Naomi Baldwin celebrates the feeling of coming home

Age 24. Sounds all grown up, right? When you’re 16 years old, adulthood feels like – or did to me – a world away yet. From taking your GCSEs (or Scottish equivalents) to your early 20s, suddenly the homework- and exam-based life is turned on its head, as you determine your path for early adulthood. Moving away from home for the first time, you learn to cook more than just cakes and biscuits, and find out the best time to use the communal washing machines. You try to balance coursework and societies while still finding time to make new friends. And then, just as I felt settled and comfortable in my new home city, it all ended, and it was time to find a real job which paid the bills and kept my new kitchen stocked with baking ingredients.

These years have at times felt tumultuous, and at other times have given me all the freedom I could ever wish for. In a relatively short space of time, you are thrown out into the world and asked to sink or swim. Not knowing where to go or whether you’ve made the right decisions, seemingly endless job applications and interviews. And then, when I finally received that ‘we’d like to hire you’ phone call, I found myself looking for a new home in a part of the country I’d never been to before, and had no family or friends in.

I’m a theatre stage manager at work, which can be amazing but means working many evenings, weekends and irregular hours. This leaves little time to make connections and pursue my other interests outside of work. However, somewhere in the hurricane of life, you must find time to find yourself…

Naomi Baldwin is a theatre technician

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This is an extract from an article that was published in the April 2020 edition of Reform

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