Leaving Chicago

I didn’t leave Chicago because I stopped loving it.

That feels important to say first, because people sometimes assume leaving means rejection. It wasn’t that. Chicago changed me. It made me louder, braver, stranger, sharper. It gave me late nights, train noise, bar lights, better songs, and the first real feeling that I could become someone on purpose.

When I first arrived from Watseka, I was still carrying a lot of small-town silence around with me. Chicago gave me somewhere to put it. Logan Square became part of my body in ways I didn’t expect: the Blue Line rumble, the murals, the coffee shops, the walks down Milwaukee Avenue, the smell of food and rain and beer outside venues. For a while, it felt like the city was daring me to grow up.

And I did.

But somewhere along the way, I started to feel stuck.

Part of it was heartbreak. I had split from someone I cared about, and even though life kept moving, I didn’t. Not properly. I was still writing, working, making jokes, answering messages, acting like I was fine, but underneath I felt bruised. Chicago had become full of places where an old version of me still existed. Street corners, songs, rooms, little routines. After it ended, I kept running into memories I hadn’t invited.

There’s a strange loneliness that comes after caring about someone deeply. It isn’t just missing them. It’s missing the future you quietly thought you might have.

At the same time, my creative life had changed. NDM had moved back to the UK, and although we were still working together online, it wasn’t the same as being in the same room. Songs can survive distance, obviously, but there’s a kind of creative spark that happens faster when someone is right there to catch the line as it arrives. I missed that.

I think I was more unsettled than I admitted.

Chicago had been my first real freedom. At eighteen, freedom meant leaving Watseka, living with Mila, staying out late, playing shows, making mistakes somewhere nobody had known me as a child. But freedom changes shape. By the time London came up, I didn’t need the same kind of escape. I needed distance, perspective, and a room where I could hear myself without every street reminding me who I had just been.

The London idea didn’t arrive as a masterplan. It came through a conversation with my dad.

I’d said something to him about wanting to see another country. He had spent so much of his life on the road, passing through places I only knew from songs, photos and stories. Part of me resented that. Part of me wanted to know what it felt like to step into a place so different it made you reconsider yourself.

That was when he mentioned that an old music business friend of his in London was looking for a live-in au pair.

Honestly, I had no idea what that life would really be like.

I didn’t grow up in the kind of family that had an au pair. I was raised by my grandparents, with Mila as the person who understood me best. My childhood was practical, loving, complicated and nothing like the version of family life I imagined existed behind London front doors. I wasn’t some polished childcare expert with a perfect plan. I just knew how to be responsible, how to pay attention, how to help when things needed doing, and how to keep going when life felt unfamiliar.

Then my dad casually added that part of the arrangement would involve cooking some meals for the children and sometimes for the whole family.

This was news.

To be fair, Nana taught me to cook. I can make proper food. I know my way around a skillet, a roast, a pot of soup, and the kind of meal that makes a kitchen smell like someone is taking care of you. But apparently Dad had told these people I was an excellent cook, which felt generous in the way only an absent father with too much confidence can be generous.

My first response was, “I don’t even know what they eat in England. What is English food?”

That question did not comfort anyone.

For about five seconds, the whole thing sounded ridiculous. Me, moving to London, looking after children, cooking family meals, and trying to understand whether beans on toast was a snack, a meal, a warning sign, or a national poem.

Then it sounded like a door.

Not a glamorous door. A real one. Children still need breakfast. Shoes go missing. Houses have routines. Somebody always needs a jumper. Nobody cares that you’re a songwriter if dinner is late and the small person at the table has decided peas are an enemy of the state.

But maybe that was what made it possible. It was work, shelter, structure, and a way into a city full of music history, old streets, strange weather and a future I couldn’t quite picture yet.

So I said yes.

Leaving Mila was the hardest part. She had been my anchor for so long that the idea of living in another country without her made me feel like somebody had quietly removed the floor. I was also leaving the city that had taught me how to be visible. Breezy was born in Chicago. Walking away from that felt, at first, like betraying the version of myself I had fought so hard to become.

But I don’t think it was betrayal.

I think Chicago did what it was supposed to do.

It took the girl who left Watseka with too many feelings and not enough armour, and it gave her volume. It gave her friends, attitude, heartbreak, mistakes, songs, survival skills, and a stronger backbeat. It taught her that reinvention isn’t clean. You try yourself on in public until one day the costume becomes skin.

By the time London appeared, I wasn’t running away from Chicago.

I was carrying it with me.

I still miss it. I miss Mila’s laugh from the next room. I miss late-night coffee. I miss the lake wind that cut through every layer I owned. I miss walking past venues and feeling like the city was one big amplifier waiting to be plugged in.

But I also know I needed to leave before I started confusing comfort with destiny.

London is still new to me. I don’t fit here yet, not exactly. The streets fold in strange ways. People say “you alright?” and don’t always want the real answer. The houses are old, the parks are softer than expected, and the rain has a personality problem. Some days I feel brave. Some days I feel like a suitcase with hair.

Leaving Chicago wasn’t the end of that story.

It was proof that the story had worked.

I went there to become someone.

I left because I had.

Anni x