People Are Quick To Judge

I was chatting to Tom the other day because we’ve had quite a few messages recently saying things like…

“Watching you both has made us finally book the trip.”

“You’ve inspired us to stop waiting and just do it.”

“I love seeing you both create a life on your own terms.”

Honestly… it’s truly the nicest thing to read. To know that by simply documenting our life, someone else has felt encouraged to finally say ‘yes’ to something they’ve been dreaming about and just go for it!

For anyone new here, to give you a very quick overview, Tom and I made the decision earlier this year to leave the UK for a while.

We’d just renovated our dream home in London, were in the middle of planning our wedding, work was going well, life looked pretty settled… and then within a matter of weeks we packed everything into storage, rented the house out and left.

(be sure to read my previous Substack posts for more context)

Since then we’ve lived in Bali, spent time in Dubai, been back to the UK and we’re now based in Lisbon for the summer.

At the time… I genuinely think a lot of people thought we’d completely lost the plot. And to be completely honest, I don’t blame them. From the outside it didn’t make much sense. We had our ‘dream’ house, our friends and family nearby, everything looked how you’re “supposed” to do it.

So naturally people questioned why we’d walk away from that???

The funny thing is… fast forward a few months and the conversations have completely changed.

Instead of…

“Why would you leave?”

It’s become…

“How have you made this work?”

“We’re thinking of doing something similar.”

“You’ve inspired us to finally take the leap.”

And that’s what got me thinking… Coming back to the UK for a few weeks actually confirmed something I’d been thinking about for a while.

Not that everyone should move abroad… but just how conditioned we all are to believe there’s only one “right” way to live.

I want to chat about this in more depth, and if you’re someone with big ideas, ambitious goals or a dream that feels a little different… this might be the reminder you need.