Why I've Decided to Emigrate in My Thirties

When is the right time to completely change your life?

Photo by Joey Csunyo on Unsplash

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"It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.”

-P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Morning

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We’re sitting cross-legged on the floor of the unfurnished apartment we’ve been renting while waiting for the visas to arrive. We’ve sat like this most nights for the last six months on the cheap blue carpet — it’s the tightly woven, unwelcoming kind you’d usually find festering on the floor of a government office — with our dinner plates set atop an upturned cardboard box. “You just have to choose a point in the story and start from there.” J says this with a startling tone of seriousness which makes me cease picking at my dinner to glance over at him. We’re discussing how I might write about the last eighteen months because I tell him that time has becoming a bucking, snarling thing, not linear but a tangle, and I can’t seem to figure out where I am inside it. I want to write about how we ended up here, but ‘here’ is bristling beneath my feet like the rough carpet. J is describing a preposterously obvious maxim of storytelling: just start somewhere. Simply begin.

It’s easier said than done. We moved together to London from Dublin five years ago. J is a native Londoner who hates the constantly shifting essence of the city and its tendency to render everyone urgent and erratic. He grew up in difficult circumstances and suffered several violent assaults as a boy and young man. He still won’t sit with his back to the door in a restaurant or café. For him, London veils a threat that he grew up with. When the streets are crowded, he prickles with a vigilance that can only come from experiencing punishment for boyhood complacency. And what should a young boy be, if not complacent? Looking always for threat is the remit and the sentence of people who have been forced to see it.

I took a couple of years to find the rhythm of this place. To understand its esoteric rules and its dissonances. To learn what it takes to ‘pass’ here and understand that, as an outsider, there are environments where you never meaningfully will. For a while, everything was less clear to me than it had been in the flatter and more transparent class structure and cultural familiarity of Ireland. I adjusted, but felt the friction, and J became wide-eyed and restless, back in the place where he stumbled into manhood, vulnerable and unprepared for the stiff middle class sensibilities of a British university.

Now we are about to throw a stick of dynamite into the life we’ve spent the last five years carefully constructing. No. More than that. We reached for this life long before we got here. We’ve since built routines, connections and careers. We bought a house. And we’re leaving all of it behind. We couldn’t be going further away from my native home or my adopted one. The why of it is complicated.

When you make the decision to move to the other side of the planet in your thirties, it has an earnestness and weight that is starkly contrasted against the detachment and open-ended possibility of your twenties. This isn’t just about embracing the potential for things to be different. It’s an overt rejection of how things are right now, and how they have been. We built a life, looked around at what we had created — its costs and compromises as well as its joys — and thought “Actually, no." It forced us to prioritise forms of work that didn’t serve us. It pushed us both into environments where we didn’t fit and were constantly reminded of that. So we’re stopping. We’re beginning again somewhere else. Australia. I’ve never visited. This time next month, I’ll live there.

This story, though, remains a tangle. We are still in the midst of it. It has been going on for almost two years but in reality it began long before, and it has brought us here to this drab apartment five minutes’ train journey from the house we bought but haven’t lived in since last December. My mother-in-law lives in our house now. It’s populated by her things. It doesn’t look or smell like our home anymore. I find going there incredibly unsettling. When we visit, she says things like '“Is it nice to be in your home again?” She means it sincerely, but it makes me want to scream.

This has, in many respects, been the hardest couple of years I’ve experienced in some time. I was confronted by the softness I’d developed. The lack of hardship. Watching my mother die over a period of months in my twenties and then grieving her was devastating. This has been a different kind of difficult — the slow eradication of familiarity, security, home. The long limbo of waiting for visas to leave. The departure delayed by months. The detachment from the current setting without yet being able to invest in a new one. The hard weave of that blue carpet scratching obnoxiously against the arse of my jeans every time I sit in an empty room to eat my dinner from what we jokingly term ‘the dinner box’. The pendulous swinging between excitement about a new life and the loss of this one despite my desire for change. Fear of change. The silence, because once you tell people, it’s all they’ll talk to you about. So only family and a few very close friends knew, and over time the silence I’ve held has started to feel like a burden and a deception.

So here we are, hunkered together at a cardboard table eating a chicken dinner; two people who probably appear (outside the context of this room at least) to the observer to have been doing pretty well. Here we are, dynamite in hand, about to blow apart the life we’ve spent so long building. Why? It’s complicated. And it isn’t. I will explore it all here, and, I hope, take you with me to Australia. Substack has given me a freedom that has enabled me to make this decision. There’s a lot coming down the line, but I want to prioritise the work I most enjoy, and that is here with you.

