I’m an adult now. I don’t know when it happened really, it just sort of snuck up on me. And I have to admit, it takes a bit of getting used to.

I can tell because I’m starting to experience all those things that adults talk about. Work has begun and the initial shock of it has mostly subsided. I’m beginning to feel as settled in this routine as I did in school, except this one has no end date.

A lot of things are hard, but they’re not hard in an immediate way like navigating the social landscape of school is, they’re hard in a vast and long term way where you know that the decisions you make today, small or big, are the cheap spongy buttons on the controller for the rest of your life. And the save key has stopped working. Its hard to to make friends, Its hard to keep in touch with the friends you do have, its hard to decide where to live, its hard to imagine what on earth you would choose to be doing with your day in five years.

All the same I’m kinda enjoying it. When I was in primary school I used to worry that this was meant to be the best time of my life. People said that children were so carefree, so happy just to be. Now that I look back on it I realise those people have completely forgotten what it feels like to be that young. It may look carefree but that’s a child at the top of a precarious peak that could collapse at any second on the whim of many many things. Life is an emotional roller-coaster, though it does slow down with age. Now that it has slowed down, I can start to take decisions that I can really think about, plan my life in ways that were completely impossible before. Long term thinking is here to stay.

I moved to Edinburgh six months ago and I want to build a life here. I’ve got a flat, I filled it with furniture, I’ve registered to vote here and I promise I’m going to get round to registering for a local GP like any day now. My sister and her amazing family are here and I’m eternally grateful for them and their company as well as all my other friends. It does take time to settle into a new city, but I can feel it slowly starting to happen. Feeling contentedly secure in a place is an awesome and rare thing.

In my life at the moment I’m in a rather different position to most people I know, and most people throughout history. I have the option to go anywhere. I have a job that is remote and I don’t have family or a spouse tying me down. What I do have is a lot of easy and fun opportunities to travel all over the world. Whilst travelling is great, I really have to investigate my motivation to do it. Am I simply running away from the difficult task of making a home for myself here? Going to all these places is great, but in the end I have to come back. There needs to be something to come back to. Maybe it is unwise of me to hold myself back like this, but right now I want to create something lasting for myself. I want to establishing myself here. I want to be an adult.