Ready or Not — Suzey Ingold

It was early August, or thereabouts. The sun had set some time ago, the neon lights of King Street and Toronto’s Entertainment District cutting through the dark night sky. The office floor was empty, save for me, the harsh flourescent lights hanging overhead, my laptop sitting abandoned at my desk. I pressed my hands into the ledge and touched my forehead to the glass. I couldn’t keep doing this. Not just the late nights at the office and the insistent pressure of a job that had become my identity over the past few years. But any of this.

Toronto. The high-rise, concrete block maze that had once seemed so exciting, like everything I had ever wanted, was starting to cage me in, leaving me both suffocated and yet stagnant. I wasn’t unhappy, but I was stuck. And somewhere in the course of the past six months, in the rush of the spring that always promised more time and space than it ever actually gave, Toronto had stopped feeling like home – just a place I returned to from being elsewhere.

The more I left the city last summer, the more I realised I didn’t want to return.

I decided then it would be my last summer with that festival, and my last summer in Toronto. The following June, I would turn 30 years old, and by the time that came, I would be gone.

And the thing about me is that once I set my mind to something, I’m probably going to do it.

Yet, I thought I’d have more time. I thought, in the wake of Kilimanjaro and returning to the overcast January skies, I’d have more time to process it all, to settle my feet in before I was taking off again. Instead, the early months of the year rushed by in a chaotic flurry of work, and short trips with friends, and family grief. I hadn’t a moment to catch my breath, let alone to try to sink back into my creative pursuits as I’d hoped I might be able to. I grabbed onto the speeding train going past and just held on, and hoped that at some point a station might come into sight.

But with each sharp turn and bend that train took, the more I realised how much this move was exactly the right thing for me, at exactly the right time. I needed space to be able to grow professionally. I needed to be closer to family. I needed to find somewhere to call home.

But there’s a difference between that need and feeling ready for it. I didn’t know how to feel ready for any of it. But nor had I known how to feel ready to climb Mount Kilimanjaro months before; nor had I known how to feel ready to lead a team the year before.

It was my spin instructor, ever a source of inspirational quotes in my life, that said to a full Friday class one day: “You’re ready when you decide to be ready”. And I’d decided.

I said my goodbyes in stages, over what felt like many months by the end. I said goodbye to my job, first, and learned to reconcile this with the idea that that didn’t mean a goodbye to my career. I said goodbye to some of my favourite places, bit by bit; to easy hops to New York, and to corners of my own city forgotten in the rush.

I said my goodbyes to friends many times over, in various places, squeezing everyone as tightly as they would let me. But those goodbyes are different, because they’re not really goodbye. They are see you sometime. They’re see you someplace. I knew that kind of goodbye already – I’d done it, six years ago, to move to Canada. So I knew firsthand just how little they were a goodbye. And what a privilege, to have friends all over the world, just as I’ve always seen with my parents and their seemingly infinite global network that they stay in touch with even now in their older years.

The kind of goodbye that takes time is that to the place. Not the physical place, so much as the place you inhabited as the you you were there. And that kind of goodbye is the hardest, because you can never return to that.

I’ve done that before, too. And it took me many years to understand that feeling and what it meant.

Carrying Toronto with me into the next chapter.

I’ve been putting it off, this time. I didn’t face it in Toronto, wrapping myself up in the logistics of another international move and making the most of the time I had left with friends. Back here, at my parents’ house in Scotland, my temporary resting point for the summer, I busied myself with organising my belongings as best as I could into a room that’s no longer mine, and preparing for a month-long trip.

Until today. Today, I let myself say that goodbye. To the woman I was at 24 when I first moved to Toronto, still so young, and to the woman I’ve become in those six years. Just as I know that time was exactly right for me to grow as I have, so I know that the years to come are ones I need to spend here, in Europe, pursuing some bigger dreams. Like home ownership. (Kidding. But, also, not.)

Because as a truly great woman I know said once, “you have to keep living to keep writing”.