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For now, I am stuck

Every night, I sit on my windowsill and watch the stars, listening to the wind in the trees and wondering what life is like right now on the opposite side of the planet, is it warm? Do they know I’m thinking of them? Who is just waking up and who, like me, cannot shut off? Who is walking their dog and who is caring for their children? Is it daylight or is it bleak skies? I find it humbling that it is thundering and cold in one country and all shorts and Pina coladas elsewhere. It gives me the dumbfounded hope that the grass may very well be greener on the other side

When I wake up in a morning, the first thing I think of when I open my eyes is a different life, just a new start

It’s not at all that I am unhappy with my current life, I just want to feel like I’m alive to work, not working to stay alive.

I want to move away, I see pictures of friends abroad, with their toes in the sand and leaning on a palm tree with the sun radiating their faces. I promise it’s not as cliché as it sounds…

I want to live, to breathe the damp fruitful air next to a beautiful hidden waterfall in the Amazon; to dig my toes into the sand of Miami beach; to watch the sunset sat on the bonnet of a car overlooking the Grand Canyon; to walk to streets that thousands more have before me. I want to meet new people, pioneer myself and explore the land I was so gratefully given a life on.

I live in the UK and I am an almost 20-year-old girl, a student at that, studying a Master’s degree in mental health nursing. My google history is full of recent searches for ‘the top ten best countries to migrate to for nurses’, I just can’t help but search, knowledge build and fantasize about waking up in a different country, with different people surrounding the area of which I am building a new life, new environments, new smells, sights, and sounds.

One day I will make that move, for me, myself, and I.

Many find it scary that at such a tender age of 19 I have decided I want to leave everything I have ever known, every face I have familiarised myself with and every smell and sound behind. I am not scared.

The urge to be someone new and prosper somewhere else builds every day, like a growing fire deep inside my soul. It is not a dangerous fire, or intimidating. It is exhilarating and curious.

4 years I will spend, on my windowsill, wondering what is. Until the day that I, myself, go on that journey and the what if, turns to; what is. It will be a reality.

But for now, I’m just an almost 20-year-old student, and they are just stars in the sky, and wind in the trees

For now, I am stuck

2 Comments


  1. You are not stuck, but more of “in the process”. You’re lucky because you know what you are doing, and where you want to go. Dreams can come true if we have the courage to take a step forward. If it can make you happier, than nothing can compare to it. I wish you the best on your journey.

  2. Hi, stranger! I’ve been working abroad for about four months and I’m still not happy. I thought I would be much happier if I can leave my motherland( I love my country, but just like you, I want to have a new life), so after I graduated, I chose to work abroad. I always want to live a different life, just like you said “I’m alive to work, not working to stay alive”. It’s really hurting that seeing people spent most of their life just for the a house, a car or other material stuff. Most of my classmates went to the big cities after they graduated, because there are more opportunities in the big cities. I’ve been asked myself for a lot of times why I can’t just live a normal life like others, but I just can’t. I heard my friends and classmates complained about their jobs pretty often, and they kept telling me that they envy me. What I was thinking about working abroad is working at the place I love, and I love countryside. But the reality is sometimes the place for work is not the place to enjoy your life. If you just want to live abroad and start a new life at somewhere new, that’s really easy for you. And it’s much harder for me to live my dream life, since I want to keep moving till I find somewhere to settle down, and now I’m on my save-money stage for me long-term journey. And that’s the only reason I am stuck here, another city.

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