Lost in transit

Casting the Die

Two years have passed, and now it looks like my time in Melbourne is coming to a close.

I haven't been able to find a good job here, and my tourist visa is up on June 20th. I've got a horrible sense of deja vu – in the past couple of months I've started to make new friends, began dating someone really great, and now I've got to pull up stakes and leave them all behind, which is pretty much what happened to me in Chicago after I'd lived there for two years there, too.

I should be excited about my current plan, to move to London to do more freelance travel writing, but instead I'm just feeling depressed about my dwindling time left in Melbourne, four-and-a-half weeks. I don't want to go, but I don't feel like I can stay, either; just as I've started coming to terms with closing up my house and selling off my stuff, suddenly I'm feeling a mild panic and wondering if it's not too late to change my plans and stay after all. But then when I think about getting a job here and committing myself to at least 12 more months, I start getting anxious at that, too. I'm so torn I keep throwing justifications back and forth to myself in a sort of tennis match of the neuroses, repeating them over and over again to friends in the hope that if I say it enough, I'll start to feel better about it. (That I'm writing it here should give you an idea of how well that's working.)

I've always wanted to live in London, and now I seem to have a chance to do so – although this plan is also fraught with difficulties as well – but instead of feeling elated, I'm quietly terrified. Besides missing Melbourne already, I've been feeling homesick for NYC, but at the same time I believe that it's homesickness for the idea of NYC, an abstract, movie-quality sort of thing, not the actual reality of living there on a daily basis. My father encouraged me to go to London, saying I can always head back to NYC if it doesn't work out, and yet I feel like if I do go back, it'll mean that I've copped out and settled, that I failed, that this "expat thing" will have just been a phase that I had to get through like a colicky toddler, instead of a valid choice I made to try to live the life I want to lead.

It always seems like an uphill battle for me, trying to find a place to go to: the torture of leaving people and places behind, of carting things from country to country, trying to get established in new places – always wondering what the hell am I doing here? But what the hell am I doing anywhere? It'd be so much easier to just give up, give in: head back to New York, never worry about visas or employment eligibility, or the exchange rate, or getting all the social conventions wrong and generally feeling like an outcast.

I don't want to stop being an expat; I just want it to stop being so hard sometimes. But of course we already know the answer to that one, don't we?

Posted by wildsoda at May 15, 2007 05:07 AM