Eliza S Robinson

So Long, Glasgow

I don’t know when the seasons changed. August turned to September and half the leaves are red, and I’m leaving Glasgow tomorrow. Today it’s eight years since I moved here, and tomorrow I leave it all behind. I thought by this point I would have something to say on the matter, but the only thing I seem capable of writing right now is my horrendously long to-do list.

When I think of Glasgow, I think of my student years. They feel so distant now, half-faded photographs in my mind’s eye, but they live larger in my head than everything that came after. I wish I could bottle up the good parts, capture the fleeting feelings that have long since faded. When I walk around this city, I see layer upon layer of the lives I lived here. The landscape shifted, taken over by blocks of student accommodation and bubble tea shops. Cafes closed and seasons changed, but my ghosts still flit in and out of my peripheral vision.

I have lived in six different flats in Glasgow, but I haven’t moved to a new city since I was 18, when I came here. Moving to London will be the biggest move of my life, and I’m so excited, but I also don’t know what to do. How do you say goodbye to the place where you have lived all of your adult life? I’m leaving with such little fanfare that I feel like I’ve barely left an impression here at all. I don’t know how to feel about leaving, because most of the things I’ll miss ended years ago. My friends moved away, I graduated university, I lost much of my sparkly side. And I mourned all of that, for years. So now that I’m finally leaving, all I really feel is emptiness and melancholia. I miss people I haven’t spoken to in years. I miss people I still speak to regularly, but who live far away. A significant percentage of the people I love live in different countries now. In Glasgow, I’m pretty much the last man standing, and I don’t know the protocol for being the last to leave. Turn out the metaphorical lights, slip the keys through the letterbox, don’t look behind me as I walk away?

I wish I could dip into the past, occupy the space my ghosts now haunt. I wish for one more walk down Dumbarton Road with my friend, catching the reflection of my long blue coat in a dark window. I would have walked so much slower if I knew it was the last time. I wish to sit on the floor of the zen room in Tchai Ovna, drinking lavender tea with my shoes off. I wish for group hugs after improv shows, and long nights in the university library. I wish for afternoon coffees in S’mug with my best friend, and drinking too much cider at parties until I’m lying on the floor rambling about my crush of the week. I miss so many people, and when I let myself feel that ache of longing, the melancholia swallows me whole. Everyone changed. I changed. I love my friends so much, and we can never go back to that moment in time. I left the Glasgow I loved years ago, without moving an inch.

When I move to London, I won’t need to cling on to the past so much. Because my world will be new and exciting, and I won’t have to mine memories for dopamine the way I do now. I so rarely get what I want in life, and I have finally achieved a goal that was years in the making. In two weeks from now, I will start my PhD. After years of laying the groundwork, I am beginning my academic career. I worked so hard for this; I still can’t believe I made it to this point.

I often feel like nothing has happened in the past couple of years. As if I haven’t spent two years learning Ukrainian, and working on a PhD application, and pushing myself far enough out of my comfort zone to take the necessary steps to change my life completely. I’m sure there’ll be many times during the next three years where I wonder if I’m cut out for this, or convince myself I don’t deserve to be there. There will always be someone more skilled or qualified. But I have proven to myself that I am willing to go above and beyond for this. I finally get to return to academia, and do meaningful work. It is all I have wanted for so, so long.

My last few years in Glasgow have been a cautionary tale, plagued by inertia and loneliness. I haven’t made new close friends since university. Even though I have been around good people, I didn’t meet many people who shared my interests, and so many of my interpersonal relationships were surface level. I spent years blaming that on luck and circumstance, but the truth is: I could have tried harder. I was burnt out and exhausted, and I didn’t have the energy to push myself out of my social comfort zone. But that has to change in London. I can’t make the same mistakes again. I feel like I’ve wasted the past few years, yet somehow, I came out the other side as a completely different person. And I got the outcome I wanted.

I wish I had had more close friends around me in the past few years, but at least the lack of that makes it so much easier to leave. If I went back to myself in her final year of university, and asked her what she wanted her life to look like in four years’ time, she would have said she wanted to be in a relationship, and have a good career. She might have named a specific person and a specific career path, neither of which came to be. But rejection is redirection, and I fell in love with someone better for me, and am working towards a career path that feels inevitable in retrospect. Because my whole life has been about my education. I was homeschooled until I was 15. When I finally did go to school, so much of it was awful. Persevering was a choice. University was a revelation, and once I found my love for academia, I was determined to never let it go. Of course I’m doing a PhD, of course I’m devoting my life to academia. All the foundations for my current choices were laid out well over a decade ago. None of this was accidental.

I have no doubts about moving to London. My world has felt so small these past few years, and I can’t wait for it to blossom into something new. There are times where I’ve felt like I hated Glasgow – usually when it rained for 10 days straight, or drunk old men tried to talk to me at the bus stop, or I looked at grocery prices and remembered what they were in 2017. I need to leave for my own sanity, but I don’t hate it here. Ultimately, I will remember Glasgow as a city where I was loved, and a city where I learnt who I am and who I could be. I met my best friends here; I fell in love here. All I have done since moving here is love the people around me. And I miss the years where I had more people to love, the years where my life was filled with friendships and theatre. But there has barely been a moment in the past eight years where there wasn’t at least one person who loved me here. This city has given me so much, but it couldn’t give me everything I needed, and it’s better to move away now than to spend years resenting a place I used to love.

Leaving means reckoning with the stories I’ve told myself about this place. Asking myself, was it ever that good to begin with? Was I ever truly happy here? When I look back on the eight years I’ve lived here, happiness isn’t the first word that springs to mind. There was no week or month or year where things were wholly good, because that isn’t how life works. But there were three or four years where I had a full, well-rounded life. Even if I wasn’t happy, per se, I felt the full range of human emotion in this city. My time here was meaningful, and I met people who showed me worlds I never could have imagined without them.

But there is space in my heart for so much more. The joy and purpose and belonging I will (hopefully) feel in London won’t negate the times I’ve felt them here. I grew up so much here, and the person I am now is worlds away from the 18-year-old who moved here. She needed different things than I do now. By choosing to leave it all behind, I finally feel like myself again.