Turn Your Life Story Into aBeautiful Biography

The morning I boarded the plane to London, I was twenty-three years old and had never left the country. My suitcase was too heavy. I had packed as though I might never return. I remember the way my mother held my face in her hands at the departure gate, saying nothing, just looking at me the way mothers do when they are memorising you.

London in October was grey and cold and completely unlike anything I had imagined. I had built it up from books and films into something almost mythological, so the reality of it was both a disappointment and a relief: the smell of diesel on the Underground, the indifferent shuffle of commuters, the way the city simply got on with itself regardless of the fact that I had arrived. Nobody was waiting for me. I was just another person with a bag.

But then, on my third day, I found myself standing in front of the British Museum in a light rain, and something shifted. I realised I had made a decision entirely my own, paid for by my own savings and planned by no one else, and that I was standing in it. That feeling has never entirely left me. It became the template for every journey since: the sense that to travel is to choose yourself, over and over again, in places that don’t know your name.