With the beginning of my post-grad study just a week away, I've been reflecting on my time since I started my under-grad degree as a naive 17-year-old in 2007. Although I'm attending the very same university, suddenly it all feels daunting again. I'm nervous about everything, from the simple things: not being able to find the right lecture hall, affording textbooks (I miss the days when the most expensive item to purchase amongst my novels and poetry was a $40 dictionary), and whether or not I'll make friends quickly. And then there are the bigger things: whether I'll be able to balance my part-time job (and only source of income) around the demanding placement hours, and the biggie: is this huge change in career the right path for me?
All of these worries make me look back on when it all first began for me. I was not quite 18 when being awarded a couple of scholarships pushed me out of home, and into a big city. To accept the scholarships (which, in hindsight was the only way I was able to attend university), meant that there was no option of deferment. I had three weeks to pack my life up, wave goodbye to my two best friends, and, hardest of all: leave my family, my dog and my home behind, knowing that I was never going to live under that roof again. And while Quayles Lane would always be home in my heart, I would never truly belong there again.
How did I go through all of these things at 17? Six years later, I'm trying to find the strength and courage that I can't believe I must have had in 2007. In my first year of uni I struggled academically, with none of the nurturing that I had enjoyed from my high school teachers. For the first time in my life, I had no friends in class. The girls in my course were angsty, hoodie-wearing introverts. And in the end, it was the boys in my classes who became my saviours. Gone were my gang of giggling girlfriends, and in was this new kind of mateship. I missed home terribly, and while I went back every weekend, I began to hate arriving back in the city, with its hot bitumen, traffic, and the sea of unsmiling, hurrying faces everywhere, that was both stifling and alienating at the same time.
I returned home every single weekend. I'd relish that train journey back, and as the months got colder, I'd watch through the window as the whizzing hills transformed from dusty, scratchy and brown, to rolling waves of silky green grass. I'd be spoilt by my mum at home, in a way that only living independently makes you appreciate. But before I knew it, I'd be watching her wave me off from the train station platform. And seeing that never really got any easier. And it still hasn't.
But while it was very hard to feel so alone in a big city, I was lucky to be living with my aunty and uncle, who were the perfect surrogate parents for me. And although I'd left my friends behind, I was fortunate enough to have a blossoming love that might, just possibly, be the love of my life. With the help of (finally!) my first female friend at uni, I started Deakin's cheerleading club, and in the one hit, completed a dream and opened up a gateway to meeting like-minded souls at university. And I will call many of these people my friends for a lifetime.
Slowly but surely, the city became my home. While I still feel like my heart belongs out where the big skies are, I call Melbourne home. It feels good now, to stride along Elizabeth St, ducking around slow walkers and knowing the traffic light patterns. It makes me feel alive to be a part of this concrete and glass world, with all of us moving, talking and breathing beings giving this city its heartbeat and its life.
A very new chapter is scary. Really scary. But if I could do this six years ago, when all of this was for the first time, I can do it now.
