I love your posts and your attitude. Of course, I quibble with certain aspects of each post. Noone agrees on everything.

My wife did exactly what you did. She realized the provincial attitude where she lived in Czechia was going to hold her back. She had also fallen into a bad circle of people and wanted to get away from that crowd. Mostly though, she realized that to get the life she wanted she had to get away from "the nest."

I went to university. I got my own place and moved out after I got my first paycheck. A few years later I moved abroad for more than a year, and a year after returning I had moved abroad permanently. My move abroad was not so much because I was consciously rejecting my parents, but more because I really liked the environment in Vienna better than Houston.

To be fair I fucking hate hate hate the weather in Houston, so pretty much anywhere cooler and drier was going to be nicer for me.

Many years and a lot of therapy later I came to realize what both you and my wife saw much earlier - the family "nest" was stifling me from learning to fly on my own.