Rebuilding Autopilot After Moving to Spain
How I simplified daily life when my default systems disappeared
The first time it really dawned on me that life in Spain would be different was when we toured our apartment, and our agent showed us the building's rooftop. “If you’d like,” she said, pointing to the clotheslines, "you can hang your laundry here.”
Going into this move, I knew clothes dryers weren’t used nearly as often in Europe as they are in the U.S. They also don’t work the same way as U.S. dryers, so they can be more inconvenient than hanging laundry.
Knowing it and living it are two very different things.
Hauling laundry up and down a couple of flights of stairs and hanging it in the Valencian heat in the dead of summer is … an experience.
How I do laundry is just one example of the way I had to adjust my everyday systems. The prep for moving abroad is exhausting, but that’s just the beginning of the mental gymnastics.
In the U.S., there were certain routines I never swayed from.
Grocery shopping? My favorites were saved in my Kroger online cart, and with a few clicks and some additions, I could have my grocery order completed and ready to go.
Need new OTC meds for winter illnesses? Pop into Walmart or Target (or add it to the grocery cart), and back to my normal day.
I didn’t need to think about what to do. I just did it.
The moment my family arrived in Valencia to begin our new lives, the daily autopilot setting I’d relied on for so long crumbled.
One of the hardest parts of moving to Spain was not knowing enough of the language before I got here. Google Translate was my constant companion, and if that wasn’t working well, I switched to DeepL.
Cooking meals often took twice as long. I couldn’t yet decipher the Spanish instructions, and shopping for ingredients was just as bad.
I hadn’t hung laundry on a line since I was a kid growing up in rural Kentucky, so that also took forever as I relearned the muscle memory.
Both are simple activities, but my cognitive bandwidth was already at capacity as I managed government procedures, settled into a new apartment, and helped my kids navigate a new school.
My conclusion was that this wasn’t Spain’s fault. Instead, as an adult moving to a new country for the first time, I no longer had the default system I’d grown up watching at my disposal.
I was “adulting” in a country where adulting looked quite a bit different than in the U.S.
Perhaps it was out of sheer necessity, but at some point, I decided to stop trying to adapt myself and instead began changing the systems I used to move through the day.
Once I stopped trying to power through and focused on simplifying, a few small changes made a noticeable difference.
