Moving to the beautiful Gold Coast has been incredible. I am so insanely grateful for all the opportunities this has bought me and for the life, I am building with Mark.
BUT…
Sometimes the endless paradise just becomes…boring. And the constant sunshine tedious and annoying.
I miss my friends and family. I miss Yorke Peninsula being a 3-hour drive away from where I lived. Now I have to catch a $300 plane ride, hire a car for another couple hundred and drive all the way down to the farm. This costs about a grand everytime, which is why I’ve only been back twice in the 2 and a half years I’ve lived in Queensland. My family will never visit me here in Queensland. My family are country people and live in a bubble, they cannot leave this bubble and never will leave this bubble. This is fine, I’ve accepted it, cried over it and moved on from it.
More than anything it’s about missing the familiarity of ‘home’ of the familiar streets and places. Being able to know where to go for the best food in town, the best drinks, ‘the place to be.’
Moving interstate is a lonely and isolated experience, you’ll have friends, best friends even who will say “oh I’ll come to visit you.”
And they never will.
And you learn quickly that these are false promises made by people who were only in your life because you worked with them, or went to class with them. They were not long-lasting friends who would call you up or text you about random things. But transition friendships for a transition stage in life.
I’ve had many of these friendships, party friends, girly friends, shopping friends, drinking friends, depressing friends, fucking friends. And when I started to say no, when I started to back away from doing all these things they stopped inviting me to places, stopped texting, stopped talking about their life because they assumed I wasn’t interested. Which is never true, I’m still interested, I’m just not interested in the activity that once bound us together.
Moving interstate requires making new friends and adapting to new experiences and cultures. There are multiple subcultures in Queensland, different laws and regulations and a mixture of ambitious and extreme laziness sprinkled with the incredibly wealthy and the incredibly poor.
Forget financial insecurity, housing and lack of employment when you move, these are intense stressful moments in time that pass in less than a month and you’re left wondering why you had sleepless nights over such trivial matters that fall into place naturally when you work hard and apply yourself.
It’s friendships and relationships that are the hardest when moving. These take long months and gruelling hours before you can even think of being invited out to something or inviting someone over.
I’ve been living in Queensland for just over 2 and a half years now and it’s been a brand new beginning for me in all facets of life. I felt like Adelaide was such a trial of my youth, I was tested in so many different ways and felt so many raw and deep emotions that my heart still bleeds sometimes today thinking of all the ugly and cruel things that happened to me. Happened to me from other people inflicting harm and myself, mostly myself. What a waste of time it truly is to hate yourself, to be dishonest with your creative drive and doubt yourself so much that you end up doing nothing you enjoy, never study the degree you really want and work jobs you fucking hate, all because you don’t believe in yourself.
It’s never too late to start again. I truly stand by that, and you don’t need to move interstate to do it because no matter where you go you take yourself with you.
I could never escape myself and I got tired of running from her and pushing away my creativity because I was too embarrassed to share it and share how I truly feel.
Being young is so hard because we are faced with the endless choice and suddenly you wake up and you’re nearly 30 and on a path, you didn’t intentionally mean to walk down but it’s too far to turn back now and take a different one.
I found this to be true and I question myself every day about what industry I should be in, what should I dedicate my time too.
I want to be so many things all at once and I’ve dabbled in all of them but never become a master. Jack of all trades, master of none.
Moving stirs a mixture of leaving the past behind and moving forward to the future. But what is that future?
It stirs old emotions that haven’t been dealt with and baggage that was long locked away that has surfaced in long car rides across the country.
It causes you to question why you have so many physical possessions and so little creative space.
Physically moving is different to mentally moving. But I think for me, I somehow did both without even realising it. Now I’m looking back over my shoulder down the path wondering if I’m on the right one.
- Haley x
Haley Lauren Smith 