Last month, I closed up shop on my life in Athens. I left the keys to my gorgeous yellow room, in the city’s graffiti-decked Exarchia district, on the kitchen table for my landlord. In September, another lucky student will move in—she will wake up to the sound of scrap dealers shouting “ola ta palia mazeuo”, the skid of speeding motorbikes and the chatter of patrons sipping freddo cappuccinos in pavement cafes. When that new student steps outside her front door, she will be kissed by the life-affirming sun that, for me, never lost its magic.
I hate goodbyes. As an anxious person, I spend months working on my mental checklist of “lasts”: “this is the last time I’ll walk this route to university”; “this is the last time I’ll work from my favourite coffee shop”… and so on. Despite all my efforts to live in the moment, the closing weeks of the academic year were imbued with a sadness that I couldn’t shake. I struggled with the notion that the life I had built was being gently dismantled—that I would no longer spend every weekend sitting in a classroom, or a coffee shop, or on a beach, with 15 of the most interesting and generous people I’ve ever met.
It is hard to overstate what my year in Athens has meant for me and my mental health. As I wrote in a column last year when I first moved there, the warmth and passion of the city and its people felt like a reprieve from the stilted politeness and, at times, simmering passive aggression that pervades British culture, particularly in the southeast of England. And there is something deeply soothing about the knowledge that, at any time, within an hour, you can put on a snorkel and plunge into the Aegean Sea—escaping the noise of life on land and entering a quiet underwater world of colourful fish and rippling seagrass.
But I believe the mental health benefits of my year in Athens go beyond these cultural and aesthetic experiences. The city has taught me something more fundamental about love.
When I first began treatment for OCD, many years ago, a psychologist told me that I struggled with “a profound fear of abandonment”—the fear that the people I love will leave me, the fear that I will end up alone. Many of us, if not all of us, wrestle with this fear at times. We worry that if we do not hold tightly to the people who matter to us, they might slip through our fingers. To an extent, those fears are justified: we will all die, and our lives will be filled with loss. But what I hadn’t realised until I packed my life in London into a suitcase and transferred it to Athens is that the inevitability of loss does not mean I will inevitably be left alone.
When I touched down in Athens, I had no idea who was waiting for me. I didn’t know that the man who works in the coffee shop next door would chat to me every day or that the Turkish girl wearing a cool jacket on our first day at university would comfort me through a medical disaster on a remote island months later. I didn’t know that my Italian housemate would not only teach me to cook really good pasta but would become an indispensable confidante who has already booked her flights to London.
I never imagined that a circle of Greek friends would teach me dance Rebetiko, or that a British friend of my uncle who has lived in the city for 30 years would become a friend of mine, too. I didn’t realise—before I left—that when you move to another country alone, you have no choice but throw yourself on the mercy of relative strangers. And I never imagined how easily, how carefully those strangers would catch me.
Athens is, to use a wonderful phrase coined by one of my fellow columnists, Vitali Vitaliev, “my personal utopia”—and I imagine I will live in the city again. But I must accept that this significant moment of my life has passed. It was the moment I learnt that I never have to fear being alone. Not because the people I love won’t leave me, but because the opportunities for new connections are endless, abundant, everywhere. Efharisto poli Athina-mou.
