I’m currently working on a book of personal essays. This is an example of what I’ve been writing.
“Welcome home (if you still call it that)”. That was the subject of a friend’s email that arrived in my inbox when I landed in Sydney for a recent trip. The echo of his words, and the perennially bewildering experience of long-haul travel, made me feel a little out of sorts as I walked in my flip-flops on summer-stained streets, my pale feet free and warm after months of New York winter.
It’s disorienting to wander around a city that is no longer yours. A city that you grew up in, that you could once navigate automatically. It had been just over a year since my last visit to Sydney, but even in that scant amount of time, so much had changed. They were small differences–new shops, new bus tickets, higher prices–all of which would seem trivial if you lived there. But to me they were dispiriting signs that the place I used to call home was becoming less familiar.
I’m a little ashamed to say that I boarded the plane in New York with a sense of resentment about going to Australia. I felt too busy to be trifling with a frivolous trip across the world, and annoyed at the interruption that such a jaunt would have on my work life. Freelancers tend to exist in a paradoxical state of “lazy panic,” in which the majority of our time is spent worrying that we are not working hard enough. (Ironically, such thoughts tend to take up most of our brain space and preclude us from concentrating on our actual work.) It was in this mindset that I arrived at the airport, having debated and finally acquiesced to the idea of paying for a car to take me there.
As I got in line to board the first leg of the flight, I noticed there was an Australian family in front of me. They had thick accents and were asking each other questions about flying and airports and baggage. Listening to them, I felt this surge of irrational anger and embarrassment. I was irritated by their nasal voices and inane chatter. I resented the idea that people might consider me similar to them on account of our mutual home country. I wanted to dissociate myself from them, and from Australians in general. Basically, my thinking was mean-spirited and nasty. And I know now that it’s because I was scared about going back to Sydney. I worried that I’d feel like an outsider. I worried, as I have tended to worry over the years, that nowhere will ever feel like home again because parts of me are scattered across the world and it’s no longer possible to gather them all up and put them in one place.
This feeling started when I was about 14. That year, I decided I wanted to spend a few months in another country. I was restless and uneasy. I had this feeling that my real life was waiting for me somewhere else, and all I had to do was go find it. I badgered my mother about it, and she finally agreed to let me go to the USA for 12 weeks–as long as I stayed with my aunt in Texas for the first two months. I became very excited by the idea of immersing myself in the American school system and having An Experience that none of my peers in Sydney could claim. So off I went to Dallas, where I discovered to my chagrin that my real life was not, in fact, waiting for me in the crowded halls of Duncanville High School.
My school in Sydney was single-sex, academically selective and required its students to wear brown tunics, white blouses and sensible brown lace-up shoes. We had blazers and prefects and weekly assemblies in which we sang the school song and clapped respectfully for the guests who came to speak to us about the importance of discipline and academic rigour. There were 150 girls in my grade, and we competed against one another in that smiling, underhanded way that girls are so good at. At lunch time we formed an orderly queue at the canteen, purchased sandwiches and orange juice–soft drinks had no place at Sydney Girls High–and ventured down to the grassy field we called “The Lowers” to sit in a circle and talk about our upcoming exams.
Duncanville High, by extreme contrast, was a co-educational school with 1000 kids in ninth grade. There was no uniform. Instead of eight lessons per day, there were four long classes in which students frequently fell asleep. Lunch was taken in the cafeteria, and often consisted of Oreos, greasy pizza and Coke. Kids fell into those American high school stereotypes that I had assumed were the exclusive domain of TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210. After a failed attempt at befriending some popular kids, I fell in with the goth misfits who sat with hunched shoulders, pulling up the sleeves of their hoodies to hide the self-inflicted scars on their arms. Noone, least of all the teachers, seemed to exhibit a genuine enthusiasm for education. I scored 110 per cent in Advanced Placement Geography, having demonstrated my ability to label Madagascar on a world map.
Those months in Texas were a real shock to me. I don’t know what I was expecting–I guess I had assumed I would be an exotic novelty that the students and teachers would regard with delight and wonder. That was not the case. I did manage to befriend some non-goth kids eventually, and they even had a farewell party for me at one of their houses. There was a cake inscribed with “Goodbye Ella, see you ‘Down Under’!” Before it was unveiled, though, we drank whiskey from a communal thermos–parents were in the house, so we had to be discreet. The host, whose name I can’t quite remember, took me into his bedroom, opened his closet door and retrieved a pistol, clocking it and pointing it at my head. It was the first time I had ever seen a gun. He laughed at my look of terror and told me they did things differently in Texas.
When I returned to Sydney I had developed a mysterious disregard for school. I did poorly in my 10th grade exams, but started caring again the next year and ultimately became obsessive to the point that I scored 99.40 (from a possible 100) in my uni entrance exams. But that feeling that my real life was waiting for me somewhere else hadn’t quite disappeared. It was re-invigorated when my mother and sister moved to New York a few months into my first year at university.
