The moment I got everything I once dreamed about
Only to realise I didn't want it anymore.
I’ve just got back to London after spending a week on a creative retreat in Tuscany in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Florence, which is why this week’s Substack is coming to you a week late. Suffice it to sat, it was a hard one to write.
It’s been a long, hot summer in Sydney. Since last September, the heat has been relentless. The days, thick with humidity and inertia. Even now—with winter around the corner—I’ve found the closeness of it all unbearable. I’ve found myself moving slowly, like I’m wading through the stringy yolk of an egg, thinking slowly, a sense of listlessness heavy on my shoulders. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re in a kind of emotional purgatory—when the shape of your life has started to shift but the pieces haven’t quite fallen into place.
The things I once loved about Australia—the endless blue skies, the easy rhythm of beach days, the golden light slanting over the sand at the end of our street—have started to feel distant to me. Like they belong to a previous version of myself. Someone more certain, more tethered. Someone I used to be, someone I no longer know.
It was about a year ago—when mine and Nico’s last visa application was declined—that I quietly checked out of Australia. Not physically—we stayed—but emotionally, spiritually, mentally, I left. Something in me gave up. I’d spent nine years wrestling with the immigration system, pouring every ounce of energy, every penny I made, every iota of my sanity into trying to secure a future in a country I had called home for so long. I was exhausted by the bureaucracy, the constant precarity, the sense that no matter how hard I tried, it might never be enough.
In that moment, I think I let go. Not of the country, necessarily, but of the dream I’d built around it.
So when the email from our lawyers came through two weeks ago, I wasn’t prepared for how it would land. Congratulations, it began. Your visa has been approved. It’s valid for the next three years; after two you’ll be eligible to apply for permanent residency.
I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the screen. My hands were shaking. Ten years of longing, ten years of hoping. This was it—the thing we’d fought so hard for. Surely I could summon a bit of happiness, a flicker of relief?
But instead, I started to cry, and I didn’t stop for the next two hours.