From stalking to love - Not your typical birthday card

Happy three months anniversary!

Can you believe we made it so far? I actually pinched myself this morning, to make sure it’s not a dream. God knows it could have ended in a terrible way – alcoholism, drug addiction or suicide. I get goose bumps just thinking about it.

Our first fall together

I mean no one who sees you acting so lovingly with me would imagine all this started with an unhealthy obsession. Yes, I admit, I was crazy about you years before we hook up. But not in a good way. More like Maroon 5’s music video for “Animals”, where Adam Levine plays the role of a creep who stalks a gorgeous young woman. Story of my life, right there!

The truth is, part of the blame belongs to you. What where you expecting after you proclaimed yourself “the most powerful” nation out there? Flashy, careless, not to mention gorgeous, you were everything I could dream off.

It was right around college when I start downloading photos of you and set them as a desktop background. The more revealing, the better. Later, when I got a job at a newspaper, I wrote an alarming number of articles about people who came in contact with you, even for a brief period. My boss was really pissed off. One day, she shook her head and told me it’s useless; you’re out of my league. I fought back and responded we’re gonna marry. Heck, I said it to everyone. I was bluffing.  After all, we couldn’t be more different. The Lady and the Tramp. The Beauty and the Beast. Cinderella and Prince Charming. You get the idea. 

I always dreamed of taking you on a coffee date

That night, your flag wrapped around my back - bought by a friend from an American store- I sat down on my bed, crying, rocking back and forth like a little baby monkey. I also prayed a lot. But my miracle didn’t come right away. It wasn't until a year later that you gave me a chance. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

 

So serene, yet mysterious...

“Yes we can”, I told myself, as I walked in the American Embassy building in Romania, with all my hopes and savings. I was prepared for a painful rejection. That’s when you did something completely unexpected – you said yes! I had a Visa to prove it.

Six month later, we finally met. I’ll never forget the breezy summery night, this July, when you waited me outside the O’Hare Airport. It felt like the movies. It still does. 

The surprising tool that helps me accomplish great things

No electrifying sensation tickled my body last April, when my name was called over the microphone, as a second-place winner in a journalism national competition. I knew I was going to be among finalists. My article – a love story between two math teachers – had just enough drama to make you shed a tear and also a happy ending. I was completely unprepared though to give a speech.

The ceremony, held on the top floor of a library, felt intimate, despite having some public figures in the jury. I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, took a deep breath and stood up to receive my diploma, while others cheered. A young woman handed me a huge white and purple bouquet of Gerbera daisies. All those branches made my chest burn; other than that I felt like a million bucks.

In the middle, happy to be a finalist

“Would you like to say a couple of words”, someone asked, slamming all my confidence. No, I actually didn’t want to say anything, except asking for my 300 dollars prize. Then I surprised myself. “Thank you! The money will go straight to my piggy bank. We are saving ten thousand dollars to move to America. Every bit counts, right? ”, I said with a dumb smile on my face. It wasn’t the first time when I spontaneously told people about my plans. I had some ‘bragging training’ under my belt.

Let me explain. Up until last year, when we were selected in the Visa Lottery, I was the type of person who loves to brag and then feels bad for doing so. It was a vicious cycle. But an important takeaway from this experience was that spreading the word about your dreams and projects, a mild form of bragging, acts like a pair of bellows blowing over a pile of wood. It gets the fire started. When sharing an idea with acquaintances, I found, chance are they’ll set you up with someone who can help move things forward.  

Just a fraction of those who helped us move to America

How could I otherwise meet George, 43, who lives in Ohio, thousands of miles away? We connected via Facebook in 2013, after I send a group email breaking the good news to my entire list and asking for contacts in America. A dozens answered back, offering names. Some, old friends of them, some, people with whom they switch business cards between conferences.  I end up using just two. Those two represented 50% of my success. 

George played a particularly key role, because he offered my husband a position in his small cleaning company – job offers from a U.S. employer usually seal the deal when it comes to American visas. Now, a year later, we regularly chat over the phone. George usually talks about his son, George Jr., and their shared passion for Lego, and we always promise to visit Ohio. “Could you believe we live just a four-hour drive apart?” he told me the other day.

The months leading to our arrival in America, I was like a broken record, confessing my dream to every person I spoke. Including the cleaning lady from work, a Romanian ex-minister of Education and hundreds of strangers who happened to sit next to me in a line, bus or train. Many disapproved. “You’ll either get fat or killed in a terrorist attack”, a coworker warned me during lunch break, waiving her fork in my face.

Still, my enthusiasm grew stronger each time, mostly because I was seeing results. A handful of people pitch in with money or valuable contacts; many gave me advice and support. But hey, the mere fact that I’m writing this from my living room in Chicago proves every bit does count.

