On leaving the mainstream path with your kids, and the loneliness nobody warns you about.
Eleven years ago I became a single mum with no job, no plan, and a very clear sense that the conventional path was not going to work for me. Which is a polite way of saying I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and decided to do it anyway.
I pulled my son out of a life I could see clearly where it was going to end up, and I didn’t like it. Not the specifics. The shape of it. The pattern repetition. I couldn’t stand the thought of feeding him what wasn’t working for me in the first place, just because it was familiar, just because it was what everyone around us was doing.
I had no safety net. I just knew that staying was the only thing I was certain wouldn’t work.
Nobody warns you about the loneliness
The day I stopped asking permission to live the way I wanted was the loneliest day of my life. And the scariest one.
Nobody tells you about that loneliness. Not the loneliness of being abandoned, or being physically alone. The loneliness of choosing something the people around you don’t understand, and aren’t entirely sure they want you to choose. This terror runs old in us. Leaving the tribe meant death for so long in human history that some part of the body still treats it that way, even now, even when the “tribe” is just your mother’s opinion or your old friend group’s Sunday routine.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about this in Women Who Run With the Wolves, though she’s talking about something older than any one person’s biography. She describes an instinctual nature that gets quietly domesticated over a lifetime, tamed by families, by culture, by the sheer weight of what’s expected, until a woman forgets she was ever wild to begin with. The way back, she says, is never comfortable. It looks like exile before it looks like anything else. You cross a line of honesty with yourself and you cannot go back, but crossing it doesn’t feel like freedom at first. It feels like falling out of the group you used to belong to.
That’s exactly what it was. Adapted to be the weird one, the different one. Also, eventually, the peaceful one and the resilient one. I like that version of myself. But nobody warned me I’d have to walk through the other one first.
What actually made it work
If I had to distill what actually made it work, it’s this: keep your needs small and your curiosity large. The gap between those two things is where freedom actually breathes.
Don’t wait until it feels safe. It doesn’t feel safe first. It feels safe after, once you’ve survived the uncertainty and realized it was survivable the whole time. Find people already living something close to what you want, just to prove to yourself it actually exists outside your own head.
And be willing to look slightly clueless for longer than feels comfortable. To you, to your family, to everyone in between. In my case that’s been approximately ten out of twelve years.
The permission is the thing you have to give yourself
Nobody is coming to tell you it’s okay to leave a mainstream cookie-cutter life. Not your mother. Not your boss. Not the school. Not your friends who built the same life and decided it was enough. They’ll pull your sweater the best way they can, because that’s what people who love you do when you step off the path they understand.
The permission is the thing you have to give yourself, and it is genuinely the hardest part. Not the tech. Not the logistics. Not even the money, though the money matters and I’ll never pretend otherwise. I started with 2000€ and a ’92 van.
The moment you decide you’re allowed to want a different life from the rest of the lot, that’s the crossing. Everything else is just the road.
Still on the right side of it
Six years later we’re still going. Still mid-journey. Still figuring it out. Happy to be on a beach on a Thursday just because. Nobody warned me that freedom was this much work either, not hard work in the conventional sense, just the constant, patient work of staying honest about what you actually want versus what you’ve been told to want. Those two things can look identical from the outside. From the inside they feel completely different. One sits quietly in the body like something true. The other produces a deep unease we’ve learned to call normal.
I’m still on the right side of that decision every single morning. Not because I arrived somewhere and got to stop choosing. Because I keep choosing it, and it keeps being worth it.