Leaving My Relationship and the Country to Find Myself

When I first started dating my London boyfriend — the only one in my four years there — I knew that he smoked a joint now and then. This was something we would never have in common. I’d already dated someone who smoked more than he breathed, and it put me off for life. Starting every day with the smell of someone else’s weed and hangover breath will do that.

So when we moved in together in June 2022, we both agreed on one rule: no weed in the flat. I didn’t mind what he did with his friends, but moving further from them was part of his plan to quit anyway.

Come New Year’s Eve, I felt like my life was finally coming together; I had a dream job offer in clinical psychology, and I was staying up with my now long-term partner to watch the fireworks from our balcony.

At 11:15 p.m., he wanted to smoke. It became an argument.

He spent the next half hour out looking for weed as I sobbed at the kitchen table. My faith in the relationship had been wiped out in minutes. He came back empty-handed; even his dealer knew better than to ditch New Year’s plans this late.

As 2023 went on, I couldn’t ignore his habits anymore. While my relationship faltered, my dream job didn’t survive, either. I spent every waking moment entrenched in someone’s worst days. After eight hours triaging and treating psychological trauma, I would come home to an apartment filled with greasy takeout trash and dirty plates he ate my dinner on. I resigned at the end of the year.

I had watched him descend into the addiction hole, but I was sure I would see him climb out of it. Foolishly, I thought you could love someone out of the hole. In September, struggling to pay bills, he moved out — but we stayed together.

I stayed in the apartment, working on a writing business — report writing had become the only part of my job I could handle — and supplementing my income with dog walking and event work.

After spending three days in a rage that read to me like the brink of psychosis, he demanded I choose between him and my friends. I was desperate to help him, but he’d given me an ultimatum. We broke up in March of 2024.

I was suddenly free. I had work I could do anywhere and no one else to consider, just a stifling apartment with suffocating memories.

New Zealand seemed like it could offer a way out. I had a fantasy that being on the other side of the world would turn me upside down and unclog some backed-up pipes in my brain, freeing parts of me that might have gotten stuck.

In July 2024, I wrote: “If everything is upside down there, that means the friends will be shitty but the beers will be cheap.” I flew out six months later to find I was wrong on both counts, but right about the rest of it.

In New Zealand, I’ve discovered parts of myself that felt like unlived lifetimes from before. I took up CrossFit and now compete as an athlete. I gained long-term writing contracts and started to write creatively, which was a childhood dream. I even rescued a cat.

I thought I had everything you were supposed to have to be “on track” in your mid-twenties: a stable career, a partner, and a rental you can barely afford. Now, as my thirties peek over the horizon, I’m everything I hardly dared to dream of: an athlete, a writer, and a certified cat lady, woken up by tūī (a native kiwi songbird) every morning.