Sometimes, You Just Know (Even If You Don’t Know Why)

I crossed the border into Scotland and breathed a sigh of relief. 

To be honest, that’s not a very unusual sensation for a Scottish person to feel when they leave England, even an English-adopted Scot like me, but this time it felt extra sweet.

After eight hours of driving, with my thoughts glued to the road, I finally swung into my parents' driveway. Tense doesn’t quite cover how I felt on that journey, I don't think my jaw unclenched once. I remember driving fast and with a frantic energy, music on full blast so the thoughts in my head couldn't take hold.

The moment I stepped out of the car though, everything melted away. I saw my dog grinning at me from the window, ball in mouth, tail wagging like it was the happiest day of his life.

I was home.

In the days that followed, I caught up with friends and pondered my life in Bristol.

A sense of hope hung in the air amongst all my friends now that, at the end of 2021, it seemed like we were finally through the worst of the pandemic.

But something didn't feel right to me. I wasn't optimistic.

I knew I needed a change, but I didn't know what. As my time at home continued, I considered my options.

What if I changed jobs? Found a production to work on again and get my teeth stuck into? Or, find a new flat in a different area?

But each thought was met with resistance. My brain threw up obstacles left, right, and centre.

'A new job? You’ll be lucky.'

'You were lucky to get that flat in the first place.'

As someone with a good dose of impostor syndrome, I couldn’t help but compare everything about my life in Bristol to what I could have at home.

In my last post, I talked about confirmation bias—how your brain hunts down evidence that supports your existing beliefs. That’s exactly what happened here. My mind was determined to prove I didn’t belong in Bristol, so it zeroed in on every little detail that made Scotland seem like the obvious choice. And in some respects, it was. Moving home meant forging stronger friendships, spending more time with family, and saving money instead of watching it vanish into rent. I could walk my dog without feeling as though every moment was borrowed—and, most importantly, the tap water didn’t taste like it’d been recycled through someone else’s body.

But life is always more nuanced than that, and there are positives and negatives to both staying and leaving. Yet my mind didn’t care. I hadn’t considered the impact leaving might have on my career, for example. Bristol and my life there were the problem—a problem I could fix, quite simply.

I kept having discussions with my family and closest friends. I was desperate for someone to tell me what to do. But, as time went on, their opinions didn't matter anyway. The resolve in my decision became clearer and stronger.

I needed to leave Bristol. I needed to come home.

Once the decision was made, there was no going back.

Two weeks into January 2022, the contents of my tiny room in Bristol were packed into plastic boxes and bags for life. Anything I didn't want to take was plonked on the wall outside the flat for passersby to take. A very middle-class form of fly-tipping—quintessentially Bristol

Even though I was sure I was doing the right thing, my negative, self-deprecating thoughts wouldn't let up. One day, while in the middle of packing up my room, I froze.

"You’re running away, coward," my mind snarled.

My stomach dropped as I took in the posters, now rolled up against the bare walls. I reeled over the career opportunities I was leaving behind. I couldn't help but think I was disappointing everyone, just like I had done when I left University the first time.

My parents, my flatmate, myself.

I nearly pulled the plug. But I'm glad I didn't. Because, when I look back at my time in Bristol, I see a girl completely unravelling. Burned out. Isolated. Drowning in self-doubt and the gnawing feeling that I didn’t belong.

I couldn’t explain it at the time. I couldn’t sit down and list all the logical reasons why leaving made sense. I just knew. It wasn’t a decision made from careful analysis or weighing up pros and cons—it came from something deeper. My body, my mind, everything was telling me I couldn’t stay.

I was finally listening to myself.

So even if at the time, I had to convince myself it was just about not liking the city, the truth was simpler: I needed to get out. Just like I’d known I needed to leave university all those years ago, I knew this was the right choice—even if I couldn’t actually reflect on what was going on and put it all into words until now.

And almost immediately after I decided to leave, the pressure I’d been putting on myself lifted. I stopped overthinking everything. I was free because I had nothing left to lose. In a strange twist of irony, that freedom led me to have the best last few weeks in Bristol. I went to the theatre, tried online dating (classic avoidant - dating with a hard exit date) and did a pub crawl on King Street.

On my last night, my flatmate and I got so drunk from drinking all the alcohol on top of the fridge that various people had left in our flat. I’m talking about the old, stale bottles of stuff like Baileys, Jägermeister and peach liqueur. The stuff that people bring huge bottles of for pre-drinks but only take one shot and leave the rest. We laughed and roared at the top of our lungs to the '90s pop playlist we'd compiled.

I’m pretty sure we worked through it all, one bottle at a time. Our stomachs served as the mixing bowls.

There was a 3 am vomiting incident into the cup that stood beside my bed which subsequently resulted in me taking a sip of my vomit a few hours later when I'd forgotten about what I'd done. Trust me, that’s a circle you don’t want to get stuck in. 

Tears pricked my eyes when I glanced at my empty room in that little Bristol flat for the last time. Then, something inside me whispered—I was ready to let go of this dream, for now.

But despite thinking my move back would solve everything, the journey down my toughest path was only about to begin.