The Hard Part
By
My newest adopted city as viewed from Mount Dandenong.
Yesterday marked the one-month anniversary of moving to Australia, but for me, it barely feels like it’s been one day. The past four weeks have been filled with a familiar challenge that I’ve become adept at accepting, the challenge of moving to a place with no job and no contacts and seeing if I can succeed. It’s a challenge that is, well, challenging.
Humbling, too. Going to a place where I know relatively few people means starting from nowhere. I sent out dozens upon dozens of resumes and heard nothing back. I submitted an online resume to an employment agency and, when I heard nothing back I gave them a call. I requested an interview and was told in the most professional polite terms to eff off. The “don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you” response is one of the maddening realities of having no professional network to build off of.
“Don’t you know who I AM?!” I’m tempted to say to the recruiter. “I’ve traveled the world in the past two and a half years! I’ve seen more internationally than you have in your own country! I’ve done real work producing video content for real companies! I don’t need your stinking 30-hour-a-week temp receptionist job. YOU need ME!”
…but for course, that’s not the case. I do need their job, and part of starting fresh is washing away that hubris that I start to carry with me simply because I’ve done this so many times before. That’s ultimately what’s so frustrating about this phase of moving to a new place, the phase I’ve started to call “The Hard Part.”
The Hard Part is like watching a bad movie where you already know the ending. I know I’m going to get a casual job and find an apartment somewhere in the city. I know it’s going to take living uncomfortably in hostels and on friends couches while I get settled. I know that I’m not going to particularly relish this period of my move — so can’t I just skip past it?
My desire to fast-forward through this phase of the process was reflected in my lack on contact with my family, my friends and on this blog. I simply didn’t want to be in touch with people I cared about until I could tell them with confidence what, exactly, I was doing here.
But on that note there’s good news. Four weeks into my stay in Melbourne, I’ve found myself with a job at a cafe in a trendy part of town (the neighborhood of Fitzroy). I’ve found a great, furnished flat with some cool flatmates just down the road from the train station (the suburb of Clifton Hill) and I’ve reconnected with a lot of friends in the area. Now that I can talk about The Hard Part in the past tense, I can start living the life I wanted to live in Melbourne. The most important part about getting through this though, is that I’ve learned something important about myself: I’m not sure how many more Hard Parts I can go through. This might be the last city I can do this up-and-move-with-no-plan thing in. Eventually, we grow out of going through The Hard Part. It’s just taking me a little while longer than most.
