The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Emily Dontsos

Image by: Matt From London

“I want to move to London,” I told my boyfriend of two-and-a-half years. “London, England. For at least a year.”

The silence and implied doom on the other end of the phone were deafening to my bored, restless and terrified ears.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “I want you to do what makes you happy.”

“Would you consider moving there with me?” I asked, already knowing the answer, already knowing where this conversation was going.

“No. My life is here.”

So, two days before I entered my fourth and final year as an undergrad and two days before my first love entered his first year of medical school, our relationship crumbled as a direct result of my need to see the world, to do something different – to live.

I was devastated. I spent the entire school year floundering in a deep sea of regret, sadness, loneliness and confusion. And I was scared. I had sacrificed my main pillar of strength and support, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, because I craved a bit of change. What the hell was I thinking? I asked myself this over and over as I lay awake through the night, most nights.

I had uprooted the familiar in favour of the unknown. What if the unknown ended up being disappointing, terrible – not worth it? I almost let the fear get the better of me as I ran back to my now ex-boyfriend again and again and seriously considered cancelling my half-formed plans to backpack around Europe and work in London for a year to be with him again. I almost let it get to me, but in the end, it lost; I went.

I had spent the five weeks prior to that fateful conversation living in a hostel in the northeast end of London while taking a summer course at the London School of Journalism. It was the longest I had ever been away from home and the first time I had ever travelled alone. What began as a deeply lonely journey to a foreign land in which I knew not one single person, the purpose of which I wasn’t even entirely clear on, ended up being the most pivotal experience of my life. Having caught a glimpse of another world, one full of new personalities, new sights, new smells, new sounds, new accents, new everything, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until this alien world became mine, at least for a while.

When I returned to Toronto at the end of the five weeks, instead of calling my boyfriend, I sat on the rocks jutting out into Ashbridge’s Bay and stared out at the lake for a long time, thinking about the gravity of what I was about to do. I knew I was not going to be able to see through all the hopes and dreams we had built up together. My heart just wasn’t in it. My heart was waiting for me in England.

So I forced myself to have that extremely difficult conversation. And despite all of the fear, sadness and regret that plagued me throughout my final year as an undergraduate, I eventually forced myself to push ahead with my aspirations and booked a one-way ticket to London. The following June, I said goodbye to my family and friends and got on that plane.

My life will never be the same. I backpacked around Western Europe for six weeks with my sister. I found employment in an incredibly huge and international investment bank where I learned to comprehend the most indecipherable of accents and forged the most unexpected friendships. I flew to Oslo, Frankfurt, Bologna, and Malta on the weekends for dirt cheap airfare from my London base.

I danced in the Tower of London wearing a floor-length black gown at the office Christmas party; took a commuter boat along the Thames to work some days in the summer; strolled into Greenwich from my flat across the river on Sundays; took a bus to see Bath and Stonehenge; had an affair with a client; fell in love with a Scot; had my heart broken by the same Scot; frequented a 600 year old pub; made some of the best friends of my life, who I still talk to at least weekly. I learned to make rash decisions and live without regret.

My horizons have been exploded and my expectations for that move could not have been further exceeded. Although I was forced to come home, tearfully, after just over a year because of suddenly altered immigration laws, London taught me to embrace that change as well, to love every new chapter of my life, despite fear and uncertainty.

So if fear is threatening to hold you back, just flip it the bird and get on with your life. Life is too short to risk not knowing how things could have, would have, should have been.

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