Letting Go to Find Yourself: A Heartfelt Conversation with Stephen Worthington

Some decisions don’t begin with certainty. They begin with exhaustion, grief, and a quiet thought that won’t let you go. Stephen Worthington’s year in New Zealand was that kind of decision.

When we sat down, Stephen was nearing the end of an eleven-and-a-half-month journey. Two weeks left on his visa. A van full of memories. And a life in the UK waiting on the other side of it all. What started as “a year away” had become something else entirely: a confrontation with loss, a reworking of identity, and a slow lesson in learning how to be present.

When he first arrived in Auckland, Stephen wrote one word in his notebook to describe what he wanted from the year: growth. He didn’t know what shape it would take—personal, emotional, spiritual—only that something needed to shift. Sitting across from him near the end of the year, it was obvious that it had.

Stephen is from Liverpool, and has lived in Scotland since 2008. He’s a software developer—work that, as he put it gently, can be stressful and not always fulfilling. For years, the idea of coming to New Zealand and living in a van had been sitting in the background. He can’t even pinpoint where the van part came from. The New Zealand part, though, he can trace clearly.

Like many people, he first met Aotearoa through a cinema screen.

As a teenager, he went to see The Lord of the Rings with his dad—an annual ritual between a father and son who didn’t always talk much, but shared something wordless inside those cinematic worlds. The films became a comfort over the years. He’d put them on during hard times like emotional shelter. Somewhere in that, New Zealand stopped being just a place. It became a symbol of possibility—adventure, space, and another kind of life.

The idea stayed an idea—something for “one day”—until life made “one day” feel dangerously hypothetical.

In 2020, Stephen’s mum died unexpectedly, only a couple of years into her retirement. In 2023, his dad passed away too. They were both gone within a short stretch of time, right when they should have been enjoying the years they’d worked so hard for.

That changed him.

It wasn’t only grief. It was a jolt—a brutal reminder that the future isn’t guaranteed, and that “I’ll do it later” can be a comforting story right up until it isn’t.

“I can’t take for granted that I’ll have a long period to go and explore,” he told me. “I’m not necessarily going to get that. So why not do it now while I can?”

So he went. He and his partner of sixteen years bought a van, came to New Zealand, and—in his words—“flipped the table” on life. Somewhere along the way, that partner became a friend, and their relationship changed shape. The journey, already full of change, asked even more of him than he expected.

When I asked what he’d say to the version of himself who first stepped off the plane in Auckland, he didn’t hesitate.

“Be present,” he said. “Just be in the moment.”

It sounds simple—almost cliché—until you hear what sits underneath it.

For much of the year, Stephen carried an internal pressure that wouldn’t ease. Even while he was “taking a break,” his mind kept insisting the year should be used to re-route his life—that he ought to return home with a more creative, more fulfilling plan than software development.

He loves tattoos and deeply respects the artists behind them. At one point, he pictured an alternate version of the year: drawing every day, building a portfolio, training seriously so he could return home and try to become a tattoo artist.

“It’s not going to change the world,” he said, “but it might change one person’s life—in a small way, or a big way for them.”

But instead of energising him, the idea started to crush him. Joy turned into obligation.

“I kept thinking: I should be drawing, I should be improving, I should be doing this and that. And it took me out of the experience. I was living in my head—chasing some future version of myself instead of being in this once-in-a-lifetime year.”

He wondered how much of that pressure was his personality and how much was the wider culture—this obsession with productivity, optimisation, and self-improvement. The sense that every experience must be converted into progress.

“It’s like I was trying to squeeze career change, personal growth, grief, and adventure into one year,” he said, half laughing. “It was too much.”

Only in the last two months did he choose—consciously—to let that pressure go.

He stopped trying to “make the year count” in some grand strategic way. He stopped obsessing over what his return to the UK should look like. He decided, simply, to enjoy what was in front of him.

That shift even changed how he remembered the year.

One practice he wants to take home is small, almost invisible: stopping to listen to birds. New Zealand’s birdlife is loud and distinctive—it demanded his attention at first. Over time, he realised he could choose to do the same back in the UK: to pause, to notice, to hear what’s always been there.

He also spoke about the harder edges of the journey. Leaving wasn’t abstract. It meant stepping away from stability, community, a long-term partner, and a career. It meant facing an uncomfortable question: will he still be employable when he gets back?

By the time he returns from Southeast Asia, he’ll have been out of formal work for nearly two years. He knows it’s a risk. He knows there’s fear in it—especially in a world where job markets tighten and security feels fragile.

But he also knows the alternative: spending a lifetime burnt out in work that doesn’t fit, watching the years pass while telling himself adventure will come “one day.”

The most personal growth he described, though, had nothing to do with landscapes or career plans. It was about agency.

For most of his life, Stephen has been—by his own description—“quite passive.” He’d go with the flow, defer to others, let partners or friends decide what to do, what to eat, where to go. On the surface, it looked like flexibility, even kindness. Underneath, it was often people-pleasing and avoidance—a way to dodge the emotional labour of choosing.

“Instead of asking, ‘What makes you happy?’ I’ll have to ask, ‘What makes me happy?’” he said, with nerves and excitement tangled together.

He sees it as an experiment: practising how to take up space in his own life, how to stop outsourcing agency and start using it. His hope is that when he eventually returns to Scotland, he’ll bring that new muscle into his relationships, his work, and his daily decisions.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked what he’d say to someone who has the means to do something similar—to step away, travel, take a risk—but feels they don’t have the courage.

“Don’t feel trapped,” he said. “The opportunity might not always be there. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know how long you’ll be able to climb mountains, sleep in vans, or sit by lakes watching avalanches.”

For Stephen, choosing to go meant trading security for growth, certainty for discovery, passivity for participation. It meant, as he put it, “finding out who I am in a different context—and seeing who I am on the other side of that.”

If he could return to the beginning and offer himself one message, it would be this: stop worrying so much about what comes next. Don’t try to pack every possible transformation into one year. Be here. Enjoy this version of your life while you’re in it. The future will arrive soon enough.

Listening to him, I couldn’t help but feel that his word for the year—growth—came true in ways he couldn’t have planned. Not as a dramatic reinvention, but as a quiet, steady shift: learning to let go, listen more deeply, see more clearly, and belong more fully to his own life.

It isn’t a grand revelation. It’s something softer. A man standing by a mountain lake, watching snow thunder down a distant cliff, thinking not about what he should be doing—but about how rare it is to be exactly where he is.

Sometimes, letting go isn’t about losing who you are. It’s about finally making room to meet yourself properly—and choosing, for once, to stay.

Listen to the full podcast: Letting Go to Find Yourself: A Heartfelt Conversation with Stephen Worthington