In 2022, we proved everyone wrong by having the audacity to be big quitters and leave home. It was really hard but here’s why we did it.
Background
Francis and I have been together a long time. Well, I think it’s a long time, but some people I met recently have been together since they were thirteen… Thirteen! I probably wanted a boyfriend at thirteen, but I was by no means collected enough to do so!!
Anyway, a cornerstone of our relationship is that we talk a lot. We ascertained pretty early on that we wanted to see the world, at least a little bit. That’s the sort of thing you can either do early on, or after kids. Who knows what will happen to you (mentally or physically) by the latter. In our naïve youthful state, we reckoned we’d be able to do it before we were thirty.
Soon enough, certain global events happened and the years disappeared. Thirty was getting scarily close.
Now, I feel really strongly that I’ll have more to offer our offspring if I have a wider world view, and also less resentful if I’ve ticked some life goals off.
The Plunge
When the stars aligned (with a bit of massaging), we began the plunge.
We wrapped things up at work in the UK, told our families for the hundredth time that yes, we were really doing it, and… totally left it to the last minute to pack everything up. To give you an idea, we were still shoving boxes away an hour before we left for our flight.
I maintain that, given more time, we’d probably still have procrastinated.
It wasn’t ideal.
A Gut Feeling
These are truths I feel in my bones – ones that made it easier in the hard days leading up to leaving, and the hard days since:
- You’re unlikely to get rich working for someone else (unless you’re part of a founding team). While it was hard to leave the job I’d genuinely given my all for, I was giving more than I was getting back to something that was not changing the world in the way I feel is important
- A repeat of the above, but if we didn’t do this while we could, we would regret it when we’d no longer be able to. As the years passed, I also became less inclined to move out of my comfort zone
- As an aside, I read somewhere that teenage girls have a smaller area they feel comfortable roaming around in than teenage boys. I can’t currently find the article to cite it, but it mentioned things like evolutionarily increasing gene pool et cetera
- We have really missed our families (more on our regrets while travelling in a different post), but our horizons have been widened speaking to more people and experiencing more things
So, those are the cliff notes on why we had the audacity to be big quitters – we’ll be sharing information on how that goes and how we’re doing it imminently, using services like TrustedHousesitters (this is an affiliate link).
✌️
Click here to return home.
