appointment Kyle has attended since he graduated high school because his brain fog prevents him from remembering what the doctor said after after we have left, and that’s a pretty minor example. He also suffered from sudden fatigue spells and loss of strength, so a lot of “easy” tasks have been too dangerous for him to take on. Cooking, for example, requires that you aren’t going to suddenly drop a knife on your foot or pour water on your hand because you lost your grip strength (yes, both of those have happened multiple times).

Kyle is still colorblind, so I’m still checking his hamburgers, but I haven’t planned or cooked Kyle’s meals for him since he started Humira. Heck, even on his absolute worst physical days since starting meds, he can still think! He might be annoyed at me for saying this, but he’s gotten more done in the past two months than in the previous six, and I am incredibly proud of him.

Kyle has never been a burden to me. I knew from the start that he probably had some chronic issue, and I just took it as a fact that we’d always need a weird system to handle that. It turns out, though, having my incredibly handsome, witty, and smart husband feel good 80% of the time and be coherent 100% of the time is a LOT more fun. Neither of us want to go back to him being miserable and me picking up the slack, so we’re even more adamant about making sure he stays insured and able to take meds for his Crohn’s.

So now I’ve got a much healthier husband, and I know that Italy would take care of us even in hard times.

It’s kind of a no-brainer, isn’t it. Healthcare in Italy will cost us about $30/mo. That’s it. We don’t have to stay in Italy either. We can easily move to other EU countries without disrupting Kyle’s care too. To top it all off, our excellent Crohn’s doctor told us that Europe is actually ahead of the US in Crohn’s treatment. There really isn’t much of an advantage to staying in the US now.There are other perks:

• I have an international client base, and most of Europe is perfectly positioned timezone-wise to serve both my US and Asia clients without scheduling problems.
• We have friends throughout Europe that we haven’t seen in ages.
• Travel back to the US is cheaper than coming back from Asia.
• I won’t have any pressure on me to drop my business in favor of getting healthcare unless Italy changes their constitution.
• I’m slowly, slowly, starting to get excited for the future again.

I’m an optimistic person by nature, but even I was starting to feel like I needed to give up a large portion of my goals to survive.

The dream has just shifted instead.

On August 18th, my sister, Dani, and I went to the Italian Consulate in Philadelphia to make our case for Italian citizenship via jure sanguinis. Our uncle has already been granted his citizenship so ours is “virtually guaranteed.” Kyle and I are starting the process of avidly learning Italian and coordinating the move. I currently understand conversational Italian because I know Spanish. I can’t read, speak, or write Italian, though, and I will need someone who speaks all three languages to tutor me at this rate since I keep getting confused.

This picture is from the celebratory lunch we had after being in the consulate for an hour and a half. Dani can vouch for me in saying that I was a weird mix of emotions that day. Scared shitless that the consulate would somehow reject us, elated after the appointment was over, relieved that my months of relentless preparation had paid off, and apprehensive about the work still to come.

With those months of toil finally over, Michelle Jamesina is back in business and accepting new clients. We’ve got a full menu of great new content releasing next month too. I honestly hated having to pause my own growth for a few months, but I’m more sure than ever before that I’m doing the right work for my soul.

And finally, a huge thank you to the dozens of people who helped us navigate life recently. I’m still not entirely used to not fighting trough everything alone, and having so many people around to keep us going is awesome.

I’m going to keep posting updates about the EU move, our Crohn’s journey, and the other craziness that happens in my life, so stay tuned for whatever nonsense I get into next.

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