When Adriel Sanders first visited Paris in 2017, she immediately felt at home, she says.
“It instantly clicked. I was like, ’This is your home. This is where you’re supposed to be in the world and this is where you will always be. I knew I had to move to Paris,” Sanders tells CNBC Make It.
Sanders returned to Paris several times while continuing to work as a general counsel for a publicly traded company in Washington, D.C. At the time, she was earning $286,656 a year and lived in a studio apartment where she paid approximately $3,000 a month in rent, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
“I didn’t enjoy the work and the expectation to work all the time and I will probably be one of the only attorneys who says it, but I don’t think it’s that intellectually stimulating,” Sanders says. “I was deeply and truly miserable at the very depths of my little heart and little soul. I knew that it was not sustainable.”
Three years after that initial trip to Paris, Sanders quit her job, broke her lease and started the process of obtaining a French visa. She landed in the city the day before France closed its borders due to the covid-19 pandemic.
