Why Romania Now?

A year ago, I wrote about why I chose Romania. I wrote about democracy indexes and homicide rates, immigration pathways and cost of living. I wrote about the Carpathians reminding me of the Appalachians, about history that was still being lived instead of preserved behind museum glass, and about choosing my home carefully because I couldn’t afford to uproot my life over again.

I still believe in all of that research. Maybe even more than I did then. But a year is long enough to discover the limits of what research can tell you and what it cannot.

No index could have told me which mountains would become my mountains. No spreadsheet could have accounted for the people whose terraces I would sit on late into the evening, the animals I would worry about, the chickens and geese and cats and dogs who would learn to trust me, or the particular roads that would eventually stop requiring directions. I couldn’t have researched the feeling of coming home and knowing which window would be glowing, who might be outside, or what was growing in the garden.

And no amount of research could have told me how much becoming an immigrant would hurt.

Loving Romania More

If anything, my love for Romania has become much more specific.

I no longer love “the Carpathians” as an idea. I love particular mountains, forests, villages, roads, and views. I know what the mountains look like when storms are coming and how quickly the valleys turn green in spring. I know the roads with the best views. I have favorite old houses and churches and trails where the forest feels especially enchanted. The landscape I originally chose partly because it reminded me of Pennsylvania has become something I love entirely on its own terms.

The history has been even better than I hoped. It just keeps giving. Every time I think I understand one piece of Romania, another layer appears underneath it. Saxon villages lead into migration and memory. Folklore leads into religion, medicine, fear, superstition, and the complicated ways people have tried to understand the world around them. A cemetery, church, festival, ruined wall, family story, or strange local custom can send me down another rich research path. And yet, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface.

But I'm most grateful for the relationships. I hoped for community. I didn’t know how rich it would become. Our lives are delightfully tangled with other people’s lives now in all the ways that feel like home: meals, celebrations, favors, disagreements, animals, errands, jokes, problems, dancing, coffee, shared cultural foods, and people noticing when you've been a little quiet. My friend community is as deep as I hoped, even though it is still young.

We're in the process of building our physical home as well. We're closing on a parcel in Moiecu, a rural area just outside of Bran known for its stunning mountain views.

The Cost of Becoming an Immigrant

That makes the heartbreak harder to explain.

The bureaucracy has been relentless. Problems that seemed as though they should take days have stretched into months, and then into a year. One administrative decision creates another problem somewhere else. Addresses, residency, cars, businesses, taxes, licenses, appointments, translations, registrations, certificates. There have been stretches when so much of our time and money went into simply trying to remain administratively functional that I genuinely questioned what we were doing and if we had made the right decision.

Business has been particularly difficult because I didn’t understand how much autonomy I would lose. In the United States, I could run a business. I could form one, maintain it, understand my obligations, keep records, make changes, and deal directly with most of the systems governing it. Romania requires accountants and attorneys for things I once considered basic business administration. Something that I would have handled myself in an afternoon can require an accountant, a lawyer, documents, fees, appointments, and weeks of waiting. It's very cumbersome. It is not simply a lack of knowing the Romanian system. The system itself places much more of my business life in the hands of professionals and institutions, which in turn creates much more chance of error.

That dependence is expensive, slow, and incredibly frustrating. I am accustomed to solving problems. Here, I can understand exactly what needs to happen and still be unable to make it happen myself. I have to wait for someone else to file something, release something, explain something, sign something, or communicate with another professional. Losing that autonomy has been one of the most difficult adjustments of this entire move.

And then there is language. In English, I know how to be funny, persuasive, warm, precise, skeptical, diplomatic, angry, reassuring, and difficult when I need to be. I know how to read a room and hear what someone isn’t quite saying. In Romanian, I am a person standing there with a translation app and a few broken phrases.

There is a real loss of self in that. Immigration has made me less competent in ways that have nothing to do with my actual abilities. Skills I spent decades developing don’t disappear, but often I cannot access them here. Accepting my incompetence and enduring childlike-ness was something I had not calculated and is one of the hardest experiences to that demands surrender. Creating an identity in another country has been much slower and stranger than changing an address.

The Country We Left Hasn’t Let Us Go

I also imagined that eventually the United States would become something happening over there.

It hasn’t.

The political and economic instability that helped push me toward leaving has continued to reach directly into our life. The Trump administration has produced an almost constant stream of major policy changes and international upheaval. Tariffs, war, market volatility, economic decisions, and uncertainty haven’t been abstract news stories for us. They have affected our money, our property, our investments, and our ability to finish disentangling ourselves from our home country.

We took a deep loss on our house. Our largest investment is still tied up in the American real-estate market, and we keep waiting for some stretch of stability that allows us to exit. It has been incredibly difficult to plan a new life while so much of the financial foundation for that life remains exposed to decisions being made thousands of miles away.

And the political measures I watched so carefully before leaving have not calmed my fears. They have decidedly worsened. Freedom House dropped the United States from 84 to 81 in its most recent assessment. V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index fell from 0.75 in 2024 to 0.57 in 2025, the largest one-year decline in the United States in its historical dataset. One of the reasons I left was my worry about the decline. A year later, that decline has only become steeper.

There is grief in that which hadn't yet developed when I left. The home I knew didn't remain frozen in place waiting for me. It has continued changing. Places, people, and the neighborhood that once formed the meat of my life feel farther away. Some of that is because I have changed. Some of it is because the United States has. The United States is powerful enough that its decisions travel. Tariffs, markets, wars, diplomacy, and economic policy impact the globe. I can live in a Romanian village beneath the Carpathians and still feel decisions made in Washington reach into my bank account and my plans for the future.

There Is No Easy Side of This

That may be the biggest thing I understand differently after a year.

When people talk about immigration, there is often an assumption that closure is eventually reached. Either you discover that leaving was a mistake and go home, or you build a wonderful new life and know you made the right choice. I don’t think it works that way.

The United States I left has continued moving farther from the place I knew, and some of the fears that influenced my decision have intensified rather than faded. But knowing that doesn’t make immigration easier. It doesn’t give me my language back. It doesn’t make bureaucracy move faster or restore the business autonomy I was familiar with. It doesn’t recover the money we have lost, untangle our finances from the United States, or instantly give me a new professional or personal identity. It doesn’t erase the exhaustion of rebuilding almost every ordinary system of adult life from the ground up.

At the same time, those difficulties don’t erase what has grown here. I love these mountains more than I did a year ago. I love the forests and the folklore and the endless layers of history. I love our strange little home and the animals who have become part of my days. I love people here whose absence would leave holes in my life. I have dreams here that hope will manifest in my future.

That is what makes this so much more complicated than deciding whether moving to Romania was “worth it.”

There isn’t an easy country waiting on either side of the decision. There is the place I came from, which keeps slipping farther away from the home I remember, and there is the place I am learning to belong, which asks much more of me than I understood when I arrived.

A year ago, I wrote that I was trying to choose my ground for my home carefully. I still think I did. What I didn’t understand was that choosing the ground is only the beginning. Putting down roots means allowing a place to change you before you completely understand what you are becoming. It means discovering that home can be something you grieve and something you are building at exactly the same time.

There is no obvious path from here. There is simply the life we have now, the people and creatures we love, the dreams we are still trying to build, and the work of becoming at home in a place that has become deeply precious to me without ever allowing me to mistake it for easy.