Moving on can leave you feeling fragile – but it also creates opportunities for new memories to be madeSunset Removals

I have never liked change. When I was six and we sold our car, I cried. Now I’m on the verge of leaving the house I’ve spent my whole life in. When I come back to Cambridge for Easter term, I will walk out of my front door for the last time and drive out of the gates for the last time and leave somewhere that has brought me so much joy. Each stage of my life has been marked out in this house: coats of paint as I changed my mind about what I wanted, splashes of coffee on my carpet, eyeliner marks on the wood.

I recently found an old film camera in my house. It was nothing special, just a point-and-shoot old camera. I took it with me on a walk into the village I’ve grown up in and spent all my life in. This house is the only place I have memories of as home. I wanted to capture a place that I had resented at times for being far from my friends and for being, in all honestly, quite boring, but a place that I really felt was home. I filled a roll with photos of the village green, the paths I walked down on my way to infant school, my garden, and the trees that had hung over trampolines, swings, and climbing frames. It was a nostalgic experience and one I felt I needed to do. 

“Growing up is hard... no one ever told you about stamp duty”

After my father’s death in January we knew we had to sell the house. It’s a big house for just my mum to live in by herself, and it’s a house for a family to enjoy, for children to play in the garden, and for families to have dinners in the dining room. So we started clearing things out. I spent a couple of days going through things left in the eaves of the loft, finding old school books and reading stories I wrote as child, stick-figure artwork and scribbled-out spelling attempts. I was hit by how long I had spent here. When I came home for the Easter break I knew that this would be the last time I would be in this house and I felt at peace with that. The house was no longer the same, it felt colder and emptier and quieter since Dad was no longer there. Dad was always at home. He was a stay-at-home dad so I spent most of my childhood and teenage years with him always just a shout down the stairs away. And he was no longer there. So it felt a lot less like the home I grew up in. It’s not even as if I am moving far away, only 10 miles, but I will be predominately living alone. It will be my own place, really, and that’s going to be quite strange.

Growing up is hard. You never realise how hard it is until you get sent about 100 pages of forms and reports and legal documents to read through and sign about the flat you’re buying and you realise that no one has ever taught you how this works and no one ever told you about stamp duty. You go to Cambridge under some kind of pretence that you’re an adult and that you’re intelligent, but you soon realise that all you think you know is based on one kind of reality, and that reality can quickly change and suddenly you are waking up to phone calls from insurance companies and estate agents, going to London to sign probate forms, talking to removal men, and you realise that you have no experience of the real world.

As I said, I used to — and to some extent still do — hate change. But I am having to adapt because my entire life is changing. My relationship with myself is changing: I have had to suddenly grow up a lot faster than I imagined. I remember seeing my brother at university, and he always said that university is where you pretend you’re an adult but really the most adult thing you do is sign a lease to rent a house twice, and most of the time you’re still a teenager in a lot of senses and still very reliant on your parents for help.

Caring for my terminally ill father over the Christmas break made me grow up. Roles were reversed. I comforted him as he cried trying to walk up the stairs because his body was crumbling. I fed him food when he was too weak to do it himself. I sat by his bed all day towards the end just to reassure myself that he was still breathing. I held his hand when he told me that he was really scared and I told him it would be okay. I suddenly became the adult and he became the child. I went in the ambulance with him to the hospice. I’m an executor on his will. I have taken on more responsibility than I thought I would at this age. And that itself was a big change; becoming an adult overnight was scary. But change is something you adapt to and you accept. Everything changes. Things have to change, that’s how we move on and move upwards.

When I walk out of my door, and lock it for the last time, I will be closing the door on a huge part of my life, and as scary and daunting as that is, I will also get the opportunity to start afresh and build a home for myself that I can create new memories in. The only way I can reconcile the sadness of leaving a home that has brought me so much happiness is to think of all the happiness that my new home has the potential to hold