I'm currently sitting in Ngurah Rai Airport drinking the first proper coffee I've had in about two weeks and I am so excited to go home that I'm ready to sprint onto that dang plane. Like properly very keen to just be in Melbourne and sit in my room and live my normal life. I can't remember the last time I felt like this leaving somewhere; normally getting on a plane home feels like some kind of a loss, and as much as I do love my normal life it's always as though I'm tearing myself away from something else that I love equally as much. Realistically that's probably because most of the time when I'm leaving a place I'm also leaving people I care about, and that's just kind of something I've accepted is always going to be part of my life.
(Side note I'm listening to Amnesia by 5SOS right now and that in combination with the theme of this post is making me quite emoshe but it's okay I have a donut.)
Growing up I moved around a bit, so I was always either in America with my extended family and friends in Australia, or in Australia having left the friends I'd made in America. We've lived in Melbourne since I was ten, and I consider that my home and the most solid base I have because it's where I went to school, where my family was and where the majority of my friends are, but even in high school I had people I cared about in Perth, and then I started youtube and unwittingly split my entire life in half, with equally important parts sitting in either hemisphere. Almost four years of long distance relationships, friendships and flying back and forth later I'm getting ready to move to London and leave the stability I wanted so badly growing up, and it is a bit terrifying and very sad but there's not a single doubt in my mind this is exactly what I'm meant to be doing.
The thing is, that stability has been shifting for a while now. I'm still close with all my friends from school, and they're all people who are going to be incredibly important to me for the rest of my life because we've been through so much together, but we've reached the point in our lives where we're all kind of off doing our own things. In addition to that, there are now a whole bunch of people on the other side of the world who have also become extremely important to me, so no matter where I am I'm always going to be missing someone, especially since the two people who are arguably most important to me now live over 10,000 miles from each other. July last year was a huge turning point for me. It's when I moved out of home and became responsible for my own wellbeing, but more importantly it's when that little bubble of this-is-where-my-family-is burst. My dad lives in America now, my mum is still in Melbourne and in just over four months I'm going to be in London. Every member of my immediate family, who I always kind of subconsciously assumed growing up - like anyone would - were always going to be around each other, is going to be living on a different continent, and to be perfectly honest that makes me sad on a level I don't know if I'll ever be properly able to articulate.
This isn't the direction I saw this post going, but realistically I think this is something that's been subconsciously weighing on me quite heavily at the moment. The fact that this might be the last time I'll be flying home to Melbourne for a long time has made me think about the concept of 'home' overall, and how drastically and quickly any person's perception of that can be. The next few months are going to be very fucking rough. I'm aware of that. I've been aware of that since I first decided to move, thought about the fact I'm going to have to leave my dog and sobbed on my bed for about half an hour. I think it's easy to look at my life and be like "oh wow you're moving to London, that's so exciting!" and it is. I'm so frickin pumped and ready. But I'm also leaving my home and my school friends and my mum and my dog and effectively the last 13 years of my life. This has been the longest I - or my dad - have ever spent living in one place, and regardless of how exciting the next step in your life is, it's always hard to leave something like that.
In short, I'm running on a basically unmanageable level of emotion. For the last few months I've been happy and excited and nervous and scared and sad, all at once, all the time. I cry at frickin everything, and I switch from one emotion to the other so quickly most of the time I don't even know what I'm feeling, which is EXHAUSTING, and I know it's going to be like this until I move. But I'm okay with that. This is an enormous change in my life and I'd rather be feeling everything than nothing at all. That being said, I would like to be able to stop crying every time I think about Calvin. Because he is a precious, precious angel, and that should be honoured with an appreciative smirk at the very least.
I'm going to get on my plane now, because a) it is very much time to board and b) I don't really want to break my 2.5 year streak and cry in an airport, but I shall be back to update you with enthralling tales of my Balinese adventures very soon. Word to ya mothers. Make good choices. x0
