When I moved back to Iceland in 1994 with my daughter Aldís, it had definitely not been on my long-term plan. After my failed attempt a decade earlier I had resigned myself to a self-imposed exile from the country of my birth.
And yet those of us who have a visceral relationship with Iceland feel an underlying disconnect, almost a pain, when we are away from it. I craved those landscapes in my bones.
Sometimes in life, we are in the flow. Things feel effortless. In Germany, I was not in that space. I struggled to make things work by applying my force of will (something I now know is a certain recipe for failure) and the only result was that I dug myself deeper and deeper into a hole. Eventually I was forced to surrender. It was either that or check out some other, irreversible, way.
One of the things preventing me from moving back was that I had no place to go to. It was not an option to go back to that decaying apartment I had bought ten years before, especially with a child. Nota bene, I still owned the place—it had been rented out on and off, something my father looked after on my behalf.
Then life opened a door.
My grandparents passed away, within five weeks of one another. This meant that one of their two apartments became vacant, at least for a time. Nervously I asked my father whether I could stay there while I was finding my footing if I decided to come back, and after consulting with his two brothers he came back with a yes—they were kindly offering to make it available to me, rent-free, for six months. 🙏
However, when I first—faintly—voiced my ideas about moving back, I didn’t have much encouragement. Almost everyone said it was a bad idea. Iceland was in a recession, the economy was in the toilet, unemployment at an all-time high. Housing would be impossible to find. (As if that were a new thing.) Stay where you are, they said, Germany is a much better place for you.
The only person who offered encouragement was an acquaintance from childhood whom I ran into during a visit to Iceland, who exclaimed: “Of course you should move back.” When I waffled, saying that I wasn’t sure what I could do for work, she waved a dismissive hand and said, “You can do anything here.”
And she was so right. You can do anything in Iceland. That’s one of the best things about living here. It’s just the right size for the lines of communication to be open in all directions.
But I was very vulnerable to the doomsday voices, and it took massive effort not to fall into hopelessness and despair. I needed a pep talk, and a sense that I was welcome. But I had changed a lot in a decade, and by now I knew that it was not up to anyone else to make or break my success, it was up to me.
I had started seeing a wonderful therapist at a women’s counselling centre that was subsidized by the German government. (The depth of gratitude I feel towards the German state and various nonprofits for holding and supporting me could fill a whole book—I am so, so thankful for the help I, a young mother with virtually no support system, received.) This therapist really helped me keep the focus on myself and my own sense of what was right for my life, and to remove my feelings of hurt, rejection or dismissal from the equation.
I worked hard to turn my negative beliefs around. For example, when someone said I would have such a hard time of it, I purposely visualized and affirmed that it would all work out extremely well. When I was told I wouldn’t be able to find work, I visualized and affirmed that I would find a great job. I wrote down all the negative thoughts that swarmed around in my mind, until my mind was empty; then, on another page, I took each of those negatives and turned them into a positive. Then I wrote those positives down as affirmations, over and over again.
The incredible thing was that, as soon as I took this approach and made that decision, everything started to fall into place. The most amazing things happened to help me along on my path—things I could never have envisioned.
For example, I booked a meeting at the welfare office and asked if they would give me a grant to move to Iceland, which would effectively “take me off their hands”—i.e. they would no longer have to support me with monthly welfare payments. (The move cost about as much as two monthly payments, if I remember correctly.) They agreed, if I signed a waiver saying that I would never be a burden on the German welfare system again. Check.
I talked to the pension fund to which I had paid contributions while I was working, and they agreed to reimburse my payments if I signed a document saying I would not return to work in Germany. Check. (This gave me a bit of money to get started in Iceland.)
I had an old car, a Fiat Panda, that I thought I would never be able to sell given the deluge of used vehicles on the German market. It sold within days, which seemed like a small miracle. Even more remarkable: the day before the sale was to go through, the prospective buyers came to my door and said that they’d have to pull out of our agreement since a car they were selling had not sold, so they didn’t have the money. This was devastating—I was leaving for Iceland in less than a week, and was relying on that money. That night, after they left, I sat down, meditated, prayed, wrote down a positive outcome, did my affirmations, then let it go. At 9 am the next morning my phone rang: it was the buyers, telling me the car they had thought they couldn’t sell had sold the previous evening, and so they would buy the car after all.
I was in the flow. And this time when I moved back, things were very, very different. ❤️
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Hello Alda, after having finished reading your memoir this week (I love the way you write!!!) I am so happy to read that after having come back to Iceland for good thirty years ago you were able to craft for yourself the life you were longing for. Your words about turning every grim thought or saying into its sunny, hopeful contrary have struck such a chord within me that I have shared your post several times accompanied with my own commentary, because I have discovered that incredible power of the mind in the last months as I battled throught a personal nightmare. Thank you for sharing your own experience as it will surely help others and as it has sort of validated my own journey from the shadows to the sun! Thank you so much!
So great to read, as someone who also has an "Iceland dream,"....someday!