Leaving school in England was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I remember walking out of the school gates in December 2007 fairly certain I'd never walk back into a classroom again, at least not until I was the one taking my own children to school one day.
So when we moved into the village and I started being homeschooled, it felt less like a compromise and more like a rescue. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life, and not just academically. Being homeschooled at that age, with a home tutor I saw one to one, gave me a kind of trust and freedom I don't think I'd have found in a classroom of thirty. I could ask questions directly, without an audience, and I built a real relationship with the person teaching me rather than just sitting through a lesson. I also had a lot of freedom to study alone as well, which instilled a great sense of self-discipline, which has been essential in my business life.
More than that, though, it handed me the schedule and made it mine to build. I quickly worked out that if I got up early and kept to a consistent routine, I could get my schoolwork done in the morning and have my afternoons free, for coffee, for shopping, for friends, for actually living in the country I'd moved to. I studied English, maths, science, business, and sociology, which I loved far more than I expected to. But the real education was running alongside it: language, travel, a completely different way of learning how the world works. I got the traditional curriculum and a real-life one at the same time, and I don't think I'd have the discipline or the ability to hold a room today if I hadn't built those habits then, on my own, with nobody checking over my shoulder.
Friendships came easier than I expected too. There's a community spirit to village life that's hard to explain until you're inside it. Bulgarians, in my experience, are sociable and generous with their time in a way that makes breaking the ice almost effortless. I made friends with neighbours in the village, with other expats, and with people in town who I'd meet through nothing more than needing help ordering something in a shop, exchanging numbers, and ending up at a coffee or a meal a few days later. People talk about cities being lonely because everyone's too busy with their own life to stop. Village life is the opposite. People slow down. They help. And that made it easy, in a way I wasn't prepared for, to build a real social life from nothing.
By May 2008, four months after arriving, I'd landed my first job, teaching English as a second language at a private language school about half an hour from the village. I still remember walking up the stairs on my first day, into this grand, beautifully built school, and thinking how strange it was that I'd left school in England only five months earlier, certain I was done with classrooms, and here I was walking into one again, except this time as the teacher. I trained on the job and worked toward an official qualification in language teaching alongside it. My students ranged from children to adults learning business English, and it widened my circle enormously, colleagues, fellow teachers, students I'd sometimes end up having coffee with outside of class.
That job also split my language life in two, in a way that turned out to be useful. With friends from teaching, I mostly spoke English. With friends in the village, it was almost entirely Bulgarian, which meant I was practising constantly, at kitchen tables, over coffee, in conversations that had nothing to do with the textbook. We were having formal Bulgarian lessons too, but nothing taught me faster than just sitting with someone and talking. That's stayed with me well beyond language, in business especially: sometimes you just have to start before you feel ready.
The first summer arrived after an overwhelming feeling in spring. A couple of weeks after we moved into the village, the novelty wore off and it stopped feeling like a holiday and started feeling like a life I actually had to build, learn the language, work out a career, make friends, figure out who I was. That realisation was a lot to sit with. But the structure from homeschooling kept me steady through it, and that was also when I started forming real habits, exercise, my Sunday outfit planning, creative outlets, all stacked around the school and language work.
Then May arrived, the village had warmed up, and everything opened outward. We ate outside constantly, went camping by the lake, had barbecues that ran late into the evening, spending the month of June watching the fireflies light up our garden and the social life we'd been slowly building suddenly felt full. Bulgarian summers run long, right through to September, and it was somewhere in the middle of that first one that I understood, properly, how much I loved being there. Between teaching for my own income and learning Bulgarian at the same time, I was living both sides of language learning at once, and it taught me more about how people actually learn than any classroom ever could.
