I moved to Prague, thinking a change of scenery would fix something inside me. It didn't.

We arrived in 2020. My wife, two children, and everything we could fit into a life that was supposed to feel different. Our eldest was already off travelling in Australia.

I told people it was an adventure. A fresh start. A chance to raise the kids in a European city with cobblestones and culture and a slower pace.

All of that was true. None of it was the real reason.

The real reason was that I was drowning in England and I didn't know how to say it. So I changed the scenery instead.

Our marriage was failing. This was meant to be the restart we needed.

For the first few months it worked. Everything was new. New streets, new routines, new language I couldn't understand, which meant new silence — and silence felt like peace.

Then the novelty wore off. Then Covid hit.

And there I was. Same chest tightness. Same Sunday dread. Same habit of scanning every room for what could go wrong. Same voice in my head telling me to keep going, keep performing, keep holding it together.

Prague didn't fix me. It didn't fix our marriage either. It just gave me fewer places to hide.

In London I could fill every hour. Meetings, coffees, networking, the gym, the commute — all of it was movement. And movement felt like progress. In Prague, the hours opened up. The city is slower. The diary is emptier. And when the noise drops, you hear the thing that was underneath it.

I wasn't tired from the work. I was tired from defending.

Against being seen as struggling. Against not having it figured out. Against the gap between who I was in the room and who I was when the door closed.

I think most expats arrive here carrying something they haven't named. A marriage that needs attention. A career that looks right but feels wrong. A version of themselves they've been performing so long they've forgotten there's another one underneath.

You can't outrun it. I tried. You just carry the same weight in different luggage.

What Prague gave me wasn't a fix. It was space. Enough space to stop moving and finally hear what was running the show.

There's a river here. The Vltava. It runs through the centre of the city and it doesn't push. It doesn't rush. It doesn't care what you built today or what fell apart yesterday. It just flows.

I started walking along it every morning. Not as a strategy. Not as a practice. Because I had nothing else.

And somewhere along the water, something began to quiet.

Not the problems. Not the pressure. The voice underneath them — the one that had been telling me to hold everything together since I was sixteen years old.

I didn't move to Prague to find the river. But the river found me.

Our fourth child was born here in 2023. I mention that because it tells you something the rest of this story doesn't. The marriage didn't get fixed. It got honest. And that was enough for everything to change.

If you moved here thinking the city would change something inside you, and it hasn't — you're not doing it wrong. You're just ready for a different kind of conversation.

I'm Andrew Sillitoe. I help leaders have better conversations. If this resonated, you can find more at andrewsillitoe.com.