The Ship in Port

Last month I turned twenty-five, an age that seems impossibly old not because I have any delusions of becoming wrinkled and grey in my mid-twenties, but because I only recently fully comprehended that I am no longer a teenager.

This has me thinking about growth, about moving from one phase of life to the next, and what I want this next phase of my life—real, undeniable adulthood—to look like.

I blogged voraciously throughout high school despite accruing an embarrassingly low readership, never caring that I was screaming into the void because I felt the screaming itself was necessary. During university, I took a break to focus on writing essays, and when I tried to return, I realised that the self I portrayed on my high school blog no longer felt like me. Now that I’ve graduated, I feel my fingers itching to type again, so it seems like the perfect time to reintroduce myself in a new corner of the internet.

So, let me do that. My name is Kailee. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, but from a young age I dreamt about living in the United Kingdom. After high school my dream became a reality when I spent a perfect six months enrolled in a gap year programme in the Lake District.

Although I planned to return to the United States for college the following year, I was conscious that nowhere I planned to apply really appealed to me. I was looking for something specific that I couldn’t seem to find and, more than anything, I wanted to stay in the UK. I felt as though I had tasted the forbidden fruit—now that I had lived abroad, how could I ever return to the US to do something as pedestrian as going to college?

I was lamenting the above to family friends over the winter holidays when they asked whether I would consider studying outside the US. Strange as it sounds, the possibility had never occurred to me. Later that same month, like fate, a friend from my programme told me about the university she would be attending the following year, the University of St Andrews, and I knew immediately it was the place I was looking for: an academically rigorous, ancient institution with rich traditions, a relatively high acceptance rate for its top-three league table ranking, too many societies to count, in a small seaside town in Scotland. I had missed the application deadline, but I was so convinced it was the place for me that I decided to go home, work, and apply for the following year.

To be safe, I applied to several US colleges along with the five UK universities allotted to me through the UCAS application system. When I received my acceptance email from St Andrews, I was elated. I had never felt so excited, relieved, or proud of myself.

Despite this, I decided to do the logical thing and wait for the rest of my decisions to come in. I worried that I was being too rash, making decisions with my heart instead of my head. When I received other offers, instead of excitement I felt the overwhelming weight of the decision I now had to make, between what I felt was the safe option: going to a good school a short flight from home, which I had already visited and whose reputation in the US would likely lead to a good job, or the thing that excited my spirit: accepting the offer from St Andrews, sight unseen, future unknown.

While I stressed, I took long walks around my neighbourhood and made mental pro-con lists with music blasting through my headphones. On one of these, a song came on with a paraphrase of the quote, “A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

Call me sentimental, but I knew then that the choice was simple. I had the golden opportunity to do the thing I had always wanted to do, to attend my dream university because of the hard work I had put into my exams, application questions, and personal essays. Although it felt scary and illogical to move to Scotland for four years, on my own, having never visited the university, I knew I would be stupid not to do it.

I started university just before the pandemic. It was impossible to know when the border would close, and which country I might be in when it did. Over the course of my first two years at St Andrews, I was routinely stuck in the UK, or in the US when I returned for summer or Christmas. Some of the hardest and scariest moments of my life were during those two years, when I was separated from people and places I loved and didn't know when I would see them again or when I would get to live the life I had imagined.

But the pandemic was only a portion of my university experience; the majority of it was everything I dreamed of and more. In St Andrews, I became an adult—became a person, almost. I fell madly in love with the town, the university, the friendships I made, and my time in student theatre, and the community I found there, which defined my experience as much as my studies. I fell in love with a boy from Edinburgh, too, and we adopted a cat. I learned how to be an adult, from cooking meals and managing my limited time to house hunting and living with others.

This past June, I graduated with a First Class degree in English. Having loved everything about my university experience, it was a difficult goodbye.

The week of graduation, I sat on the beach in one of my favourite locations in St Andrews with my friend Molly and we spilled our hearts. She articulated what I wanted to say: that we had spent the past four years building our dream lives, and now that we finally had them, it was difficult to imagine leaving.

Perched on a rock overlooking the North Sea, Molly mused, “When it gets easy, that’s how you know it’s time to move on. There’s no more growing to do here.”

Having taken two years to study, travel, volunteer, and work before starting my degree, I am already an adult, but this year marks my transition from student to full-time professional. It's different. And it's scary, especially when I considered myself pretty good at being a student.

But, writing this now, I know Molly was right. My life here is easy, and although the ship in port is safe, that's not the reason it was made. That's the same principle that guided me across the sea to Scotland, kept me here throughout the pandemic, and strengthened me when I first considered the possibility that I might never want to leave the UK, no matter the challenges I would need to face to stay.

Although my time in St Andrews will always be a vital part of me, my story stretches far further than my experiences in this auld grey toon. While I loved being a student, I have many interests I’m looking forward to exploring more, writing, photography, and content creation among them.

This year, two of my goals were to spend more time writing, and to create a new, slower space for myself online. In creating this blog, I hope to achieve these goals, as well as share a glimpse of my daily life as an American on the never-ending adventure of growing up, in the UK. Here you will find my virtual journal entries, photography, and other projects, along with lifestyle content such as book recommendations and travel notes.

Last month, my boyfriend and I decided what we would do next, which is a blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, it is time to set sail again, to find out what life looks like as full-time professionals, in a new city. The future lies through uncharted waters.