As they say, our personality is formed in the early years of our development. Further life experiences – especially the meaningful ones – can also make a powerful impact on our main characteristics. If I was to mention a remarkable period of my personal development, I would confidently come up with my relocation to the United Kingdom in April 2012.

The young girl who was travelling on the plane to London on that spring afternoon back in 2012 was although full of determination, but little did she know how challenging this journey will be in a new environment where all she had was her intelligence to solve problems.

Meeting E. during this major milestone of my life was a blessing. I did not have any connections in England so he was my sturdy tree with deep roots whom I can always rely on. Not a lot of English people would give a chance to a complete – and unemployed – foreigner to rent his property because of fear of not being able to pay the rent, but he did. In all honesty, few expected I would make a success of relocating to the UK (not even me), but E. was trying to give me faith at all times with his positive personality that it will happen if I persevere. And he was right. It took a while but it finally happened and managed to transition from retail to banking.

When I developed my mental illness, I thought this will be the end of my career in this country especially after the second debilitating episode but I managed to stabilise on the meds and bounce back from it. I will never forget when E. took a day off from work to take me to Tooting hospital when I was at rock bottom. It was the worst and most vulnerable times of my life. As a person who doesnt have any roots here, he was my main support who was always standing tall and can rely on him under any circumstances.

We are ultimately very different people but I believe we both learnt a lot from each other. He was a sales manager by profession and I always admired his confidence of handling people and listening to his constant arguments with Virgin Media about their appalling service gave me important lessons on how to stand up for myself in a world where a lot of people would push you down just so they can lift themselves up. E. has also witnessed my challenges in my career due to office politics and gave valuable advice on ‘playing the game’ myself to navigate in the harsh world of the corporate settings. But I guess the biggest lesson I learnt next to him is that perfection doesn’t exist and so people don’t need to be perfect to be loved by us which was taking me a long time to realise being a perfectionist soul.

Knowing how strong, stubborn and self reliant his personality is, I was very surprised to see that a quiet introvert like me can have an impact on a rowdy extroverted person like him in terms of a lot of aspects of life. He slowly learnt from me to be more sensible with money and someone who was always after the fine, luxurious things in life, he eventually learnt next to me that sometimes the simplest things mean the most. And I suspect as a salesman who learnt to not portray any sensitivity in his professional and personal dealings he also realised during the time of his dad passing away that vulnerability is not a weakness in front of your loved ones but something that genuinely makes you human.

I don’t think E. knows how proud I am for the self-employed career he built up. I remember I have tested his website previously and I enjoyed it very much knowing I am helping him in the process. I have seen a few posts on Linkedin about this company activity and some very nice reviews on Google and I am sure he is doing very well now but would love to know how he is doing.

I feel guilt almost every day that someone who has contributed to my development so much and was there for me all the time through thick and thin is no longer part of my life in any form. Although we were opposite personalities, one thing was always common: we were both liberal and we managed to have wonderful conversations about life which I deeply miss: it feels unnatural that we don’t talk anymore after what we have gone through together in the last decade.

Guess in the unlikely event of him reading this post, I hope he will realise how much positive effect he had on an immigrant who wouldn’t have been able to achieve as much if he had not been by my side…