I wrote this post on June 13th 2021 while staying at my friend’s in London. I just came back to the U.K. after one year of travels around Europe and America. And around a million Covid tests.
I lived in the Canary Islands from November 2020 to end of March 2021.
London
I moved to London on the 6th of April 2011. If any of you were there at the time, you might remember the unusual heatwave that week, people drinking pints of cider on ice in beer gardens and hanging out in the parks. It was my birthday just a few days later and it was one of the ones to remember as a lot of my friends joined me for my birthday picnic in Highgate, where I just moved and shared a room with my friend. I had £500 cash that my mother gave me to pay for rent and food before I found a job and earned some money. I was skint, but I was excited and full of hope and ambition. I did have a degree in Architecture in the end.
Step by step, first I got a job in a local bar, and then hotel and was able to even afford a budget holiday in Croatia in July. In September I finally got my first office job. From that moment getting jobs got much easier. I never really applied for any more jobs by myself again, my agents did it for me. I researched the most wanted skills and computer applications at the time and made sure I was proficient in as many as possible. At some point literally everybody wanted me to work for them. And this hadn’t stopped until I eventually dropped out of the architecture profession in April 2019. Exactly 8 years after I moved to London.
The jobs were okay.
I mean, there were some better and worse ones. One was particularly awful though, and I apologise for saying that if anybody who still works there is reading this. But I really, really disliked it, to be honest I hated every minute, every nanosecond of it! Most days I had nothing to do and when I had things to do they were utterly boring, not even slightly creative, and it also took me hours to get to the office, and I was unlucky enough to be placed on the noisy, muddy building site. Hated it to bits. Anyway let’s get to the point.
That job was so boring that I started daydreaming of going away somewhere far and eventually began planing a two week trip to the Philippines. I opened an Instagram account and called it @matonholidays. I thought, one day this will be it: I will just travel places and won’t ever have to worry about horrible jobs and things I didn’t won’t to do.
It was 2014.
A lot of things happened since that time and some of them you might already know if you read any of my previous posts.
That moment though, was truly the moment when I made a promise to myself that one day I would free myself from 9-5 for good. I had absolutely no idea how or when that would happen but I knew it would.
I remember I just got a new bicycle through the government’s Cycle to Work scheme and went for a ride to the Epping Forest.
I posted a selfie. That bike ride was the moment when I manifested my own future.
