Next week will mark one year since we moved to Sydney. Already we are leaving. It will be the fourth big move in as many years (to London and back to Brisbane, to Sydney and back again). I didn't expect this.
I knew I wouldn't be here forever, and in fact, I wasn't happy to move to Sydney. I thought, why couldn't it be Melbourne? Melbourne I could live with, in a heartbeat. Sydney was something else. Sydney was corporate and cold and concrete and snobby and just not me.
But I had that job offer on the table, and it was everything I'd always wanted: a book editing job; a respite, it seemed, from the advertorial-ruled world of magazine editing that had been mine for seven years. So I took it, and after just nine months back in the nest of a flat in inner-east Brisbane the Mister and I bought when I was 21, we packed up again.
Expectations are funny things. The dream job was not a dream. It was stressful and depressing and it made me, perhaps, a worse editor than I had been before. Just under a year in, I handed in my resignation, with a lighter heart and deeper breaths than I had been able to take in months.
Sydney, on the other hand, had won me over, in a way I never expected. What I didn't understand about Sydney is that outside of the (yes, very corporate, very concrete) CBD, it is a collection of small villages where everyone can find their place. And our place happened to be in Paddington, a suburb that my ex-neighbours told me was the wealthiest part of Australia. So we may be out of place, I said, but hey, we'd do our best to bring the suburb down to earth; we'd walk down William Street in our pyjamas and order one big curry to share at the local Thai. Aside from the Collette Dinnigan and $150 haircuts, Paddington is a village unto itself, and it is inclusive and lovely, and we have three pubs within five minutes' walk where we feel at home and an art gallery committed to showcasing emerging locals literally around the corner. We live in the bottom half of a terrace house two blocks behind Oxford Street, with high ceilings and wooden floors and a courtyard where the cat sleeps blissfully in the sun.
Coupled with the amazing group of friends we have here, it is difficult to leave, to say the least. Taking out the emotional aspect and the uncertainty of leaving two solid jobs for one dreamy pursuit and one possible small business, the logistics themselves are exhausting. I'm dreading packing yet again, worrying myself sick about a long drive with a cat (and a self) who travels badly, adding up the many costs. Of course, I'm choosing to do this and, in many ways, dragging a fairly reluctant Mister along with (he was also fairly reluctant to move to London three years ago, and then fairly reluctant to leave Europe again, and very reluctant to move to Sydney). And it's all because of the three little letters PhD, seductive in their promise. It's because of the memory of how happy and stimulated I was for every second of my Honours thesis, and the research topic that leapt into my brain and is itching and itching and sometimes out and out screaming in my ear. I have a highly romantic and likely naive notion of life as an academic that I can't resist pursuing any longer.
On the plus side, I get to reinvent our space yet again. The chance to indulge in an often-unfulfilled obsession with interior design is more than a little sweetener to the anxiety.
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