Reckoning with the hedonism of my 20’s

Was it hedonism? There was certainly a hefty dose of that, but at its core, it was more like a rejection of 'modern life’ or the modern life I felt subscribed to anyway. I remember telling my mum, ' I don’t want the white picket fence and the job and the kids and the same boring life as everyone else’. Her response, that those things often contained the most meaning, couldn’t penetrate the bubble of my 23-year-old ego. I was going places, just not in the corporate sense.

When I left New Zealand aged 21 I hadn’t yet formed this intense worldview. I set off for Spain, my suitcase bursting with ‘going-out’ dresses from Superette (I bankrupted myself to buy them) and my GHD straightener. You could take the girl out of Auckland, but you couldn’t take the Auckland out of the girl, yet.

It wasn’t until I was living in Guatemala, marooned there after losing all my bank cards and working in a hostel that illumination struck. Like a teenager watching The Matrix for the first time my brain lit up with possibilities ‘What if I just did this forever?’ I mused. I hatched plans for my eternal life on the road, and read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac.

After a few more solo sojourns into Central and South America, I was deeply embedded in my ‘fringe-of-society’ persona, as fringe as one could be while funding their travels working on a superyacht. I wanted to experience it all. If life were a fable of the tortoise and the hare, I was the hare. Racing through a world filled with endless possibilities and roads branching off into different lives I might lead. None of which involved any kind of realistic financial security.

At 25, I shacked up in rural Galicia with a single mother from Germany and her two kids, trading food and accommodation for shoveling horse poo and gardening. She was anti-marriage anti-establishment, and a raging feminist, fuel to the fire of my growing anarchic worldview. At one point I wanted to get an A for anarchy tattoo (LOL) thankfully that one wasn’t carried out; it would have been a cute look at the playground.

Eventually, I started to drift back down to earth. Time and maturity afforded me a new perspective. What an enormously privileged position it is to shrug off ambition like it wasn’t necessary for survival. As if I would be exempt from striving for something more. As if it was clever or cool to want to be exempt in the first place. The image of myself barefoot, playing a bongo on a beach in Central America until my skin was leathery began to dissolve.

In its place came the image of myself measured against my peers. Those who had opted for a more ‘normal’ trajectory, which included goals and career progression and the sowing of seeds that were beginning to bloom into a beautiful life. While my friends own businesses, impressive careers, and houses, I have fading finger tattoos by a Colombian man called Emilio, and increasingly hazy memories of my life ‘on the road’.

I always thought there was time on the ‘other side’ to cultivate something more stable but at 34, I’ve just started to nudge the dial on what I was earning 10 years earlier. Of course, this comes with a bunch of caveats—I’ve had a baby, switched careers, and moved countries multiple times—but still, it gives me pause to reflect on whether I would make the same choices if I had a second spin on the cosmic roulette of life.

It turns out illumination can strike twice. To nurture anything long-lasting and meaningful—whether it be a career you care about, relationships with your partner, family, friends, or children—requires stability, stillness, and the discipline to build a world for yourself and those you share it with. So now, steady as a tortoise, I plod along toward a house deposit, without an international flight in sight. But when I’m tucked up in bed with Taika to read the same book for the 1000th time I think maybe Mum was right all along.