A year ago, my life changed in what turned out to be a positive way. I learned that I would have to leave Australia, a situation I knew was on the horizon but was holding on to hope that things would change and I could stay. I refrain from using the word my life changed for the ‘better’, which I have used in the past and which people told me on a daily basis: “You’re so much better off. This was all for the best.”
I don’t want to use those words, better or best, because God knows what my path would have been like had I stayed in Australia. It could have been great – it could have been better than great. It could have been fucking awesome. I’ll never know what would have happened had I stayed. Where would I be today? Would we still be living in Little Mount, or would we have moved to Eastern Beaches? Would I have gotten homesick and left on my own, or would I have really settled into a life there? Would I have gone on to travel Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, the Outback, or would I have followed a different trail? Would I still be at my same job, or would I have gotten an opportunity with The Sydney Morning Herald? Would my relationship have had another shot? Would I have had time to find professional sponsorship, or would I have gotten fucking arrested and deported?
I used to think of it as having no choice but to leave the country, and in a way, that’s entirely true. I didn’t have the support I needed to stay, and there were hefty legal complications (more like criminal complications) that kept me from going down a certain road; there was far too much risk in lying to immigration. But at the same time, and to quote the one and only Jay Z, I think of it like this:
“No lie, just know I chose my own fate
I drove by the fork in the road and went straight.”
When it first happened, I sat there through the whole weekend with my friends or on Facetime with my family, from that early morning phone call on a Saturday morning just last year to when I made the call to immigration just a few days later. “What do I do? Do I lie? Do I call him again and try to talk to him? Or should I just call the woman at immigration and tell her the truth? What do I do? What would you do? What do I do?”
I mean, I could have lied. I really and truly could have lied, but to put it bluntly: It was just too fucked up a situation. At the time, I felt like I was damned if I do and I was damned if I don’t, like no matter what, I was just left feeling lost.
It was hard for me then (nearly impossible really) to feel and understand the positives of the situation. But every day I grow just that much more accepting of how it all went. I have these two friends, I’ll call them Kate and Gill, both of them involved in international relationships and all of us struggling with them when we were in them. Recently, they asked me if there was anything I regret, and though there are things I do regret, I realized that I don’t regret my choice not to lie. It wasn’t even on my radar. I never said in the past year, “I wish I lied to immigration.”
It’s weird to think of all the “what if” aspects of it all, but such is life. You can spend forever and a day looking back on things and wondering or hoping or holding on, but that will only keep you standing still. You just gotta keep charging forward (which in New York City can be difficult sometimes, a mix of the Polar Vortex and the city’s aim to continue to test the strongest out there) no matter what you feel like is pushing against you.
It’s not always an easy road for everyone. It can be a conscious, mental effort to keep yourself focused, to choose things that make you happy, to do what you can to keep yourself as straight as you can be.
And eventually, you’ll collide with the positives.
