Closure

I'm still alive! I just haven't been writing recently. There are a couple reasons for that.

My last post was Oct 15th, 2023. A few weeks after that was the one year anniversary of this blog. I started it right around Halloween 2022 as a way to both document this Australian adventure and help me manage the big and complex feelings that come with a massive life change. It also played an essential role in making sure I felt connected to everyone at home. Obviously the past year our lives have been like nothing else we have ever experienced (and probably won't again).

Shortly after my last blog post, I had a really poignant, full circle moment. One of the first people I really connected with in Australia is moving to North America for a post-doc (basically an after PhD job). I've known this for months. I found out early because he was freaking out about it, and knew I recently moved across the world. I'd like to think that I helped him wrap his head around how to grapple with an opportunity like this. I also made him a list of things you need to do/get done/look into before you make an international move.

Obviously, he has been crazy busy finishing his PhD, and getting ready. One day after work a friend and I went to his place to raid his apartment for things he no longer wanted/needed. When we got there, his whole living room was packed up into boxes, headed for storage. And despite knowing this from the beginning, suddenly it hit me, and I got unexpectedly emotional. He was leaving! Packing up his life and leaving. Just like Justin & I did all those months ago. You know when you are going through something big, but the 'bigness' of it doesn't hit you, because you are so far in it? And then the same thing happens to someone else, and because you are watching it from the outside, you can see the impact? Finally you can take in the magnitude of it.

Nine months ago, we packed up our life into boxes, and moved across the world. And at the time, I was so focused on keeping it together and getting things done that the massive scale of the change we were making didn't sink in. I wouldn't let it - I had too much to do. We had to learn how to live in a totally new place. There was no time to wallow in feelings. Plus I knew that if I thought about everything we were doing too much I would get too scared, and might back out. But now that someone else was going through it, I could finally see the impact of a crazy international move for a once in a lifetime opportunity. My friend was about to change his life and start an amazing adventure, just like the kind Justin & I are having.

The weight of change finally hit me. Not in a negative way. More of a 'yea, this has permanently changed the course of our lives' way. Justin & I have both known this fact from the beginning, from even before I got funding and we decided to do this. We explicitly talked about it at length, numerous times. We knew this would become a permanent bookmark in our lives, from which we would measure time and events: Our lives Before Australia would be different from our lives After Australia. These are things you can (and should) talk about before something big happens. However, talking about big things happening is a completely other thing to experiencing big things happening.

So there I was, tearing up on my friends front lawn, in front of a car full of things I had pillaged from his kitchen. I wasn't just emotional that he was leaving, but for everything I knew he was about to experience. For everything that Justin & I have experienced in the last year: fear, loneliness, homesickness, sadness. But also joy, excitement, adventure, and wonder. Often in immediate succession, or all at the same time.

Looking at my friend's apartment full of boxes made it really hit home as to how far Justin & I have come. This feeling has been a little while coming, I just didn't know what it was at first. Even in the weeks leading up to the lawn-crying experience, it was getting more challenging to find the motivation for blog posts. I think partially this is because the PhD is really getting busy, and the workload is no joke. But the other part, the main part, is that Justin & I are settled. It no longer feels like we are travelling. It just feels like we are living our regular lives, in a newish place that happens to be very warm.

Yes, we are still absolutely on an adventure. And yes, we are still 100% planning on coming back to Canada. If anything I'm more resolute about this now than I was when we left. But our Australian life is starting to feel really settled, in a lovely comfortable way. We have a furnished apartment, jobs, hobbies, friends, weekend plans. We have a favourite brunch place, and preferred convenience store snacks. We know where to go to get groceries, prescriptions, clothes, etc. We still miss Canada, and all of the people there. In fact, one of the harder learned lessons of this journey is that homesickness never really goes away, its just more or less loud depending on the day. But for now, we are enjoying our relatively uneventful Australian lives. And its true that I could still write about my daily life here, but I just don't have the same drive or motivation around it.

I started this blog because I had a compulsion to write. I had things I wanted to say, experiences I needed to document somewhere. For now, that desire has quieted. I'm not saying I will never write again. Quite the opposite in fact. I genuinely enjoy writing, and I don't expect that will change. But I don't want to force it. So I'm changing the way I use this blog. I don't know exactly what it will look like yet, but I suspect for a while, posts will be quite infrequent. I tend to not enjoy writing about my daily life - its not that interesting (I go to work, I go to the gym, I stay up too late on social media. Wash, rinse, repeat). Plus Justin & I have enough of a community here in Australia that documenting daily things would include a lot of details about the people around me, and I'm just not comfortable writing about others like that.

I expect that when we are doing out-of-the-norm, non-daily things: travelling, doing Australia specific activities, etc. I will probably write about them. We have a trip to Vietnam planned over Christmas. That will probably be written about at length. We also (very loosely) are expecting to spend some time in both Gold Coast and Tasmania during 2024. I think both of those periods will inspire some interesting writing.

In the past year, I have written just under 64,000 words over the course of 64 posts (for those of you keeping track, this is still less than what I wrote during our European backpacking trip, when I managed to get down about 85,000 words over the course of 8 months). I want to express my immense gratitude for all the support, encouragement and love you have given me through reading and engaging with this blog. It has more of an impact on me than you will ever know. One of the blog goals was to bring you all along on this adventure with us. I think I have accomplished that. At the very least, I have ensured I remember that you are all still with us, even if not physically. And so while it isn't ending, it is changing. Settling. Just like Justin & I.