Just a little under a year ago I made a decision I was sure would impact the rest of my life for the better. I was only a year out from graduating college with a degree in English, but I had another passion: weather. I decided that I would finish my English degree and then proceed immediately to Georgia Tech to study Earth and Atmospheric Science. From there I would get a good job working at the Weather Channel and somehow – somehow – find a way to pursue my passion out onto the Great Plains each and every spring for storm season. I was set. I was excited. My future was fresh and promising.

In the midst of my excitement, though, I had to face reality. Quiet evenings which were spent reading Shakespeare one hour and studying physics and calculus the next were often interrupted by ambulance sirens and long stays in the Emergency Room. My mother was ill. She’d never been particularly healthy, but things were getting worse now. She’d always been there for me and I was determined not to leave her side, even if it meant lugging a bag full of books up to the hospital day after day. Finally she told me that she and my stepfather had decided to move back to England so that she could be with the rest of her family.

“Will you go?”

“No.” I answered immediately, looking out at the horizon where a particularly beautiful cumulonimbus cloud was alight with the setting sun. “No I won’t.”

But the thought of being left alone in a country which had never quite felt like home became more than I could bear. And then there was always the writing. Even when I was determined to be a meteorologist I was still adamant that writing would be a large part of my existence. After weeks of soul-searching, I decided that I would always have a passion for the weather, but my passion for the pen and for my family was much stronger, and they were both passions which could be more actively pursued across the pond.

So here I find myself, one year later, and I look around the house which was once filled with the trinkets of a life here in the US to find it now hollow and empty. Everything we once had has either been sold or packed away. Even the family pet must go. But there is a plane ticket sitting on my desk for a flight which departs to London in exactly two weeks. Suitcases half-packed sit along the wall in my empty bedroom, and the books which have surrounded me for the last four years are packed away in boxes, waiting to be shipped to their new home in the United Kingdom. I am giddy with excitement, and sick with fear.

What does it mean to give up the things you love for your family, and for an uncertain future in a country you only half-belong to? The prospect of not being able to drive to the top of a mountain and look out at the storms as they dump rain and wind all over the South on a summer’s day is terrifying, but so is the thought of walking the streets of London with nothing but a dream and a few books to my name. I am scared. Have I made the right choices? Will this gamble pay off? So far things are coming easily enough. Visas have been issued, citizenship has been established, and I receive nothing but encouragement from my mentors, but the fear is still there. The gamble has begun. 

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