"[T]he weather had been so nice/but as they boarded, it started to rain."
Come From Away, "Something's Missing"
There's a theory a lot of people have that you re-live your parents' trauma, your parent's parents' trauma, and all the way back generations until you finally find a way to solve it, to heal from it, to accept it and move on.
My mother never travelled. The bravest thing she did was move from one side of the country to the other as a young sixteen-year-old runaway, chasing a place to belong. My grandmother did the same, travelling all over the world as a musician, and so did my great-grandmother, looking for that sense of ground beneath our feet that belonged to us, that was where we were meant to be.
All of those generations, walking and running and never looking back, never stopping, and always just searching.
I've inherited this restlessness--it's not a wanderlust, it's a sense that if I keep moving, I'll find my tribe. I'll find the ground beneath my feet that feels like this is where I belong.
But, you know, I think I'm done looking. And no, this isn't me saying that Sydney is my home--I don't think it is. I think I'm just... done with that belief that I'll find that in a place, and instead ready to find it in people.
See, the thing is, I think when I left the first time I was worried I was losing that spark I'd found when I moved. The spark that made me leave the country in the first place, that made me audition for a show, that made me take leap after leap of faith and trust that people were going to catch me. So when I got back home, instead of believing that Sydney had changed me, I assumed it was the place that was the secret to the spark, and not the people in it.
Not me.
I guess what I'd always viewed as this restlessness, this hunger, was not an emptiness. I'd spent so much of my early twenties looking for things to fill that space I thought was in me that I lost sight of the fact that I could actually fill it instead with kind, good things.
Just because what created that space was negative, didn't mean I had to fill it back in the same way. Maybe what I've been thinking of as an empty space is really just a place that I'm meant to have, maybe it's just a big heart with big ideas and an even bigger need to share them with as many people as I can. And maybe Sydney was the first place I found that in myself, and the first people who let me share those things with them.
It's stopping here, I think. This restlessness, this belief that none of us belonged. And it's stopping because I'm accepting that none of us 'belong' to any place.
I think, in the end, I belong to the people who've helped me fill the empty spaces. And I plan to spend the rest of my life finding more of them, and helping them to do the same.
- C.
xx
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