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Chapter 1

The story about it being the right time for me to have an adventure

 

Maybe it’s odd; being a teenager and wanting to up sticks, to leave all my friends behind and move to a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language; where I would have to go to a brand new school; where I didn’t know anybody. 

 

I think that if my parents had said that we were moving a hundred miles down the road I could well have ‘strongly’ objected, but weirdly as we were moving across basically a whole, entire continent to a completely different life; it did actually seem quite appealing. 

 

It was felt like it was going to be so different that it was almost impossible to imagine how different it was going to be.

 

But Mmoving to Italy was also going to be about leaving things behind. The question is; how much baggage can a teenage girl have to leave behind? The answer is: it is a lot; there were some petty arguments that just hadn’t got resolved, and a few ‘so called friends’ that I was no longer speaking to, and that was at times awkward especially on the school bus home when some serious carving out of territory was going on.

 

At school I was surviving under the radar, doing the minimum work to get by. Though socially I had a large group of friends, who I would be in and out with; much of my time was spent trying not to draw too much attention to myself whilst at the same time trying to endear myself to the older girls smoking behind the bike sheds (this is a cliché everywhere). I was doing all I could to walk the line between fitting in, not getting bullied, whilst trying to maintain my own identity.

 

At home I got to roam free. We lived on an old farm, with barns and grain silos to play in, and we played across the fields, in the streams, and then in and out of each other’s houses. 

 

Through all of this though; I was getting older.

 

I was turning into someone else and the edges of the village started to become the boundary to my teenage years. I had started to feel a bit isolated, when all my friends lived in town.

 

Turning into a teenager was bringing other issues too. Looking back I realise that I also had started developing low level anxiety that meant that was I rigidly sticking to routines to try avoid ‘bad things’ happening. I was also probably a bit bored and under stimulated too.

 

It looked very much like moving to Naples was a much-needed step. It was going to be a change for the better, and edges to my world were just about to go stratospheric.  Continue reading...

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