My grandmother used to say that no matter what we do, our lives cannot change. God has his plan for each and every one of us and it’s written in the stars. We can go left or right, we can go back or forward. It doesn’t matter. We’ll end up exactly where we are supposed to end up and become exactly who we are meant to become.

I just took it as she said it at the time but I cannot help but wonder if she was right or it was just a lazy excuse of not having ambitions and settling for whatever comes your way.

From my teenage years I had the same dream over and over again. It was just repeating night after night and it drove me mad. I tried to make something of it. I tried to understand it but it made no sense. I was in front of an unfinished building and I started climbing the stairs to it. It had so many floors I lost track. I just kept going up trying top reach the top. I passed by people I knew every time, people who meant something in my life and still do. I did not feel tired or in any particular way. I just went up and when I finally reached the top I was alone and I was just watching people on the street pass by. They never looked up to see me. I just looked down to see them and they seemed so small I couldn’t tell their faces.

Funny how my dream stopped when I realised that whatever I was doing it wasn’t working. I was over thirty, I had a big TV job and that seemed like it. I was alone and I could just tell you I probably had only two friends. I felt lost, abandoned and with no perspective whatsoever. I took a look at my life one morning while having coffee and just wondered if that was it. Was I supposed to just do the same thing my entire life? Was that my destiny? Being all alone, wasting so many years of my life on a job? (I was married to my job and my bosses couldn’t be happier to count on me twenty four hours a day). I am ashamed to say I had no savings on my name, no man I could count on and no idea how would I come out of it all. I lived in my parents house and they paid for my bills. I was trapped and I had to get away.

Long story short, I had a few days trip to London and the second I stepped on British soil I felt like I belong so I decided to move here permanently. And I did in spite of my mum’s protests and my father’s reassurance that I will always have a place to come back to. I was determined to make it on my own. I got a job as a waitress and lived in a room in a shared house with people from all over the world.

It’s been nine years since and here I am. ME. The ME you know now, a ME that had to grow to become what I am now.

Maybe my life is not what I pictured and I have not become what I always dreamed of but I feel I belong. I feel loved and accomplished. I learned how to love and I became a mother and this beats it all. I see life in a different perspective and I keep wondering if it was all written in the stars or just the choices I made in life brought me to where I am now. Is it all a series of consequences of our actions and the choices we make in life?

Did I choose my path or the path chose me?