Selling Everything to Move Abroad: What It Feels Like to Let Go

Somewhere in the six weeks between “what about Thailand?” and a one-way flight, I sold my stand mixer, and I had waited years to own that mixer.

If you’re getting ready to sell most of what you own and move abroad, there’s no shortage of advice about the logistics, what to sell first, what to ship, what will fit in a suitcase. Almost none of it mentions that a few of those things have your whole idea of yourself attached to them, and that’s the part that’s harder than it looks.

Why a stand mixer mattered that much

The mixer was one of those purchases that made me feel like a real adult. I had a kitchen, I had a farm, I had a stand mixer sitting out on the counter and a food dehydrator for preserving whatever came out of the garden, and the whole arrangement said something I was proud of at the time. Look at me. I have arrived.

It sounds a little silly now, and it didn’t feel silly then. Those things belonged to the woman who had built a home and expected to stay in it, and they were proof I was doing adulthood correctly.

Six weeks of strangers in the driveway

We listed our life on Facebook Marketplace piece by piece, the furniture and the farm equipment and the kitchen things and the animals, and it sold faster than I expected. We had spent years building that life, and strangers carried it away in six weeks.

There was real freedom in watching the rooms empty, and I felt lighter every time something left, because every sale meant less debt, fewer responsibilities, and one less thing to store or maintain or find a place for later. Then somebody would pull out of the driveway with something I had waited years to own, and the freedom would catch in my throat.

That kept happening for weeks. I was letting go of the person I had thought I was going to be.

The animals were harder than the furniture

The farm had given us mornings with the rooster crowing and the dogs’ nails clicking across the hardwood, goats lined up at the gate waiting for alfalfa, chickens scratching through the yard, and ducks floating down the stream behind the house, quacking in a way that always sounded like laughter to me.

When the animals started leaving for new homes, that was harder than the furniture and harder than the kitchen things, because we knew their personalities and their routines and which ones would push to the front when food showed up, and sending them away meant trusting strangers with lives that had depended on us. In a lot of cases we still don’t know what happened after they left. I worried about that then, and I still do sometimes.

Grieving and ready at the same time

The life we were leaving had been good, and that mattered, because we weren’t clearing out the remains of something we hated, we were taking apart something we had loved enough to build with our own hands.

I remember the sadness, and I also remember how ready I was, which is the part that can be hard to explain to people. Nobody dragged me away from my home. I wanted to go, I was excited to get on a plane and be somewhere completely unfamiliar, and I was grieving while I packed, relieved every time the pile got smaller, scared, and fairly sure it would work out. Not because we had proof. We didn’t. I had applied for a job in Thailand and never heard back, so what we really had was two one-way tickets and a plan that was mostly faith.

What “making it” turned out to mean

The mixer had once meant I’d made it, and selling it made me ask what making it had actually come to mean. Was it owning the things I had waited years to buy, or having a house full of proof that I could build a proper life, or being able to recognize when that life no longer fit, even after I had worked so hard to create it?

I didn’t have those words for it at the time. I only knew that someone else had my stand mixer, the dehydrator was gone, the farm was emptying out, and two suitcases were starting to hold everything we planned to take. For years I had measured progress by what I could add, and those six weeks asked me to measure it by what I was willing to release.

If you’re in the middle of selling it all

A few things were true for me in those weeks, and they might be true for you.

Selling the ordinary things first helped. The house got lighter quickly, and that made more room for the handful of items that were really about who I had been.

The sadness didn’t arrive on any schedule I could predict. It turned up over an appliance and skipped things I had expected to cry about, and I’ve heard enough versions of that from other people to think it’s fairly normal.

It helped to keep saying out loud why we were doing it, which my husband was better at than I was in those weeks, and some days that reminder was the only thing that got the next listing posted.

And the pace is strange. You can be grieving and relieved in the same afternoon, and both of those are honest.

Related reading: What to Pack When You’re Moving Abroad and How to Say Goodbye Before You Move Abroad