Take Control of Life and Become Who you Want To Be
Why we decided to move to Thailand
Like everything, when you scratch the surface there’s always something more.
It always goes deeper.
The car journey home from Scotland that day was the catalyst, the ignition for something we thought would remain just a fantasy.
Our life in England had become all about existing, living just to pay the rent and bills on our 1 bedroom flat.
A trip to Asda every week to buy food, feeling guilty if we wanted to get something ‘nice’ rather than just the essentials.
A good friend said to me when I told her the news of what we were planning to do and reasons for going “but that is just normal life, that’s what life is”
To which I replied, “it doesn’t have to be, its only ‘normal life’ if you let it”
The thought of how we were living, continuing for even another year, filled me with dread.
I’ve always envisaged that there’s got to be more to life than this.
Never happy with what I was doing, always feeling I should be doing more.
I had imagined scenarios like this for so long, snippets of newspaper articles read when I was a teenager that stuck with me:
…..High Flying City Lawyer, Gives It All Up To Live In A Mud Hut In Africa…..
I had always wanted to be that person.
My job I had in the city of London, drove me to the verge of insanity – everyday a feeling of ‘this isn’t me, this is not what I should be doing’
I would get on the tube in the morning and turn up outside my building, without even remembering the hour long journey.
I felt hollow. I became a robot. Going through the motions of the day without feeling. Worst of all, I stopped caring.
Months spent in this coma made me feel that I couldn’t do anything, I had been taken over and was no longer in control of my own life.
The whole time knowing deep inside, if I didn’t do something soon I was going to drown myself in despondency. All because I was told, “this is life”
I know now that those feelings came from not doing anything with myself, not living to my potential and not achieving. Letting my life pass me by.
Suppressing what I actually wanted to do, because it was against the norm.
Fighting with ‘normality’ is the hardest thing. But we worked hard and we made it out of the suffocating surroundings we had put ourselves in.
So this is why we made the move, to actually start living the way we want to.
It was a well planned motion and wasn’t just a drop everything and go situation. As much as I wanted to do that sometimes. We knew we had to do it properly otherwise we risked everything.
Tying up our lives in England, selling our belongings, leaving jobs that gave a regular pay check, only to end up back at home after a few months as we hadn’t planned right, run out of money or not thought it through properly.
We spent 14 months researching, plotting and planning the move to Thailand before we actually left.
Those 14 months felt like an age, we had been talking about it for so long that it felt like it wasn’t going to happen, it wasn’t real. We weren’t actually going to leave.
It was a dream, one that you never quite remember when you wake up, just flashes and glimmers into what could be, but it never felt like a reality.
Talking about it to friends, felt like I was in a play, a production of my life that hadn’t yet made it to the stage. I was just practising.
Up until the very day we left, I felt this way. It hadn’t sunk in that we were going, even with the bags packed, farewells spoken and a one way ticket booked.
I’m still waiting for it to hit me.
It hasn’t, the feelings never came.
The emotional rush I was waiting for as I boarded the plane to Asia, the ones I thought would descend on me 30,000 feet up in the air flying over the mountains of Iran, they were absent.
No panic, no fear for leaving my UK life behind.
I can only assume this was because we were moving forward with our lives.
There was nothing to be afraid of…
Sacha El-Haj – 8 Miles from Home
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