#invisible2visible

For as long as I can remember, I have been lucky. I have been lucky to have met so many wonderful people in my 25 years; I have been lucky to have visited the countries I have wound up in, the experiences that have presented themselves to me and the lessons I have learned along the way. Above all, I am lucky for having the family I have. For as long as my pea-sized brain can remember, my parents have always given me the belief that I could do anything and that I could become anything if I set my mind to it. They never once ushered me down a particular path or put pressure on me to become a particular type of person. The only real aspiration that they have always had for me (and my brother for that matter) is to be happy and, as I sit here on a cloudy afternoon in Scotland's capital city, I can happily say I am thankful for that.

As I am sure most former pupils of the European School of Luxembourg will agree, it was an institution that had expectations of its attendees. From a young age, we were engineered to follow the path of School- University-Job. Without even knowing it, our futures were being drummed into us and we, as naive, fortunate little shits, never once questioned it. If you wound up in the British section, you were forced to listen to a Careers Counselor who couldn't quite seem to to take her eyes away from your chest, regardless of your gender and suggested that you would be suited to a certain field as a result of your subjects at school, strong-arming you into believing that you would excel in certain universities in the United Kingdom. Needless to say I found myself applying for Law and Politics. Really? Me? I don't even bloody vote. For all my parents' teaching, I was trapped and I thought that was that. Through a sheer twist of fate, I wound up in the granite jungle of Aberdeen, initially starting off with Legal Studies and Philosophy. Before long, I changed to English and French after realising I wasn't much suited to Legal Studies. Probably a good thing too for the legal industry...

I plowed on for 4 years with damning statistics for attendance, a hatred for Michel Proust and a new-found love of the English language. I was fortunate enough to have a great job which in turn introduced me to some of the best people I know, a wonderful girlfriend and offered a new outlook on life. In the midst of my final semester of my academic career, I started thinking about what I was going to do with my life. Up until this point, decision-making was not exactly a forte, which probably led me to making some rather naive  decisions. At the time, I was reading a lot of travel writing such as Bill Bryson's uncompromisingly funny "Neither Here Nor There" and following bloggers such as Derek Baron, better known as Wandering Earl at www.wanderingearl.com. For the first time in my life, I had found something I wanted to do. It hit me like a wrecking ball (not to quote eccentric songstress Miley Cyrus) and it was great. I was going to become a permanent traveler and write about my travels and not a single thing was going to stop me- I was on a mission! The only problem was that I had no experience in developing my narrative voice, no clue where I was going and not enough money to properly fund my extensive travel itinerary. Thus, Invisible To The Visible was born.

As the curtains closed on my university career and my life in Aberdeen, I had decided New Zealand would be my first stop and no sooner had I decided on the southern hemisphere as my first port of call, I was there. I spent 6 months soaking up everything Aotearoa had to offer, travelling the length and breadth of both islands but not seeing nearly enough, making new friendships along the way and finally putting pen to paper to make Invisible To The Visible a shining beacon of success. Until I stopped writing. I don't know why I did, it wasn't as if I didn't have enough ideas to jotted down to share with the world. For a couple of months, my writing was put on the back-burner along with my dreams of a permanent, nomadic writer's existence. I returned to Scotland under false pretenses and found myself a little bit lost and for the first time in my ife, I felt isolated and without sugar-coating it, lonely. I had bugger all money, nowhere to live and I had just passed up on the greatest opportunity to live life on my terms ever. In desperate need of cash, I landed myself a job working as an account executive for a creative marketing firm. One minute I was sunning myself on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, the next I am sucked into the nine-to-five rat race which I had always vowed I would never do if it wasn't a position I truly believed in. By my own admission, I was a hypocrite. A liar. A total and undeniable twat.

Sure, it wasn't all that bad; I found myself living in a stunning apartment in a beautiful part of Edinburgh, closer to my family and friends than I was 12,000 miles away in Auckland. I tried to relaunch my blog without success. Yet again, I had no clear direction and no focus on what steps I would take to make it a go-to blog for travel enthusiasts and others who might find my ramblings interesting. At the time, I had a wealth of ideas that I wanted to start on and visions of where I wanted to take Invisible To The Visible but in my scrambling for inspiration, I simply gave up for the second time.

That is, until the start of this year. At the start of 2015, I gave myself a good talking to (out of earshot of anyone else because the local loony bin would have been alerted to a rather plump white male shouting obscenties at himself in the mirror) and for the first time ever, actually sat down and plotted what I wanted to do, where I wanted to end up and how I was going to get there. After a couple of years of faffing about, you learn that having a written plan is most invaluable. This, essentially, is my last shot if I want to make something of myself. Not only do I want to prove to myself that I am capable of making a career out of what I love doing but also to those who have followed Invisible to the Visible since its inception. I want to prove that nothing is impossible if you are willing to go through hell and high water for it. Above all, I want to repay my folks for the faith that they have shown in me.

The idea is to start off small. My one true love is the English written word, followed in close second by travelling so if I could make a good go of combining the two, which is what I initially set out to do in 2013, then I am already in a commanding position. The most important thing for any writer, and this something I have learned from authors such as Walter Mosley, is to write frequently. Personally speaking, being disciplined enough to sit down for three hours of the day and write is demanding but then whoever said success came easy? Ideally, I would love to finally get in to the habit of writing on a daily basis, to at least exercise the many ideas I have milling about in my overly large head. I think anyone can write for the sake of writing but through my blog I would like to have the ability to publish articles that are alluring, that make the audience want more.

In time, I would love to have a blog (or a website) that is established as a multi-disciplinary platform to showcase everything from apparel to art, from film-making to photography, transcending into an all-encompassing creative space that people can visit for that little bit of inspiration and simply enjoy. So I guess this really is a fresh start for me and I am pretty chuffed that I am in a position for the first time ever where I can really start getting the wheels in motion instead of giving up at the first sign of stress. I have a couple of trips planned this summer and I am in the process of compiling an article about my recent trip to Copenhagen, so be sure to keep an eye out as I report back on my first trip to Scandinavia.