I feel like I've told this story before, and I sort of whip this story out like a party trick for people, but I used to brag how I'd been to six different elementary schools in as many years and never stayed at one long enough to make the class photos. I bragged about living in every suburb in Vancouver, and cultivated my status as the 'New Kid' like it was something to be coveted.
And I was so, so lonely.
In high school, I begged my mother to let me stay in one place--in my selfish teenage mind, she was moving because she wanted to, not because of other survival-related reasons. True to her word, she somehow managed to find the apartment she still lives in now, and I began my five year high school career confident in the knowledge that I would be making friends for life.
Except, you know, high schoolers are kind of dicks; I'm sure it will surprise no one to know I was every worst part of my extroverted personality turned up past eleven in high school. I made friends, absolutely, but they weren't necessarily the kind of friends you expect to have last forever. In fact, most of them didn't. Years of never staying in a place longer than it took to help my new teachers pronounce my last name had left me with the staying presence of a cloud on a windy day: one good strong gust and I was gone.
When I first got to Australia, I kept focusing on the trees--they were so different to anything I'd seen before. The leaves were thin and tiny, the bark was light and constantly flaking off (I actually remember asking Dani if they were diseased), and they looked nothing like the trees I grew up with. Living in Vancouver my whole life, the trees back home had become as important as the air I breathed, and I felt like I was suffocating in this alien landscape.
I did what I do best--I became the New Kid again.
I've detailed a lot more of the rest of my time here (though I probably could have been a bit more active) but never really mentioned the strange thing that was happening to me as I strengthened my friendships, listened in awe as two of my jobs begged me to stay on, and got more tan than any Canadian ever has a right to be: I started to put down roots.
It happened slowly at first, a comment here, a wistful remark there, until one day I was walking around a small reserve near my house, admiring the trees, and it hit me:
These trees looked like home now.
See, the problem with being adaptable that no one tells you is that you can make your home pretty much anywhere; I can find something positive about any place I'm in, no matter how little I want to be there. I'd spent so much time waiting for that 'aha' moment where I felt like I finally belonged somewhere that I never realised that I could actually belong anywhere--it was just up to me to pick where I thought that 'anywhere' was.
When I left Vancouver, I threw a going away party and invited all of my friends--people that, even though I lived in the same city as them and had known them since adolescence, never really saw me or replied to any of my messages asking to hang out.
Ultimately, what I had feared most as a child had happened--people like the New Kid, but once she's not new anymore, it didn't matter.
I threw a great party; my mother and I love hosting things and I inherited her obsessive need to make sure everyone is having a good time. I invited about 30+ people, sure that about 15 or so of them would end up coming.
On the day of, at least twenty people messaged me and told me they were 'so sorry' but they couldn't make it. In the end, six people showed up, and two of them left to go to another party halfway through.
Honestly? I cried. Here was the undeniable proof to me that I hadn't mattered to any of these people, and that no matter how hard I tried to hold on to anything, it would wrest its way out of my hands because of the sheer fact of who I was.
On Thursday I had my going away party from Sydney and I was terrified it would all happen again; I could literally see myself sitting there with only two or three people, getting the text messages that told me they would 'try and get to see me in Canada sometime!' and feeling like every single person I'd met had been lying to me.
In the end, every single person who told me they could come, came. In the end, I had all of my friends there and could not believe how many people had shown up--not because of quantity, but because all these people had actually mattered to me and just shown to me that I mattered to them, too.
I stood in front of the little corner where they were all sitting and took a polaroid photo, and I had to excuse myself after to go cry. I couldn't and still can't believe how lucky I've been to have met the people I've met and experienced the things I've experienced. It feels incredibly vulnerable to be admitting this, but Sydney has made me a softer person, someone more willing to be honest about what I'm most frightened of: being alone.
So, here's to you, Sydney, for forcing me to be alone over and over again, and showing me that when I'm alone is when the best possible people are going to enter my life. I did so many scary and crazy things this year--I got back onstage for the first time in nearly four years, I told far too many people how much I liked them, and I poured parts of my soul into every single bit of it. Moving to Sydney was the riskiest thing I have ever done, but it was also the best thing I have ever done, and I cannot wait to come back.
xx
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