Travel Essays

The Move

Leaving the UK didn’t feel bold or brave — it felt necessary.

The same dreary weather we’d complained about year after year. The cost of living creeping higher by the day. I knew these pressures weren’t unique to Britain — they seemed to be everywhere — but I still found myself thinking: surely there must be somewhere with less of this constant struggle.

My partner and I carried the same tiredness from one day to the next — perhaps more myself than he did — until looking elsewhere stopped feeling like an idea and started feeling like the only option.

So we left.

To somewhere greener — mountains rising into cloud, air so fresh it felt startling after thirty-three hours in transit. It filled my lungs like a reminder that my body had been waiting for this before my mind caught up.

What I didn’t recognise at the time was how much effort it took to stay. Not in any dramatic sense — just the daily work of enduring. Enduring noise, weather, a schedule that never seemed to soften. I wasn’t unhappy exactly, but I had grown practised at pushing through a life that asked more than it gave back. I got used to living to work, rather than working to live.

The reality of that didn’t land until a conversation with one of my managers. He asked, almost casually, where I saw myself in three months’ time. The question felt impossibly small. Three months wasn’t enough time to change anything meaningful. Without thinking, I answered: survival.

It wasn’t that I lacked ambition. I had ideas about my long-term future. What I didn’t have anymore was a sense of direction in the present — any short-term vision that extended beyond getting through the week. Somewhere along the way, the hustle had stopped being a phase and started becoming the plan.

In London, I met people who seemed to move through the world with a different relationship to time than I had. They spoke about their travels — adventures, risks, even moments that could have gone badly wrong — and still smiled as they told them. Listening, I became aware of how small my own world had grown.

I caught myself wondering when that had happened. I had always been curious, always imagined myself as someone open to the world. Somewhere along the way, that curiosity had been deferred — not abandoned, just quietly postponed in the name of practicality.

That was when leaving stopped feeling optional.