Then Go Out and Love Someone.

I was 18 when Mum started blipping. 


I’m 28 this year. 


This fact probably freaks mum out.


I’m still very young; I’m aware of this. But I’ve reached a number that 18 year old Steven would have considered an extremely grown up age, and that brings with it the occasional reality check, existential crisis, or millennial second guessing. The constant pressure to have a career, wife and kids or at least some notion that resembles a plan, weighs heavy on a lot of people my age, as it presumably always has done, and I count myself lucky that my parents always allowed me the freedom (and the responsibility) to do what I’ve wanted to do. A lot of my friends haven’t been so lucky in that regard, and stumble through their lives, altering their lives in minuscule and massive ways to meet an agenda that was set into motion generations ago with no real merit to it. I left for America almost a decade ago and haven’t stepped foot in Scotland in over three years.


Every so often, I have strange conversations with people back home that involve them telling me that I “made it” because I’m over here. I got out of Scotland and I’m living the dream. I’ve never fully grasped what that meant, and I think it’s because I lost sight of why I came here in the first place. I wasn’t sold on doing what everyone else was doing back home. I could have gone to uni and had a blast, but I was doing it because I felt it’s what I should do. America was an act of rebellion in my own exciting little way, and when people would proclaim I was living the dream, I’d beam back, steadfast in my own superiority because I’d done something different and was following my dreams. 


But after college, I got a job. I mainly took the position for a VISA, and for the first couple of years it was great. I travelled a lot for work, I was still in the US, and there was still the air of the exotic to both people here and occasionally from home. But in the last couple of years, as people tell me I’m still living the dream, I feel like a little bit of a sell-out. America is great. I’ve got great friends, live in a truly wonderful city by the ocean, and I’ve found an incredible girl to spend my time with. But I spend 9 hours of everyday doing something that I’m not passionate about, that has started driving me insane, and makes me crave 5PM on Friday like a crack addict. And that’s not the way I want to live. It’s not why I came to America. It’s not why I stayed, and it’s most definitely not my definition of “making it”.


I’ve just settled into the same routine I strove to avoid by leaving Scotland, albeit in a better climate. So here I am. 27 and about to leave it all again. Ironically, the biggest push to go out and do something completely different and irresponsible came from said incredible girl, who’s never left the country, and is up against a hell of a lot more resistance than I ever would have met. The two of us are dropping everything, throwing a few things in a rucksack, and buggering off around the world for a few years. No set agenda, just a starting point. No 9 to 5, no bosses, no consistent society or sceptical peers to remind us how irresponsible we are being. And I’m genuinely excited for the first time in a few years to go and genuinely live a bit.
 
But the main point of me writing this to try and make my Mum cry. And so to achieve this, I’ll leave it at this: It’s the greatest feeling in the world to have a mum and dad that are willing and proud to let you step out into the world, fully aware that the next time they’ll see their kid could be a matter of years, not weeks; to have them be fully supportive, even encouraging, when you tell them you’re about to drop your full time job to float off the grid in some random country in the east; and to have instilled in me a lust for life, and understanding that you don’t grasp the world by sitting in an office for half of your life. I love you both so bloody much. It’s all for you, and I hope I keep making you proud.