A year ago today, I called it quits, and at the time I thought I was ending a chapter because that sounds much nicer than admitting I was exhausted, confused and making a fairly enormous decision while hoping the meaning of it would become clearer later, which, for the record, it has not.
The hardest part is that I knew I had it good, really f**king good, I knew I had a life most people would have killed for, the kind of life I had sat and written onto a vision board as a young girl who begged for National Geographic magazines, never really believing any of it would leave the page and become real, and then somehow it did. I literally got paid to travel the world for work, I was invited to dinners I had absolutely no business being at, often sitting beside people far more accomplished, interesting or glamorous than me, and there was rarely a moment I didn’t quietly wonder how the hell I had ended up there.
I knew my life was extraordinary, and that matters because I did not leave thinking it was ordinary, or bad, or something I had outgrown, I left knowing exactly what I had and also knowing what it was costing me, which is probably why the regret has been so difficult to untangle now, because I cannot rewrite history and pretend I did not appreciate it at the time, I did, I was incredibly grateful for it, but I was also tired of having friends everywhere and very few people beside me to actually call and share it with. It was beautiful but my god was it lonely, and both of those things were true at exactly the same time, which is probably the problem with most things worth loving.
For nearly ten years I decided loneliness was simply the price of freedom, but as I edged closer to 30 (cry) I started wondering whether freedom and loneliness had become a little too similar, and what I wanted in the end was not necessarily romance or some cinematic version of settling down where I suddenly acquired a husband and children, just, my own bed, washing machine and, rather surprisingly, even a gym. I wanted friendships built around actual time together rather than countdowns to departure because after years of passing through places something about staying still had started to feel almost exotic. I suppose the saying is true, you always want what you cannot have.
So I left, except I did not exactly come home, I came back to Sydney for a month in December and then promptly ran away again, which was very on brand, except this time I was not leaving for work, there was no group waiting for me or professional reason to keep moving. I still left because I simply could not sit still, and that was probably the first time I had to properly confront the possibility that movement had not only been my job, but had also become the easiest way to avoid being left alone with myself.
Eventually, three months ago, I came back again, properly this time, tail between my legs, no money, no real plan, and what I had imagined might feel like some dramatic homecoming was honestly just slightly embarrassing. I know Sydney is beautiful, I know how lucky I am to have been born here, but I felt completely defeated by the idea of staying in the city where I was born, as though somehow coming home meant I had failed at whatever I had been doing before. Maybe even that all the sacrifices, the difficulties you bottle up in yourself were for nothing.
But I pushed through and I got a job, and I thought familiarity would eventually feel like belonging, but it did not, there was no automatic closeness with family simply because I had returned, there were friendships with fourteen years of history only for me to learn that history is not the same thing as intimacy. I suppose that has been one of the stranger parts of coming back, because I spent years believing the loneliness of travel was temporary and that eventually I would come home, I just never really considered that home might feel lonely too.
Then there was the bigger problem, and here goes, me.
I have spent most of my life writing things down, hundreds of journals, notes in my phone, pages scribbled onto vomit bags on planes, scraps of paper stuffed into bags, thoughts recorded absolutely everywhere, and reading all of it back makes me believe I am spectacularly self-aware. The woman in my journals understands grief and loneliness and alcohol and food and attachment and self-worth, she understands exactly why I do the things I do, unfortunately she appears to have absolutely no authority over the woman actually making the decisions.
I can recognise a bad choice while actively making it, my brain can say, this will not help, and my actions reply, noted, proceeding anyway, and that is one of the more irritating things about getting older, realising that awareness and transformation are not the same thing, because I had assumed the great breakthrough would be understanding myself, and instead I have discovered that I can understand myself perfectly and still behave like an absolute idiot.
I have also always been very good at making difficult things easier, and somehow making easy things difficult, I overcompensate with joy, I get funnier, or at least sillier, when I am sad, I get louder when I am hurting, and I turn bad situations into stories before I have even worked out whether they have broken my heart. The joy is not fake, because I genuinely love life and people and find most of existence completely ridiculous, but sometimes it is also camouflage, because if I am entertaining enough nobody asks the question I am not ready to answer.
I used to think keeping my pain to myself was kind, and this year has probably been the year I understood that pain does not become harmless because you hide it, it just comes out sideways, if you do not say you are sad sometimes you become angry, if you do not say you are scared sometimes you disappear, and if you do not ask for help sometimes you end up resenting people for failing to offer something they never knew you needed.
