Photo by Me. Raglan, New Zealand.
I am currently in New Zealand at the moment, I have been here for two weeks. Before I had been living and working in Australia for the last 9 months. New Zealand is/was the goal. I had always had it in my head to come here, when my sister came back from travelling when she was 19 and said it was one of the most amazing places she had seen. I didn't know much about the place but being a visual person I knew I wanted to see the talked about landscapes for myself.
Having worked and saved for many months back in the UK, I still had to work and save in Australia so I could enjoy the freedom of travel in New Zealand. The thing about travelling is not only do you get to experience some of your highest highs, you learn a lot from your lows.
In this day and age of social media, there is a tendency to bullshit about how great our lives are, comparing our behind the scenes to people's showreels as the saying goes. It's literally driving people crazy, we are being made to feel more aware of how we should look and how we should socialise or how much we should earn even if it's not something we aspire to. This is why I wanted to write this post to say some of the realistic sides of travel, because there's nothing worse then making the commitment to feel like you are doing it wrong in comparison to what you have seen on Facebook.
It seems that the right of passage for a Brit moving to Australia is to fall in love with the place, do your farm work to get your second year visa and eventually start the seven year process of becoming a legit Aussie if you are lucky. I realised quite quickly that I didn't like it enough to commit to 90 days worth of farming, which made me feel like I had done something wrong! It wasn't till I met a girl at a bus stop who also wasn't interested in doing farm work to say "Australia isn't for everyone and that's ok" to feel like I could finally admit to people I didn't want to do farm work simply because I don't like the country enough.
I won't go into the details as such but things went tits up after about a month and half of living in Sydney. I was on my own and soon to be even more alone. I was working in a job that was bringing back my anxiety and going home straight into bed emotionally exhausted from being on the phone to upset and angry customers. My god did I want to throw in the towel and get on a plane home! I thought about it all the time, I thought about what I could be doing if I was at home. I thought about seeing friends, hugging family, drinking at my local even fantasising about shopping in Tesco's. But I knew I wouldn't forgive myself if I left before I had even stepped foot in New Zealand or even got out of Sydney!
My solice was Netflix and a $12 blanket I bought from K-Mart I used to wear as a cape to stay warm. Word of warning: houses in Australia don't have heating and it gets cold in the winter so take layers! I kept looking at photos I had saved of the places I wanted to visit and referring to a bucket list I had made for my travels to keep me going. Another thing that really helped was a suggestion to make a motivation board for my cubicle at work to remind me why I was there sticking it out. I stuck photos of friends and places I wanted to go. It really did help!
A strange thing that you don't get told about when travelling and I think this is happens more if you are on your own, is that you will think about every moment in your life you can physically remember. You will re-live every emotion you experienced. You think back to what you were like as a child, the holidays, the tantrums (I had many), you think about the pain you put your parents through, you think about all the boys you had a thing for, the funny memories you shared with friends, you'll laugh again at inside jokes, you start to realise who you are becoming, noticing that you are slowly becoming the person you always wanted to be, you'll have a word with yourself many a time to snap out of old habits that always annoyed you, you'll start to relax into yourself.
The thing I found most strange was having to rely on myself to make a decision. This is something I have always found hard, I always have to ask about 10 different people for their opinion on something that will in no way affect them because "I don't know what I want to do!". Fucking hell is it boring! Having been travelling on my own, having the freedom to make a choice is almost overwhelming. Yeah you can ask for advice but at the end of the day there's only so much someone can say because they're all trying to sort their own shit out too!
Even though I was miserable for a good few months whilst in Sydney I wouldn't change it because I gained so much from working that job for so long and staying in Sydney. I have to mention I left on a high after moving to a new house with the most fabulous housemates (2 of which were four legged).
After being unemployed since the end of August, I may be poor but I am in New Zealand!
To be continued...
0 comments:
Post a Comment