On Settling Down: Needle Butt Is Looking for a Pincushion

“Woke up in London yesterday
Found myself in the city near Piccadilly
Don’t really know how I got here
I got some pictures on my phone
New names and numbers that I don’t know
Address to places like Abbey Road
Day turns to night, night turns to whatever we want
We’re young enough to say—

Oh this has gotta be the good life
This has gotta be the good life
This could really be a good life, good life
Say oh, got this feeling that you can’t fight
Like this city is on fire tonight
This could really be a good life
A good, good life”

– Good Life, One Republic

Every five years, in late October on the dot, my life changes.

It’s difficult to explain how or why, only that it does. The person I was for the past five years ceases to be recognizable almost overnight.

In the past five years, I yearned for travel and adventure. I wanted to fall deeply and passionately in love and to hold this person’s hand while we went to see the world.

I did fall in love…and oh, what a moment that was! It was the kind of love that makes you believe in God. We once spent a magical summer together amidst a massive heatwave in my little downtown Vancouver flat that faced the setting sun and didn’t have a proper bed.

On one of those summer days, as we basked in late afternoon glow, he turned to me and said, “I want to give you everything. I don’t know what that looks like, but I’m going to do it.”

The years disappeared and him with it, so I went to see the world alone.

I’ve always had this dream that I would be a jetsetter—this bright, happy girl with tales upon tales of adventures in foreign lands with beautiful people, some of whom would turn into family, one of whom I would love and travel with for the rest of my life.

In the past five years, I lived that dream.

But I had to do it alone.

Now, I am tired.

Yes, I want to keep traveling. Yes, I want that family, that love but it seems like the former is not congruent with the latter.

I’m tired of always being stuck in airports, on long-haul flights. I’m tired of living out of suitcases and cardboard boxes.

Now, Needle Butt wants a pincushion.

It’s time.

I’ve been on the move, on the run, from a place, a boy, a situation, something, for far too long. I’m tired of saying to people, I refuse to buy a drying rack for my clothes because I’m just going to move again. I’m tired of saying things like, I don’t know where I’ll be next year.

I’ll always have a measure of wanderlust, but at this point, I’m looking for stability. I’m looking for a person, place, job, and within myself to find that.

One of the greatest lucks and also biggest downfalls that we have in our modern-day, relatively peaceful first-world is that we are overloaded with choice.

“[Overchoice takes place when] the advantages of diversity and individualization are canceled by the complexity of buyer’s decision-making process.” – Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1971

I acknowledge that I am supremely lucky to have had the opportunities that I’ve had—born American, raised Canadian, and physically healthy.

That being said, divorce and depression rates in the first-world are higher than ever. Something about modern society is broken. We’ve lost touch with humanity and with ourselves. We want stability but fear it. We crave human connection but spend most of our days hiding behind the smoke screen of social media. We don’t know how to behave anymore.

So where do we go from here?

Who will keep us warm at night and safe when nothing else is safe? What sort of career will provide us with intrinsic satisfaction given that we devote the majority of our lives to it? What place in the world will make us happy and support us in our journey to becoming kind and moral people?

I’ve traveled the world and found no answers.

Two and half years ago, I arrived at YVR on a hot summer day with a backpack, a carry-on suitcase, a neck pillow, a stuffed rabbit keychain, and courage bordering on recklessness.

I was due for a one-way outbound flight in two hours.

I hadn’t left the continent for four years.

That spring, the person who had told me he would give me everything left. The relationship and home we had built for years disappeared, along with the last of my reasons to stay in Vancouver.

And so I quit my job and put myself on a one-way flight to Europe.

I then backpacked solo from Amsterdam to Istanbul.

One morning during this trip, I sat alone on the banks of the Danube in Budapest with a latte, a fruit tart, and no idea what to do with the rest of the day. One of the biggest silent struggles that had plagued me for past decade suddenly dispersed.

I realized I was okay with being alone.

That day, I felt truly happy.

After my trip, I decided that it was time to leave Vancouver and began seriously exploring my options.

Europe was the last place that I remembered being happy, so I wanted to go back.

It took a year of organizing my personal, professional, and financial situation before I managed to leave.

I didn’t particularly want to go to London; there are various continental European cities that I personally like better. However, due to my language skills, London was the most sensible place to go.

And so I left.

I had a breakdown at 5:30am on my first full day in London. I hadn’t properly cried in over a year.

What have I done? I thought. What have I done?

I called my best friend who had driven me to YVR less than 24-hours prior and wished me the best of luck.

He told me how brave I was to be chasing my dream of building a better life while seeing the world at the same time.

He told me how happy he was for me.

It’s now been over a year since I decided to leave Vancouver, that stunning city that simultaneously holds and breaks my heart.

It’s been a strange and crazy journey that doused me with the cold water of reality and forced me to re-examine what it means to be truly happy.

Traveling makes me temporarily happy. Meeting new people makes me temporarily happy. Pushing my career makes me temporarily happy, but such things can’t last.

At some point, whether it’s in a few months, a few weeks, on Monday, or in evening, you have to go home.

What is the point if, at the end of it all, you have to go home to a cold and empty apartment? Why do we try at all if there’s no one to share our victories and sorrows with?

For better or worse, that last stage of my life is over.

When I quit my job and left the country two and half years ago with about three weeks’ worth of travel plans, I figured I was committing career and financial suicide. At that point, I was young and heartbroken enough to not care.

The life that I had wanted, the only home that I had ever trusted enough to build, was gone.

Since then, it’s been a long road of lights, music, faces new and old, 80-hour work weeks, sweat and tears, disappointments, triumphs, and nights when I didn’t know if I could ever feel human again. It was terrifying, but I made it.

This summer, I made Head of Content Marketing in London, one of the biggest and most competitive job markets in the world.

Along this way, I learned that, while I can be truly happy alone, I am truly happier when I can share my life with the people I care about most.

And so, I am done running.

I’ve learned that you can run until you nearly fall of the edge of the world but you can never run away from yourself.

It’s time to build a home, career, future, and most importantly, self that is solid and stable.