So it has been a (six year long) minute since my last blog post.
How the eff did that happen?
Six years ago, at the ripe old age of 28, I arrived in Melbourne with a backpack. I was dusty, heartbroken and probably a teeny bit smelly! I was immediately swept into a very lovely life. I found a flat with an old school friend just off the famous Chapel Street and commenced having an absolute blast with not much thought as to what might happen next.
Within six months I had a job- a proper grown-up serious one- a group of friends, an online dating profile and was making my way back to the UK for a visit to tell my family that, in fact, I wasn’t going to be returning home to live as planned. I was telling them that I was going to become an expat.
Six years later, I am typing this in my sunny lounge in my bayside home- on which I have a mortgage- a very proper grown up serious one. My husband (!) is busily doing the online food shop while our baby (!?!) is napping upstairs. This is surely the expat dream.
Well it certainly has its moments that is for sure. But let’s slow down a second. Why did the smelly backpacker get a job (and frankly- how?) Why didn’t I return home as planned?
Well it certainly has its moments that is for sure. But let’s slow down a second. Why did the smelly backpacker get a job (and frankly- how?) Why didn’t I return home as planned?
Maybe it was all three- and a few more. But I blame Paris.
I was 19 when I first got my taste of expat living. I had just finished school and, with no intention of immediately starting the next serious step in my, seemingly inevitable, forward trajectory, I took a sideways step and moved to Paris with my best friend. For five months we shared a teeny tiny flat next to the Canal St Martin. We got hospitality jobs, ate crepes, drank 5 Euro wine, went to jazz bars and did laundry once a month at the laundrette at the end of the street. It was heaven. When she left to go to Argentina (yes she was, and still is, that cool) I stayed on and really started living in Paris. I had a group of friends, I started a French Language and Culture course and I occasionally even cooked a meal for myself.
And that was it. I was ruined.
Sarah Turnbull in Almost French describes the feeling that once you have lived in a country that isn’t your home, your heart will always be in two places. For me, when I returned to England to attend university after that magical year, I felt a sense that there was no inevitable path any more. I had proved that I could create a life for myself from scratch. I could find friends and work and experiences totally on my own terms. I could arrive somewhere where people didn’t know me, where I wasn’t known as someone’s daughter or sister or friend. I was just Chloe. dolor in reprehenderit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
For almost 10 years that idea niggled at me until the passing of my Grandma May gave me the prompt I needed to say I would leave my life in England and travel. At that point, in theory, I was planning to return. But perhaps, even then, a part of me knew I could stay away.
For almost 10 years that idea niggled at me until the passing of my Grandma May g
So as each of the steps fell into place seemingly by accident- the break-up, the boat, the flat, the job the little voice in my head said ‘You can do this. You have done it before.’
But even I couldn’t have known then how crazily beautiful, transformative, painful, life-affirming and magical the next 6 years would be.
