What Happens When You Realise Your Dream? (Part 2)

Within six months of that dinner with my inspiring, interior designer friend – the one who challenged me to pursue a dream I didn’t realise I had – my employer announced that my role was being made redundant. They really valued me as an employee but, sadly, there were no suitable positions for me in the Sydney office. 

They did, however, need a strong manager in their Brisbane office; would I consider relocating? 

To Brisbane?! 

What about my mortgage and my family and (my heart and soul) my friends? What about my sweet, little apartment, my sanctuary? 

And oh! What about the humidity?! 

It will only be for 12 months. They promised. 

Adventure was not then, and is not now, a regular feature of my life’s vocabulary; nonetheless, I packed up my apartment and rented it out to strangers. I bade a sad farewell to my friends and family, and hauled north to the sunshine state.

It was tough. And it was lonely. So far removed from everything I held dear, it felt as though I had disappeared altogether. My tangibility seemed inextricably tied to people and things beyond my own self. Homesickness was a real struggle.

I found that new friends were almost impossible to make in a city so inward looking, and my old friends hardly noticed my absence. My old life went on without me; even my mortgage took care of itself. Only my mother missed me.

Try as I might, I simply could not like Brisbane. And I did try. GoMA was a great refuge as was the State Library. The Powerhouse was a short walk from my apartment and offered amazing weekend diversions, and the riverside lifestyle was refreshing. But ultimately, my heart simply wasn’t in it.

At the end of the 2010 it became clear to me that a homecoming was not on the cards - my employer wanted me to stay on for another year. I knew I had to make a decision. I would not survive another year.

If I was going to be separated from, and barely missed by, all that I cared about, then I might as well do that in a city that had more to offer than any other place I had known.

And that city was Rome.

…to be continued…