This is the scary bit. In a couple hours I’ll be boarding a flight from the United Kingdom to Lisbon, and at that point I stop traveling. Not permanently, mind you. Not even for all that long, at least at first.¹ But it’s the first step of this ill-planned kinda, sorta transition to having a place to live after many years without one, and the concerns and worries surrounding that are consuming most of my psychic bandwidth.

This isn’t how I imagined it all working out when I first applied for Portugese residency, back in April 2021. I thought I’d be able to wait for my visa to be issued — I still don’t have a residency card, which is either irrelevant or a major pain in the ass, depending on your point of view — and I assumed at that point I’d be able to drop in and out over the course of a year and figure out where I wanted to live. Instead my medications are running out and I’m supposed to be monitored by trained medical professionals a little more diligently than I currently am² so my hand’s being forced a bit.

So I’ve rented an apartment for a month on AirBnB.³ I’ve booked a slew of of intensive Portuguese lessons and I’ve scheduled some doctor’s appointments over the next few weeks. The vague plan at the start of the year was to use this time to look for a more permanent place to live, possibly even with an eye towards buying an apartment.

But there’s always a catch. In this case, there’s two of them. The first is the longstanding matter of my residency permit, which still hasn’t been approved. The Portuguese immigration service basically stopped processing visas midway through 2022, and has only recently shown renewed signs of life.⁴ Those who had their immigration interviews in early-to-mid August 2022 are reporting they’re finally getting their approvals. I had my interview in late October, so I’m guessing I’m at least six weeks off. That’s not a problem for Portugal — I’m entitled to live there while my application is pending — but it is a problem for the rest of Schengen. I’m leaving Portugal at the end of March because I have various conventions and larps scheduled elsewhere in the EU through the beginning of May, and if I stayed in Lisbon I’d run out of time I can spend in the Schengen area. So I can’t really consider settling down, even partially, before I don’t have to choose between Portugal and the rest of Europe.

The second catch is far better news. At the beginning of January the Portuguese parliament, in recognition of the inexcusable delays in the immigration service, changed the laws around naturalization. You used to have to wait for five years from when you got residency before you could apply for citizenship. The parliament changed it to be five years from when you first applied for residency. If everything goes as expected, I could apply for citizenship in 2026, not 2029.⁵

Buying an apartment somewhere you expect to live for two years is a vastly different thing than buying one somewhere you expect to live for five. And the advantage of citizenship is it opens up the possibility of living and working anywhere in the EU. I sort of assumed I’d have time to figure out whether I wanted to be a Portuguese citizen before I had to apply to be one, let alone deciding where I wanted to live for the rest of my life. Suddenly I’m speed running my retirement.

So that’s the scary bit. I’m going to be stuck in Lisbon at some point in May, unable to visit virtually anywhere in the EU until I get my residency permit and wait for the three months I spent in early 2024 to fall off my schedule. I have anxiety about being trapped, worse since the annus horribilis of 2020. I’ve talked before about the way my depression manifests; traveling has become my way of staying one step ahead of it. I’m not looking forward to having to find a new way to cope.

With all that hanging over my head I haven’t exactly been able to enjoy the three weeks I’ve spent in the UK. I dealt with the stress by doing what I fear I’ll be doing in Lisbon: barricading myself in my room and working on some project or other. It’s how I got through the COVID lockdowns. One of the benefits of ADD⁶ is that I can hyperfocus for hours — sometimes even days — and be insanely productive on whatever task I’m engrossed in. It’d be a superpower if I could decide what to hyperfocus on, but it’s less often the thing I’m supposed to be doing and more often newly released roguelikes and Wikipedia rabbit holes.⁷

So I spent three days in Edinburgh without leaving my hotel room, then came down to London for a week where the friends I was in town to see ended up being out of town, so I spent half the week in their flat and half the week in a rented room over a pub. I went out for cocktails once and met someone for dinner and drinks later, but otherwise was busy tapping away at a computer.

