From Mispronounced to Empowered: Embracing Change Over the Past Eight Years

Eight years have passed. When and how, I couldn’t say with the same eloquence as when I stated my full name. For many years, I was self-conscious about my last name because everyone new I met would always mispronounce it.

Embracing My Name

I started to love my name around the age of 26. It was when I entered a radio station for the second time, and for the first time not as a guest, but as that voice you hear now and then speaking between songs while you’re trying to navigate through the hellish traffic, with the air conditioning on, because there were scorching summer days then, just like now.

“Hello, I’m Monica Sibișteanu, your host this afternoon” — I said it so many times that I eventually came to love the name that always made me feel a bit special.

Then, when I got used to it, I thought everything had become too comfortable, and I needed some new challenges in my life. Now I laugh, back then I cried, but it was exactly what I needed. To move to more western lands where, to my surprise, more people got the pronunciation of my name right than those back home. Yes, I had moved to the land of the “sh.”

Where “vamos” is “vamosh,” “somos” is “somush,” “escola” is “shcola,” and so on. Practically, I had become special again, different. And it continues to be, as there isn’t a conversation I enter where, within five minutes, I’m not asked where I’m from because my Portuguese has a distinct accent. Sometimes, it’s very hard to manage this because sometimes you just want to go unnoticed through life, like a duck through water.

The Hardships and Growth of Expat Life

But some of the hardships that come with expat life, especially the pain born from uprooting, because you are between places, you no longer belong to a single place, you are a bit from everywhere you’ve lived and the people you’ve met, these hardships pale in the light of the personal growth that comes with such a change.

Well, the years have passed, and I’ve been through everything in life, even called myself a change strategist at one point, but it didn’t resonate as strongly with me as it seemed, so I went my way, choosing to keep close and focused only on what resonates deeply with me, with what I feel completely aligned with.

Eight years later, 2 cats, 1 house, and a child, a blue sky, some nonexistent but damn cold and wet winters, some summers sometimes way too hot, pieces of nature that simply live in me, where I find my inner peace, make me continue here, on Lusitanian land.

I’m not a tree, so I don’t know where the next years will find me, but I will clearly choose where I can breathe peacefully and my soul smiles, and little Monica thanks today’s Monica. While future Monica smiles under her moustache because she knows what she knows but can’t say.

Unexpected Love for the Ocean

I never thought I could love the ocean as much as I have come to love it and find my peace in the sound of its waves. But then again, I had never lived near the ocean before.

How could I have imagined something I didn’t know, something I hadn’t experienced? And yet… many times I, and I know you too, pretend to know. We think we can imagine the unimaginable. Ha ha. Just like that: ha-ha.

How much naivety lies in us often, and how much lack of trust in the course of life and in ourselves, because that’s why we want to know everything, to have all the data before making those important decisions.

Reflections on Change, Learning to Let Life Happen

Eight years ago, I had no idea what was coming. I even sneaked a smile through tears on the plane, telling myself what my friends told me back then: “Come on Monica, are you stupid? You go too because summer is coming, and if you don’t like it, you can just come back.”

The truth is, I could have, and yet I chose not to because many things were going to happen to me here.

Eight years have passed since a great transformation process began without me knowing. And how good it was. Because, seriously, if I had known how many upheavals came with it, not only would I not have left, but I would have retreated to the mountains. Maybe Nemira, maybe Ciucaș, maybe even Făgăraș (Romanian mountains) – irrelevant now.

In these eight years, I have learned that life happens if I allow it, if I let it be free, and that the unexpected is actually great to embrace when you have clarity and when you know within yourself what your path is, what your purpose is, what your mission is.

The last year, with motherhood included (I’ve written a few blog posts about motherhood and self-awareness, my learnings and challenges), the avalanche of unpredictability hit hard and organized Monica from head to toe was left bare, because what she knew no longer worked, because life with a baby is whatever you want it to be, except easy and the same every day. But remembering the most recent transformative moment of my life and that my life is a book, and its genre is a bildungsroman, I look in the mirror and smile, telling myself: “You’ve done well so far, Monica!” And then I go to take my little one in my arms and feel with all my being that I have done well.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! And now I dare to tell you: go get to know yourself, bring clarity into your life, allow yourself to be who you are and do yourself good, as it were.

Lots of sincere hugs, marvelling at these 8 years.