My Inner Rebel Was So Suppressed That When She Finally Got Out She Got On A Plane To Mongolia

I want to tell you about the time my inner rebel escaped.

She didn't go quietly. She didn't suggest a strongly worded email or a difficult conversation or even a sensible job application closer to home. She looked at a map, found the furthest point from Abu Dhabi she could reasonably get to, and booked herself a teaching post in Outer Mongolia.

The Rebel wanted Freedom. The Good Girl chose Obligation.

I am, technically, the one who applied. But I want to be clear that the rebel was driving.

It started with a video. An advert for a teaching job in Ulaanbaatar, with footage of children singing, and behind them the kind of landscape that makes you understand why people write poetry — vast, empty, completely indifferent to your problems. After a year in Abu Dhabi teaching in a school that had the word British on its paperwork but was, in practice, nothing of the sort, those singing children and that impossible sky looked like another planet. Which was precisely the point.

My first teaching job had been, to put it politely, a lot. I was an NQT — a newly qualified teacher — and the only British trained member of staff in a school that had decided, mid-crisis, that it wanted to become an accredited British school. A COBIS inspection was looming. The discipline was non-existent. Local staff often lasted a morning. I lasted a year, which I now understand was an act of either tremendous resilience or catastrophic people-pleasing. Probably both.

I did try to leave. Once. The principal sat me down and reminded me that these children had no stability in their lives. That I would be letting them down. That they needed me.

The good girl heard this and folded immediately. The rebel went very quiet and started googling Mongolia.

The thing about the rebel is she always knows what she doesn't want. Long before she has any idea what she does want, she knows — with absolute bone-deep certainty — what she cannot stand anymore. And if you don't listen to her, if you keep stuffing her back down and smiling and saying yes and staying, she will find another way.

She found Mongolia.

I gave up a five bedroom villa to live in a single person's accommodation on the edge of the Steppe. I left my family, my comfort, everything familiar. And I got on a plane.

It was, it turns out, exactly what I needed. Not because Mongolia fixed anything. But because somewhere over the distance between Abu Dhabi and Ulaanbaatar, I remembered that I was a person who could choose.

The rebel knew that before I did. She always does.