Grief has made all of that louder, and I used to think grief belonged mostly to death, that somebody died and you mourned them and slowly learnt how to live around the absence, but let it be known… grief is greedy. You grieve people who died and people who are still alive but no longer know you, you grieve places you cannot return to in the same way, versions of yourself you once hated and would now give anything to become again, maybe worse you grieve purpose and belonging and the life you willingly walked away from, which is probably one of the hardest kinds because there is no villain and nobody to blame, just you standing on the other side of your own decision wondering whether you misunderstood yourself.
I still think I made a bad decision, or at least I think I made a much bigger one than I realised, because I think I mistook exhaustion for an ending and believed that needing rest meant I needed to leave everything, I thought wanting something less temporary meant I needed to abandon the life entirely, I thought purpose would be easier to replace and that home would simply be waiting for me, and I was wrong about quite a lot of that.
Work has probably been the hardest loss to explain because in my old life I felt useful, I loved what I did and I knew I did it well, and there was something incredibly comforting about chaos because chaos gave me purpose. I did not realise how much I had confused usefulness with worth until nobody particularly needed me anymore.
Now I sometimes struggle simply to go to work, which has been one of the more humiliating discoveries of this year, because Monday defeats me, not the Taliban, not food poisoning… Monday. And Sundays are somehow worse because I never used to understand Sunday dread, Sunday was just another day, I probably did not even know what day of the week it was, whereas now I can feel Sunday afternoon arriving, laundry, schedules I don’t want to participate in, and somehow that feels deeply offensive.
I know this probably sounds like complaining but I think it truly is mourning a life I was lucky enough to have, because honestly nothing terrible is happening, and sometimes that almost makes it harder to explain, because I spent years in extraordinary circumstances dreaming about ordinary life and now ordinary life is the hardest country I have ever tried to understand. I used to feel like an active participant in my life and now, some days, I feel like I simply maintain it, work, groceries, laundry, sleep, again.
It’s privilege, inherited privilege I know, I have a job, I am safe, I have a roof over my head and I have had experiences younger versions of me would barely believe were mine, and I know all of that, but gratitude and sadness are not mutually exclusive, you can love your life and struggle to live it, and boy can you miss something that exhausted you and tested every fibre of your soul and body. You can regret leaving and still understand why you left, you can want stability and still want to run, you can know alcohol will not solve anything and still occasionally want your brain to shut up for an hour, and if my travels taught me anything it is that human beings are wildly inconsistent, so at least I have finally confirmed that I am one.
For years I kept looking for one clean explanation for myself, one loss, one childhood experience, one mistake, one thing I could point to and say, there, that is why I am like this, but people are not puzzles, we are just accumulations of every person who stayed, every person who left, every home, every rejection, every kindness, every version of ourselves we had to become to get through a particular year, everything.
I am all of them, the competent one, the disaster, the woman who wants to be free, the woman who desperately wants something permanent, the person making everybody laugh, or occasionally cringe, and the person quietly falling apart, and maybe they are not contradictions at all, maybe they are just different versions of the same person trying to work out how to live.
I still miss the girl I was a year ago, and I know she was tired and I should probably remember that more, but she was softer, more curious, more alive, constantly annoyed at airports and somehow happiest in them, and I know I cannot go back and retrieve her because even if I booked the flight tomorrow that life would not be waiting in exactly the same form, people are gone, relationships have changed, doors have closed and time is rude like that, I get it, it does not preserve things just in case you later realise how much you loved them.
SOOO… Maybe that is what this year has really been about, not convincing myself that leaving was right because I still do not think it was, but learning to forgive the person who left, because she was tired and lonely and exhausted by everything being temporary and she wanted something that stayed, and I cannot hate her for wanting that.
I still do not know where home is, I still want to run some days, I still miss being useful, I still struggle with Sundays, and I still occasionally believe another plane ticket might solve everything despite considerable evidence it won’t.
More than anything, I know grief is not only just about losing people, sometimes it is losing purpose, sometimes it is losing home, sometimes it is losing a version of yourself, and maybe eventually this will also be the year I stopped trying to become who I used to be and started working out who I am when I am not constantly leaving, fixing, helping or escaping.
There is no great conclusion yet, just me regretting this day a little, understanding it more than I did before, and still trying to learn how to stay inside my own life while somehow continuing to move forward with it.
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