Living according to the “The Secret” and hating it

 

It’s hard to pin point the exact moment when I started to project my life in America. My earliest memory of this kind is from college, when I developed a habit of looking up on Google Images for stunning, obviously digitally enhanced pictures of Chicago’s skyline and save them as a desktop background, which I then stared at whenever I was feeling down. It offered me free, instant pleasure.

Later, I got really into Oprah and the hype surrounding her “Law of Attraction” principle.  She suggested thinking and acting as if our biggest wishes already happened. So I started doing that.

Laid on my bed, eyes close, I would imagine a vivid scene taking place in Chicago. It was either me strolling down the Magnificent Mile all the way to Millennium Park, bathing with all my senses in a swirling vortex of scents and colors, or both of us, serving dinner in our comfy three bedroom house in ”The Windy City”. I felt high just from doing that.

My addictive personality immediately clung to these simulations exercises, as if they were crack. Any free time between classes was spent sitting on a bench in a nearby park, jotting down random ideas about America.  Phrases like “I’m already there”, “This is a fact” or “Chicago is waiting for me” found their way into my school books.

 

Here's what my current Dream Board look like. I look forward to: get a tattoo, eat sushi, watch the fireworks on New Years Eve in Downtown, visit Oahu, buy a Fitbit and, most important of all, work for Chicago Tribune

But instead of seeing progress, something bizarre happened. I would go to school and sleep my way through seminaries. My once favorite public garden seemed like a dump when I compared it to Millennium Park. The Romanian peanut butter I ate for breakfast tasted like Vaseline. Nothing was good enough as the American version. I feel trapped in a world I didn’t want to live anymore. Things got so bad that I couldn’t function without movies, YouTube videos and songs, all in English. Apparently, I attracted the wrong live.

The day we found out none of us had been selected on the Diversity Visa Lottery for second year in a row, I hit rock bottom. Getting to a better place took months, but I did it by using the same tool that got me there in the first place: my thoughts. America was not a moving train; it would be still there after one or ten years. With that in mind, I enrolled in an imaginary rehab. My husband held me accountable. Every day after work, we would chop veggies to go with scramble eggs, while I named at least three things I was grateful for. It went like this for several weeks, but it eventually came naturally. The habit of keeping a gratitude list stuck with me to this day. 

What I know now- Oprah actually mentioned about this – is that you don't let fantasies sidetrack you from the actual work. My new strategy involved sending e-mails to U.S. companies, asking for a job, opening a blog in English and hanging out with Americans living in Romania. In the end, what brought us here was The Diversity Visa, but if The Secret it’s a real thing, then it wasn’t pure luck; I earned it.

Our Journey to America- Part Two: Shattered dreams

Be sure to check out Part One!

After one year of blogging about our wish to cross the ocean and move to America, two people offered to help us.Through Twitter, we connected with Kat, a 40-year-old, who worked in the movie industry, while Facebook helped us met Eugene, a rich Romanian politician established in “The Windy City”, owner of a transportation company. They were both just what we’ve been looking for: wealthy American citizen, able to fly us there.

It's really amazing to see what courage and perseverance can do

Due to the time zone difference, I emailed them at night and get an answer at dawn. Reading their emails felt like Christmas morning; I would wake up, immediately open my laptop and checked my Inbox, anxiously scrolling down. When there weren’t any messages, I freaked out: “Did I say something wrong? What if they got tired of us?”

Soon enough, I began day dreaming about our future life. I would be Eugene’s housekeeper and my husband, his gardener — he actually can’t name more than three species of flowers, roses being one of them.  A variation of this plan was also made for Kat.  

We were kids...

Studying to become a journalist meant I was in charge of writing those emails. But unlike me, a natural oversharer who could easily spit out my entire life over e-mail, they preferred to remain extremely mysterious.It was frustrating.

Convincing them to share basic information about jobs or age was like pulling teeth, though I did manage to found out that Kat was Mexican and single and Eugene dreamed of running a political organization. None of them wrote back more than five lines at a time; I responded with pages. When their emails became few and far in between, I saw my fantasies slipping through my fingers. “I’m going to get you here”, they would say, then didn’t replied back for days. 

In the winter of 2011, our “pen-friendship” ended abruptly. Around the same time, election results came out: Eugene party had sunk. Kat, on the other hand, explained she had a dying father to take care of and recently lost her job. The news hit me like a lightening. I stalked them for several weeks, sending long, hateful emails in which I obsessively asked them to keep their initial promise, to bring us in America. None of them fought back.

I would often fall asleep with a keyboard soaked in tears in my lap and Chicago’s Downtown picture in the Menu Bar. “Are we still doing this or not?” I asked C., on a particularly sunny morning. It was April and we were ready to dust off our pride.