Life is not like Instagram: Home & Away

When the grass is always greener, how can you balance the comfort of familiarity with the urge to travel?

Although I’ve lived out of a bag for years and years, I’ve often returned to certain places because of people, that return ticket becoming a natural step even without the familiar comfort of bricks and mortar beckoning. London especially has been a magnet for me, although over time it has had so many different faces.

But my London now is different, more mature. It’s full of people who bring joy and I have an extended family and that special something I’ve often longed for there, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to leave and now, when I go, a little of myself remains behind.

I struggle desperately with this. I need to be present to embrace this weird world I live in. I’m a kind, well-meaning man and I like to listen, to sleep like a dream, to wake without worry, to say hi to the rise and setting of the sun and to feel like the only impact I have on the people and places around me is positive. When I fail in this — and I do so regularly — I suffer, overthink and beat myself up. And in turn I consider how to compromise the very things that I yearn for because they’re responsible for my current state of detachment.

Which is ridiculous because it’s all in my head, I’m the responsible one, or not. This is my problem, my world. It’s the balance I’m working on now, and my soul is always a (very mild) conflict zone, not least because it’s the quality of my relationships that suffer. I’ve unwittingly adopted an acceptance of the scattergun approach, and therefore despite being surrounded by hundreds of people I’m glad to consider friends, it’s ever so rare that I really let anyone in.

But when I’m surrounded by my best friends I don’t feel the need to leave. Somehow, out of nowhere and totally contrary to my younger self, I can feel roots planting around me and I like it! What?! Where the hell did that come from? It’s now harder to stand up and walk away even if I now feel the brunt of that difficulty once I’ve gone.

But if I don’t wander off, I’m also lost. You should have seen my little face when I landed in Bali the other day. Grinning from ear to ear at the crazy moped-filled roads and the warm kiss of evening sun and those grotesque, gorgeous statues and the irrepressibility of nature despite humans and huge geckos bigger than your forearm and the comfy new bed I get to lay my head in because I chose this life.

If I didn’t travel and hustle and live through a desire to tell stories then I wouldn’t be the bloke that my friends love me for. I’d be doing my potential a disservice and that lack of fulfillment would just seep through my skin and jump across to the people around me like a doubting gremlin just wanting to rip all the dreams apart.

And I’m over the disappointment that came when I went ‘home’ for the first time and realised that nobody really cared about what I’d been through or done or even felt. My life shifts and heaves during every experience now but I’m under no illusion that this is for anyone else but me.

It’s who I am and how I can relate — not just regurgitate — my experiences to friends back home, that’s what counts.

So just as I believed way back when that there must be a way to make a living doing something I enjoy and that Mondays didn’t have to be the bane of my existence, I now have to believe that both roots and movement can play a part in my life. They’re both possible; they must be. Otherwise a part of me would die and seeing as I’m here to live I have a general issue with the dying stuff, even if it’s a metaphorically dying slowly in a cubicle kind of fading away.