I was tired and miserable after a number of months living at home and commuting from Reading to London everyday. I was feeling less like myself because I definitely wasn't getting enough exercise or seeing my friends or boyfriend enough. I was tiring myself out attempting to learn to drive too early in the morning on the weekends. In short, in some aspects of life I wasn't feeling particularly lucky with my lot.
On the other hand, at least I was enjoying my job at the time, I was slowly making some more friends and I was enjoying getting to know London.
Fast forward to now and a fair few things have changed about my day-to-day life: I live in London, I passed my driving test in March, and I changed companies in April but I'm still building my career in PR. My group of friends has stayed largely the same since then, and I'm finally making new ones in London (bar a few shockers in terms of ghosty friends lol).
I'm aware that I'm dangerously lurching into a look-how-great-my-life-is-now type of spiel, so I won't spare the details in between. At the turn of the new year, I paid a whopping £500 for my monthly rail ticket between Reading and London, and thought, bloody hell, I can't do this anymore.
I began my search for my first flat in London, and chose north-west London. I managed about three months in my first place because it just wasn't the right arrangement for me, I needed to live with people my age. Stupidly, I tried to do way too much at the same time and decided to also finish up my driving lessons in order to pass my test, which after lots of back-and-forth between home and my new place, I finally passed after an intensive course.
You can probably tell from how I described that experience that I really didn't enjoy learning to drive and I was so pleased to have the licence done and dusted. Around this time, I started feeling unhappy at work. I was unable to put my finger on one particular reason, but my decision to leave was mainly due to the culture in the office and how positive I felt about my progression there.
So to cause yet more upheaval, I left my job in April and not long after joined a new PR agency. At first, I panicked about leaving my first job out of university and that I'd made a mistake, but six months on, I'm so glad I followed my gut instinct and made that decision. I love the range of clients that I get to work on and the fact that I feel challenged and excited everyday.
So, unhappy in my previous flat, I hit upon an incredibly jammy find of a flat on Spareroom, and I've not looked back. I couldn't believe it because it was the first and only place I saw. I get on well with my flatmates, we have similar interests and the flat is in a truly beautiful location. What's even better is that I'm not sacrificing most of my salary for the place either; I feel lucky every single day for that.
I've lived there for almost half a year now and I finally feel completely settled considering all the ridiculous changes I put myself through this year. My mum often moans at me because I always insist on doing everything at once, I have zero patience (I wrote about this earlier in the year if you fancy a read). But then, what if I had waited longer to change things? Sometimes, you just have to follow the gut feelings and bite the bullet, no matter how much stress this might cause in the short-term.
Now I feel at home, I am making more of an effort to enjoy the London life and build up friendships and hobbies outside of work. I'm loving getting to know north-west London as my own corner of the city. I'm even working harder on the blogging side again, which is an overwhelmingly big world compared to Southampton and Reading's land of bloggers.
In short, I'm feeling really quite lucky at the moment, after lots of life overhaul. However, none of these things happened by a stroke of luck; I took the plunge and changed things as needed, and I can finally enjoy the outcomes of what felt like huge leaps out of my comfort zone.
Thanks for reading! What's made you feel lucky recently? I wanna hear all about it!
Post a Comment