Monday, June 11, 2018

Goal Achievement Month - Chapter 2


  STEP 2Acquire the knowledge of what you need to accomplish the goal

I had a goal and I had a vision on why I wanted to achieve my goal. I could see myself living in another country and - most importantly to me at that time - not living in Romania. I was speaking this into being, I was acting as though it was a given. Even though initially I had no idea how I was going to accomplish my goal, I was convinced I would do it. At the time I had conversations with a friend and we both said we would leave the country, but we had different visions of what that would look like: I said I would live in another country for the rest of my life and only come back to visit; she said she would go work and return with the money to live in Romania. And we both got our wishes.

After coming home from the college experience in England, I started sharing first with my parents, then with my friends, my intention to leave the country after college, at some point. The strange thing about sharing my goal was that as I was repeating it, I kept getting more certain of the outcome – still without knowing when, where or how. And the interesting thing is that once they saw me so determined and sure of my idea, my parents started believing it would come true; and they also started acting like it was going to happen. Because of my college experience, the first logical choice was England, or somewhere else in Western Europe. After all, there were a lot of Romanians living abroad in that area, including a few of my friends. My ultimate goal became moving to the United States later in life, alter some years in another country or two.


And then my plans got changed when I met my now husband, and we wanted to be together. The goal now became moving to the US, without spending time in other countries, so we could be together. This also started as an idea and was soon developed into a plan. In a time where the information was not as easily accessible on the internet, I managed to find out details on immigration and the INS (now USCIS) rules. Following the online directions on their official website, my husband and I got married in Romania and applied for my spousal visa. Thus, 2 months later I joined him in Richmond, Virginia; and have been here ever since.

It was a stressful 3-4 month period once we decided to get married because we had to figure out the legal requirements for my transition from Romania to the US. I found lots of horror stories online about how hard it was and how long it took to be able to get there. All we knew at the time was that we wanted to be together and him living in Romania was not an option - language barrier, work challenge and lack of a personal place to live. 

I relentlessly scoured the internet and connected to people within Yahoo groups (Facebook was not even a dream at the time) and learn from their experiences what not to do. I also read anything and everything there was to know about immigrating in the US as a dependent of a US citizen. And then, armed with that information, I coached my husband on the documents he needed and on the steps we had to take. 

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