Here I must pause and explain the international nature of our family. My mother is American. She grew up in Michigan and California, and eventually found her way to New Zealand, where she met and married my father. I arrived a little later, and my sister was born almost two years after that. Then, when I was three, we all moved from Wellington to Sydney, where I would stay for the next 22 years. This means that I am a citizen of three countries.
My American mother and New Zealand-born, Australian-raised sister both moved to New York in May 2001. I stayed behind in Sydney because, though I had entertained fantasies of attending Columbia or NYU, tertiary education in Australia is vastly cheaper.
I had mixed feelings about their departure. Part of me was excited about being independent at 17, but this sense of freedom was overshadowed by a more sinister element. I was still in the psychological grip of anorexia, and the idea of not having people around to spy on what I was eating or check up on me was enticing. My mother had concerns about leaving me behind, but we both chose to pretend that it was a great idea that would benefit us all.
Not one minute after I watched her and my sister walk to the departure gates at the airport, the feeling of restless unease returned. It persisted, to varying degrees, for the next seven years, as I tried to understand why I felt abandoned when I had willingly bidden my family farewell with a smile on my face.
Though I tried to block out the low hum of constant worry–of being not okay–with odd, ritualistic eating behaviours, various legal and illegal drugs and academic self-sabotage, the spectre of anxiety always lingered at the edges, occasionally clawing at me and sending me into frightened episodes of questioning my sanity. It seemed there was so much to be dealt with, but I didn’t know where to begin. So I returned to the comforting notion that this was all just a waiting room. I once more began to think that my real life was elsewhere, and that soon I would be called into it by a nice secretary with a soothing voice.
New York seemed to be the answer. I visited my mother and sister and we would go over plans for me to move there. But I still harboured such resentment toward them for moving there without me. Then I visited some friends in London, met a glorious man and started thinking about moving there instead. I would return home from these trips, head swirling with visions of packing up everything I owned and moving it across the world, where everyone would greet me at the airport and say “Welcome! Welcome to your REAL life!” I booked one-way tickets to New York and London, then changed them to return flights at the last minute because I was afraid of being disappointed. Or, more accurately, I was afraid of being disappointing.
Finally, at the end of 2008, I decided it was time. I left my job in Sydney, booked that one-way ticket and moved to New York. I knew that, even though my family was there, I might not feel a sense of home or belonging immediately. And I was right. It took over a year to feel comfortable calling this city my home. But now I do.
So, where does that leave Sydney? Is it my “home,” too? In a way. When I was back there on my recent trip, I felt out of place for the first few days. But then, slowly, the balmy evenings brought back smells and sights that are so much a part of me that I could never disown them. The warm mix of wine and seafood wafting from outdoor bars. Sidewalks–footpaths, I should say–covered in a dusting of frangipani flowers. Flying foxes streaming across the sky at dusk toward their trees in the Botanic Gardens. The salty tang in the air by the beach.
I will always feel an emotional connection to Australia. Every time I’m on a flight that has just begun its descent into Sydney, the sight of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and the frothy waves of Bondi is enough to render me silent and awed. I love that place. I always will. Whether it’s because of its inherent beauty or because it is the setting for so many memories and defining experiences, it doesn’t matter. I love it.
Walking around the city was like taking a tour of my own history. I caught the same bus that I caught to get to high school for seven years. Which is the same bus I caught to get to uni. It’s still there. And when I was on it, I remembered the weight of my school bag on my shoulders, or the feeling of my law textbook in my arms, or dozing with my head against the window after rehearsing a play late into the night. I walked past the State Library and instantly remembered studying fervently for my year 12 exams. I strolled through Martin Place and thought of watching the 2000 Olympics on a giant screen during that magical time when the whole city came alive.
So much of what we call home is about the nature of memory. Even in the space of a year, my memories of Sydney have taken on a romanticized sheen that doesn’t reflect reality. Some things are better than I recall. Some aren’t as good. But the distortion of memory–willful or otherwise–is a fascinating thing. Recollections that seem so seminal and important to you are nothing to others, and vice versa. We reconstruct them in our minds, garnishing them in ways that paint us as the heroes of our own stories.
A few days after I flew back from Sydney to New York, I went to Los Angeles for three days. It was an intense work trip that involved a 200-person team and two 10-hour days of live shoots with hardly any time to sit and think. The flight back to New York left LA at 1pm and landed at JFK after 10pm. We took off into the sunny, cloudless skies and within a few hours, darkness had swallowed us whole. All that light and warmth vanished so quickly. But soon, in its place, came the bright lights of New York City. The energy and the vitality and the comfort of knowing that this is a place that never goes to bed. I put my headphones on, cued up Empire State of Mind, and gazed out the window in silent awe as I landed in my second home.
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