Less Itchy Feet

In the six months since I left home I have experienced a shift within myself. Prior to coming to Australia, I hadn't had any big desire to come here. I always felt that if the opportunity to go to Australia presented itself I would take it up, but I wasn't going to go to any special efforts to make a trip to Australia happen. When I found out about ARCSHS I knew that's where I needed to go and off to Australia I went.

I liked Melbourne right away. Adjusting to life here was really easy; I found a great place to live, got my own furniture, and settled back into academic life in no time. I still wanted to travel all over the world and could frequenty be found making plans for trips I'd like to take. When I thought about what I'd do after I finished my PhD, I envisioned myself travelling in Africa, maybe even teaching at one of the many American universities around the continent.

But slowly that started to change. When I thought more about what I want to do career wise, I started realizing I'm more interested in doing research than being a teaching professor and I started to think about my PhD research in terms of what sort of post-doctorial research it could lead me to. I started to prioritize focusing on my own research above anything else. I stopped thinking about coming up with something to submit to international conferences because I recognized that my energy is better spent focusing on making my research strong now, so that when I have done my data collected and start my analysis I can have something interesting and important to say at those conferences.

When I think about the future now, and what I want from life now, I have a different picture than I did when I left home. I still want to travel, but I also want to make a place for myself that I can call home. And I want that place to be in Melbourne.

Calgary will always be my home town, but it hasn't been my "home" for the past 10 years. Living in Calgary, I felt trapped, like I couldn't be myself, like I couldn't reach my full potential. Over the years this feeling became more intense. Every time I left Calgary I felt a sense of relief, and every time I returned I felt claustophobic.

I've moved away twice before, both times with different experiences (in Ottawa I really felt "at home" and like if I wanted to, I could make a life for myself there, whereas in Amsterdam I had some amazing experiences, but I learned I could never feel "at home" living there, or likely anywhere in Europe). And both times coming back to my life in Calgary, when I had changed and grown as a person so much while I was gone, and the life I had left was waiting for me pretty much right where I left off, it was really rough. I found it extremely difficult to deal with and wasn't ever really successfully able to reconcile the changes I'd undergone with the life I was living in Calgary.

When I finished my undergrad degree I felt that I didn't have anything tying me to my life in Calgary anymore (my family and friends are still my family and friends no matter where I live) and started looking to make a life for myself elsewhere. I wasn't successful in that at that time, but it was during that time I found out about ARCSHS and, like I said, I knew that was where I needed to go. In the meantime, I took a job that I loathed so that I could earn money to be able to make the life I was dreaming about a reality. And it was really hard for me to stay with that job for as long as I did, but after a fair bit of manuveuring I was able to make it a bareable situation.

When I left this time, I knew that I'd never live in Calgary again. My reaction to Calgary when I came back from my trip to Peru last year was enough for me to know that this time when I got out I was staying out for good! Calgary is just not a place where I am able to feel happy, free, and at peace with myself and my life. I am not going to get into the reasons for why I feel that way here. But while I know I can't ever come back to Calgary to stay, it is a place I am happy to come back to visit, and will be doing just that in June 2009. Being in Calgary is much easier for me to manage when I know I don't have stay.

So why do I want to make a life for myself in Melbourne and not somewhere else in Canada like Ottawa? A lot of my reasons are quite strongly personal and not best expressed in this forum, but there are a great deal of practical reasons as well. The career path that I'm on now is quite different from where I was when I was living in Ottawa, and there isn't the same kind of space for the one I'm on now there. There's a different culture here, a different academic setting, and it's one I'm finding fits much more comfortably on me than what I've seen in Canada and Europe. I can visualize a potential career path for myself in Australia that just doesn't translate into anything that interests or excites me as much in Canada.

Things are different here. I am different here. I feel free in a way that I've never felt before, free to live my life on my own terms. It's an exciting and really envigorating feeling to have. Why I had to come so far away to feel this way is complicated at best, but the reality of it is that I've come a long way from home and gotten in touch with a very wonderful part of myself that has been neglected for just way too long. My feelings may change as I go along with this particular journey that I'm on now, but somehow I think that I'll always feel like my real home is in Melbourne.