You don't have to accept your circumstances

This blog was born in San Diego and I have talked about this city a lot on here as well as on my Instagram. I love the beauty of San Diego but the truth is that I have an ongoing love-hate relationship with it still. We have lived there for many years. I will not get into the details here again (you can read them in this post), but a part of me still loves this city while the other is trying hard to keep fresh in my mind the reasons why we left it in the first place.

We had steady, good-paying, with good benefits jobs, were established there (more or less), and yet, we felt trapped, limited, and unfulfilled. We felt that we were missing out on life, places, and experiences, that there was a bigger world out there, and that we wanted to get to know it. My husband and I always wanted to travel, to see a different point of view, of life but with our jobs and some 2 week vacation time a year, that life was far from reach.

The idea began in our heads to quit and do what we’ve been dreaming about. It seemed crazy at first. But after a series of good and bad events, we started to really consider it and made the decision to give ourselves a year to make it happen. I wanted more than anything to just do it, to run away, especially on difficult days but we stuck to the “plan”.

Don’t think for a second that we weren’t scared of our decision. What kept us going was realizing that fear was what was keeping us where we were, and if we let fear rule us, that’s where we’d always be. And throughout this year we have received many signs that our decision was right, at least for the circumstances we were in at the time.

We started purging most of our belongings as it didn’t make sense to pay for storing them when we wouldn’t even be in the country. I love a beautiful home and all, and I was taking my decor seriously. But, during the time we were making plans to leave and during the purging process, I understood that those things were enslaving us, and we didn’t even need all that stuff - I’ll definitely reconsider my choices in our “next life”.

Fast forward when the time finally came... the day I put in my two-week notice was a sad and scary one. I finally had a great team and manager at work, and it felt crazy leaving that. But deep down I knew better as things there were changing fast and not always for the better.

The last day at work came fast and it was all over. I still don’t regret it.

Shortly after, we left San Diego and were headed to spend some time in Upstate New York, preparing intensely for our European adventure. And now here I am, writing this from London, UK, after visiting Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland (I’ll share about that in future posts).

Do I know what the future holds? NO. But I have faith in myself, my husband, us, the universe, and that little voice in my head that’s been telling me there’s more to this world than what I knew, and that I can do better. And it’s only the beginning.

It’s never easy leaving the comfort of what we know and have, to leave everything behind and go for the unknown, but if we don’t try, we’ll spend the rest of our lives wondering what could have been. I didn’t want to keep doing that. What about you?

Until next time.
XOXO,
Em