J has his own reasons for leaving the UK. They aren’t mine to share. For my part, I’m tired. I’m a bit bored. I’ve long worked in beauty journalism — an industry full of excellent people, but which nonetheless holds an obsession with status, where everyone in the room knows their place on the hierarchy. The culture of comparison is rife, and not a game I care to play. I still love beauty, and the people I’ve befriended through the years, but I need a break from it. It sounds self-indulgent to write that. Perhaps entitled, but I don’t feel like climbing into the box that’s assigned to me. I have a lot of interests — I like working in them all. I write about beauty, yes, but also politics, culture, books and sport. Above all I love philosophy — its unrelenting interrogatory energy. Its ability to equip us with the skills to deconstruct the social, political and psychological machines around us and look at the whirring parts within. I’m not content to do just one thing.

Besides, journalism of every kind is in crisis. I’ve cast my glance ahead to see where things are going —where I might go — and there’s nothing much waiting on the other end. Or nothing I feel excited for. I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer. What I think about when I wake up in the morning is writing. I just want to write. That self-indulgent, ‘notions’ desire has fuelled me all my life. It’s silly, and it’s important. Everything is.

I called this Substack Peak Notions. Where I grew up, ‘notions’ were the worst thing you could have (and nothing is more notions than Peak Notions). It’s a pejorative (if very funny) term that we traditionally use in Ireland to shrink one another. To tug someone who has reeled off back inside the lines. Setting oneself apart in any way — articulating or (heaven forbid) celebrating individuality — is seen as an act of arrogance. In some ways this is still the case. It can register to other people as an insult. A prioritisation of self over other and a rejection of the norm, which I suppose in some instances it is, but we have taken this shrinkage to such extremes that some of the darkest corridors of our history are littered with people who could not find their voice when they needed one. Systemic abuses, Church hegemony and an incredibly repressive attitude toward women and children are legacies we still live with in Ireland. We know the costs of being too loud, too weird, too independent, too skeptical. Or of wearing a beret. That too is notions.

Of course, Not every individual whim we pursue is an act of political rebellion or social importance. Sometimes we’re just being selfish asshats. If your ideological principles align to maximise your comfort and advancement in every scenario, then they aren’t principles at all and you’re in definite asshat territory. But when you come from a culture that encourages you to be small and quiet, to tolerate discomfort rather than express it, and to feel shame for desiring or feeling entitled to pursue anything outside the blueprint you were born into, it can be challenging to find your voice and terrifying to use it. It can feel like something you’re simply not entitled to do. It can come with costs, whether you’re wearing a notions hat or articulating a dissenting view.

This is changing in Ireland, but it remains in the dark mineral mass of our skeleton. The recent death of Sinéad O’Connor and the celebration of her life and character felt jarring coming from within a culture that taunted and ostracised her for decades. She was dismissed on the grounds of mental illness, and her activism and lack of deference to authority seen not as brave and subversive, but pathetic and attention-seeking. O’Connor was pilloried. Every Irish person knows someone with some of her qualities, though O’Connor was of course unique.

Such people struggle, and are often blamed and ridiculed for struggling. There are so many wonderful features of our culture — the humour, the humility, the deep connection to art. The ability to find and connect with one another all over the world. The fact that you can meet a random Irish person in a bar in New York and discover every time that their best friend’s second cousin’s boyfriend plays hurling with your brother. But the person who doesn’t, can’t or won’t assimilate — we often fail to make room for them. It can be hard in this cultural environment for anyone to take a risk, or embrace the possibility of falling on their face. The social cost is high.

This is why it feels ‘notions’ to share this decision —not to go to Australia, where there is a long-established route worn by generations of Irish emigrants, among them my own great-grandfather, but to cease something good on my own terms because it doesn’t serve me any more. It’s an immense relief to finally be able to share it. I am very lucky to have my life. Transitioning from Irish to UK media is difficult. There are all manner of hurdles (generally class-based) barring the route here. That’s an article for another day. But to arrive at this place and then say “Okay, I want something else” will register to some as insanity and others as ingratitude or ‘notions’.

However, to stick around for that reason would be to prioritise perception of success over success itself. I want to write what it fulfils me to write. I want a slower, less expensive life. I want to travel more and work less in environments where there is such incentive to signal wealth while generally being abysmally underpaid. I want to visit Ireland every year for long trips to spend time with my family, not a stolen weekend three times a year.

Success is living a life that is meaningful to me. Devoting more time to Substack, which is now — astonishingly, miraculously — making up the largest portion of my income. Hopefully within a year we will have grown to a sufficient extent that I will make enough from Substack to live on and funnel some back into its growth (I’m not there yet) to offer and do more. If I have the resources, I may bring back the podcast. And I’ll be finishing that book I’ve been jabbering on about for the last five years. For me, success is autonomy.

Once you reach the point when you look around at your life and feel uncomfortable with what you see, you can stick with it. Or you can change the things over which you do have control, from small ones to the bigger stuff, insofar as that’s possible for you. I’ve been living on autopilot for a couple of years now. That’s all about to change, in part thanks to you - you’ve helped me to build an income that I can carry with me anywhere. I’m obscenely excited that it’s happening. I hope you’ll come along with me.