Since I moved to London last August I’ve had to adjust to lots of things. At first, the most pressing life problem was being able to financially support myself in one of the most expensive cities in the world, whilst also leaving myself enough time in between jobs to pursue the career which brought me here in the first place. Not easy to do. Then I had the added pressure of moving all my hospitals down here and making sure that I could receive the treatment I need even though none of the doctors here knew me. Again, not ideal and I’m still waiting for the pair of shoes I ordered back in October. But I want to give the disability talk a rest today – imagine ! – and chat about what’s going on in my brain instead.

Something I’ve realised about myself as I’ve become total self-sufficient is that I have a tendency to want to run away from things when I get overwhelmed. I’ll pack a million things into my days, tell myself I can handle it, struggle with the concept of being bored, eventually crash, and then feel this desperate need for space and quiet. So in those moments I get in my car and I run to the seaside, or to a secluded lake or field, or to my parents’ living room; all places where I feel like I can be truly quiet and not allow my brain to run at a hundred miles an hour. Just for a minute.

A couple of months ago, I was getting to that point again after my most recent stint of hard graft, and I met up with a friend who I hadn’t seen in years. We sat and summarised our lives since the last time we’d spoken – not a simple feat when you’ve had whole university degrees and countless life changes since your last chat, but we gave it a go. Once we got onto asking each other how we’d both found moving to the capital, my friend managed to capture exactly how I was feeling in a way that I just hadn’t been able to for months. I’d told her that sometimes I feel so claustrophobic in this massive city, that even having to go at 20 miles per hour everywhere can make me feel like I can’t breathe and I don’t know why; it’s not like there aren’t a million places or go or people to see all the time. At which point she came back with, ‘it’s because there’s no horizon anywhere’. And for me, that simple sentence managed to summarise everything I’d been feeling so beautifully.

She’s going to love that blog feature as well, so happy Tuesday to you mate.

This idea that every day I go to work or out to meet friends or just to wander around, but there’s no end to the city skyline everywhere I look leaves me feeling like I’m boxed in. It’s wonderful and vibrant, and there’s always so much going on, but there’s no space, so the northern country girl in me ends up feeling periodically trapped in a corner by the constant light and sound. Thus I wake up some days and all I want to do is look at something expansive like a field or the sea, or drive at 60 miles per hour on a road to feel like I’m actually going somewhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I love everything that the city has to offer as far as opportunity and creativity are concerned, but most people here work themselves to the bone, so that, mixed with the constant sensory stimulation, tires (!) me (!) out every now and then. In my core, I’ll always be the Yorkshire gal, and with that comes the love for a field. Somewhere quiet where all you can hear are the sheep and the river. In those spaces I breathe better and I don’t feel quite so tense. But the radio stations aren’t in the fields and I’ve got things to do, so if keeping a life in the city means that I’ve got to run away for a bit every month or so then so be it. There are worse coping mechanisms to have.