This last week was a little better; I caught a train⁸ into Staffordshire and stayed with another friend for a week, so I was able to cook a little bit and even took the time to head out to the coast for a couple days. I spent a weekend in Pembrokeshire at the southernmost tip of Wales, probably at its best if you can ramble around the beaches — there are some lovely footpaths meandering across the coast — but that didn’t have much appeal on an overcast winter’s day. What did appeal was the history. There’s Pembroke Castle where Henry VII was born and for wandering around one of the better Norman castles I’ve visited, and St David’s Cathedral with its Bishop’s Castle.⁹ It was nice to get out and actually see something historic, even if it was just for a weekend.

And now I’m heading to Portugal. At least I know I’m not going to spend the whole month locked in my apartment. If nothing else, I’ve got those in-person language classes scheduled from 9am to 1pm every day of the week.¹⁰ But I’ll still be isolated, still waiting on a residency card, still watching my Schengen days dwindle to nothing.

There’s a lot I need to sort out in the short term: a mailing address, a storage unit,¹¹ an apartment so I don’t have to keep bouncing from AirBnB to AirBnB. But while that might keep me busy, it isn’t going to help me answer the bigger question, namely where am I going to live for the next twenty years?

Maybe that’s a futile question to ask in the first place. There’s never been a time in my life when I could have predicted where I’d end up in five years. Maybe the best I’m ever going to be able to do is just manage what’s in front of me, make smart decisions, and let the universe sort itself out. My grand plans never seem to work out anyway.

Either way, I’ve now got a month to try and figure out the rest of my life. How hard can that be?

Next: Good Friday, 2024, Lisbon
Prev: Stockholm (ARN) to Edinburgh (EDI)

Footnotes

¹ I’ll be leaving in a week to fetch some things from storage before returning for the rest of the month.

² Although we’re close to hitting the six month mark where my risk of another heart attack drops significantly, which makes that a little less critical.

³ I had rented an apartment on Flatio that came with an actual legal lease, but I got an email from the company a week ago saying there were problems with the apartment and it wasn’t available after all. I had to scramble to find something affordable at the last minute.

⁴ There was the summer break for July and August, then the entire immigration service was disbanded and reorganized, then there was the holiday break for December and January.

⁵ Strictly speaking, it’s still not law yet. The parliament passed it, then the president referred it to the courts to review its constitutionality. Most of those of us waiting for our visas assumed it was dead at this point — there’s a change in government looming and no time to reconvene to pass it before then — but the courts approved it and returned it to the president, who promptly announced it was going to be signed. After 30 days it should take effect.

Even after all that it’s not entirely clear how it affects the visa I applied for. The simplest interpretation is that the clock starts when I first filed for the visa in April 2021. But the timer could plausibly start from when they accepted my application, or when I attended my biometric interview, or some other arbitrary date entirely. We won’t know until someone actually applies for citizenship and the court has to make a decision.

⁶ I understand the term ADD has fallen out of favor for ADHD, but I abhor being called hyperactive.

⁷ It’s also, tragically, not especially great for writing. Like, yes, if the stars are right I can sit down and write for four hours straight. But the act of writing is a creative one, and every hour banging on a keyboard is backed by at least two thinking about what I’m trying to say and how I want to go about saying it. So it’s better if you write a bit, then go for a walk, then write a bit more, then watch a video, then write some more, etc, etc. I’m not phenomenal at task switching like that.

⁸ I saw one of the single most English things I’ve ever seen at Euston Station. A crowd was surging off a train and in the middle of the melee a commuter’s water bottle fell out of their bag. A good samaritan noticed it happen, got their attention, and as the commuter walked back to fetch it apologized for bothering them.

⁹ St David’s is the smallest city by population in the UK, with a total of 1,751 people living there. It’s been a city since the 12^th century thanks to the cathedral, although the status was revoked in 1886 only to be restored (at the request of Queen Elizabeth) in 1994.

¹⁰ The classes are geared to get you to A2 language proficiency in four weeks, which is conveniently exactly the level you need to apply for citizenship. Of course instead of immediately taking the test as intended I’m leaving at the end of April. I’ll probably have to enroll in more classes when I return.

¹¹ I need to start consolidating the things I have scattered across Europe at the apartments of various friends, and if I don’t have a place to live I at least need a place to dump my stuff.