I’m Emma, I am a 24-year-old chemistry graduate with no idea what I want from life, other than to be happy. 

Life hasn’t always been easy. I kind of assumed I’d always be some level of sad. I think I have fair reason to be, growing up with an alcoholic mother wasn’t a walk in the park. Nor was losing her at the end of 2021. When I was younger, I felt a lot of anger towards my mother for her alcoholic tendencies. Nowadays, all I feel towards her is a great deal of sympathy, sadness and understanding. 

I spend a lot of time wondering what the impact of her illness had on shaping who I am. I often get called mature, resilient and independent- those I can certainly attribute to her situation. Those aren’t bad traits to have. But there will be character traits I possess that aren’t so useful- I am a people pleaser, constantly reading others emotions, and terrified of conflict (there was a lot of it in our family home); I also spend most of my time feeling very alone in this world. 

I stumbled into happiness following an acutely unhealthy couple of years spent neglecting myself; I can now look back and say with certainty that I was heftily depressed- perhaps highlighted by the fact I saw absolutely no reason to stick around.

How things have changed!

I remember waking up one morning in August with a suspicious lack of anxiety and sadness. And then, the most unfamiliar feeling followed:

 hope. 

It wasn’t long after that I was off to Nepal and India for two months. This time was indescribably happy, carefree and enhancing. I met incredible people, experienced things and learnt lessons that I could not have comprehended, let alone anticipated when I was packing my 45L pack.

Exercise, the outdoors, and adventure have been my outlets for a long time now. It’s very rare you end up feeling worse after any of these things. So it’s not entirely surprising that in my year out, I’ve chosen to utilise all three and cycle around New Zealand.

My enthusiasm for cycling assuredly peaked before my mother’s death. I can attribute the decline to a severe reduction in mental and physical energy- having been absorbed by grief. Since then, I’ve probably done the same amount of kilometres in half a year than I used to do in a month. But that’s okay. Hopefully, my legs haven’t forgotten what long-distance cycling is, or New Zealand is going to be a bit of a shock to the system.

I’m honestly not sure about what I want this platform to be, and I’m probably not going to define it because I’m not sure about a lot of things in life, and everything has worked out okay so far. On the topic, my good friend Sarah said:

 “As it grows and more people read it you’ll probably inspire someone or relate to someone and give them a push to step out of their comfort zone and speak about things openly”. 

It would be really cool if that happened.