Sasha Piton

Irish-French-American Sasha Piton has travelled widely outside the US but has recently settled in Dublin. In her new series for The Journal, she shares the insights of a new arrival on a country she’s trying to call home.

MY NIGHTLY COMFORT show is The Golden Girls, and lately my mind can’t help but notice how my life is starting to parallel a few of my favourite shows.

Picture it. Ireland, 1860s. My family sets sail for America in search of a better life.

Generation after generation, they married Irish Catholics and kept their traditions close, even from across the Atlantic. My mom grew up with both sets of parents and grandparents rooted in that Irish Catholic world, and then she travelled abroad and married a Frenchman.

My dad came with my mom to America in the late 80s, before my sister or I were born, and watching him navigate a new country and a new language shaped us in ways I’m still unpacking. It tied us closely to the immigrant experience, not only on my mother’s side, where Irish Catholic identity ran deep through the family culture, but now through our dad too.

We were French-Americans, occasionally bringing my Mémé and Pépé to school for show and tell, since they didn’t speak English. I did, at around age six, teach them beans beans good for your heart, the more you eat, the more you fart, without them actually knowing what they were saying.

Once it was translated, we all had a good laugh. I was probably 12 before I realised that Mémé and Pépé are just the French words for grandma and grandpa, and not names that happened to rhyme.

I think that’s why I always felt a little sideways in America.

My brain didn’t move the way the world around me expected it to. Too slow, too distracted, too inside itself, too literal, too caught between two worlds. Hurry up. Be productive. You should know that. Prioritise. I learned to build systems just to keep pace: colour-coded notes, visual calendars, creativity woven into tasks, so my brain would actually care enough to show up.

Visiting family in France, I noticed something: the slowness there didn’t feel like failure. It felt like freedom. But I’d go back to America, and the pace would swallow me whole again.

My family left Ireland for a better life. A few generations later, I would do the same, just in reverse.

I had passed through Dublin before, always just in transit, way more drawn to the Wild Atlantic Way than to the lights of this city. Dublin felt like a place you moved through, not a place you stayed.

And yet here I am, laptop open, clouds rolling in the way they only do in Ireland, even in summer, writing a column about a city I’m having what I can only describe as a love affair with. It’s moody. It’s complicated. It’s expensive. There are plenty of reasons to resent it, and people here will happily list them for you. And yet somehow I keep finding myself further intertwined with it.

I’m pulling a Carrie Bradshaw, and writing a column about my city. But I will say, Carrie, herself was quite toxic and a genuinely terrible friend, so I’m not claiming her as a personality type. More of an essence. The laptop. The city. The column. The vibes. The question that keeps writing itself no matter how many times I try to close the tab:

Can Ireland be home?

The thing about Dublin: The housing market will humble you. The weather will confuse you, is it outside pint time or inside pint time? People will tell you the transport is a disaster and the cost of living is unsustainable, and they are not wrong about either of those things.

And yet.

I have never lived in a big city before. I came from Idaho, where you drive everywhere, and the silence is enormous, and the sky takes up most of the view. Here I have the DART. I have buses. I have a coastal line that, on a grey Tuesday morning, still manages to be quietly, stubbornly beautiful.

The things that frustrate the locals are the very things I’m falling in love with, and I’m self-aware enough to know that’s a very new-arrival thing to say. Dublin is teaching me things about myself through its inconveniences, and I find that I don’t mind being the student.

This is, I’ve decided, my New York. Dublin is a little complicated, surprising, and I cannot quite imagine being anywhere else. 

I sold my house in Idaho. Sold what was inside it. Sold my car. And I made the journey my ancestors had made two centuries before me, just in the opposite direction. I spent two months in the States looking for housing, and once I got here, another two months searching from inside Ireland.

I had temporary accommodation, a suitcase, two dogs, and a level of administrative chaos (read: anxiety) that I have decided to reframe as “character-building”. Last week I finally moved into my own place. My own keys. My own door. The sea not far in one direction, the DART not far in the other.

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Finding the answer

And then, two days later, I flew to Croatia.

A girls’ trip I’d had planned for a year through my Instagram! I host and plan girls’ trips, so American women can travel together, see the world, experience new cultures and food, while making friends. I went, and it was everything I needed! It was beautiful, and I had the best time. And when the plane touched down at Dublin Airport on the way back, something in my chest physically loosened; I had my answer.

I pulled into the garden. Put the key in the lock. My two dogs lost their minds.

Oh, I thought. There it is. I’m home. 

I’m 38 and I just up and left my world to reinvent myself somewhere new. Am I absolutely terrified? You bet! But if I live by Sex in the City timelines, I’m really only in season one at my age and if I live by the Golden Girls’ timelines… girl, season one hasn’t even started yet.

So while I’m scared, I’m going to “pull myself up by my bootstraps” as they say and keep going. 

I want to explore this city with the kind of unguarded appetite that makes people raise an eyebrow and maybe tip their hat in respect. I want to be occasionally ridiculous in my ambition, publicly figuring out where a career like mine (content creator, model, aspiring actor) fits inside a city like this.

I want to stand in a gallery on a quiet Sunday and feel something, and maybe get a pint with friends during outside pint time.

Picture it: Dublin, 2026. And we’re just getting started. 

Sasha will be back with more insights into her adopted home (yes, Ireland) next week.