I moved to the other side of the world-here’s what it’s taught me:

Like nearly 50,000 Brits this year, I took the massive leap and applied for my first Working Holiday visa to Australia. It seemed like the cliché thing to do at nearly 23 years old with no interest in getting a corporate job. Back home I felt suffocated by the perpetual feeling that nothing was ever going to happen to me. I felt agitated all the time and was craving a new adventure. I had this overwhelming urge to create a new kind of chaos in my own life that I no longer seemed to recognise.

I had to do the unthinkable–I had to leave.

Holding onto the edge whilst too scared to make the dive, I devised a plan to only be in Australia for four months and do something a bit out of the ordinary like a ski season, and live out my chalet girl fantasies. I got my inspiration a year ago from an old episode of Don’t Tell The Bride Australia where the moronic groom designed

an après-ski wedding completely against his beach-loving fiancée’s wishes. Until that point, I didn’t even know it snowed in Australia. But that is what I decided that I had to do, at least for the time being.

“Don’t be impressed with the snow,” those more versed warned me (I’m not)–but I knew I wasn’t coming for the snow. It represented something much more to me, as if I already knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I would make the eventual decision to stay way longer than originally planned.

In May, I exchanged the UK’s grey and dull skies for Melbourne’s equally grey and dull skies. I stepped off the plane at 7:00am and ordered an Uber to my friend Inika’s apartment in South Yarra. In the car ride I glimpsed kangaroos to my left and it hit me that I was in Australia. I was in the land of didgeridoos, Tim-Tams, and excellent hourly pay. I began to talk to the taxi driver who turned out to be from Lebanon and had immigrated here thirty years ago. He told me how much he loved Melbourne as he drove me under the skyscrapers of the CBD for the very first time. I felt spiritually connected to this random old man on our shared foreignness to this adopted land. We hit a pothole and I hit my head on ceiling of the Toyota Corolla, bringing me back down to reality.

Upon arriving at Inika’s apartment, I took a much needed nap after 22 hours of travelling, including a layover in Hong Kong. We spent the next few days exploring south of Melbourne’s river and the CBD. I was, and still am, in awe of the retail selection of Melbourne’s high street. I went a bit crazy and probably spent over $1000 on basic vests and tees that I didn’t need but somehow thought would change my life. I had also developed the ‘everything is half price’ mindset from the incredible exchange rate. We then travelled to central Australia the following week, driving about in a Suzuki Jimney and saw everything from Uluru to Kings Canyon to despite its florally name, the not so florally Alice Springs–although we did manage to catch the Finke motorbike festival which is apparently the biggest night of the year there!

Shortly after, I returned to Melbourne and boarded a stupidly expensive bus to Mount Buller where I had accepted a job for the ski season, in a trampoline park on the top of the mountain to be exact.

Everyone was right about the snow. When I first got here, there wasn’t any, and now as I write (mid-July) there’s only about enough to cover three runs. At the trampoline park, I spend all day watching kids jump up and down and taking on the role as a secondary therapist/parent for 11 year old boys who had never been taught to share. And that’s where I’m sat right now. As lax as this job can be at times, it also leaves room for a lot of contemplative time. I thought it would be worth my while to comprise a list of things that I have come to realise from moving to the other side of the world. It goes as follows:

1. You are not special

Unlike the US where you are literally congratulated on being born the other side of the pond, in Australia, no one cares for your Britishness. It’s not I would ever expect to be special for my nationality, in fact I internally cringe at the fact that I am lumped into the same group as Brits that go on holiday and can’t be bothered to learn another language and those who make a pantomime out of forming a queue everywhere–my french is excellent and I refuse to queue for anything unless I absolutely have to.

But I vastly underestimated the unoriginality of my grand relocation.

You can imagine my surprise when I arrived up on Mount Buller and literally every other person who I greeted sounded exactly like me. The big cities, Melbourne, Sydney, sure, I understand there’s going to be a lot of us there in these diverse melting pots. But on the mountain? The first time I walked into the local pub, upon opening my mouth, I was met with an eye roll and the unnerving remark of “Oh, you’re just another fucking Pom,” from a guy from Perth who clearly had tried and failed all evening to have a conversation with another Australian.

It sparked a weird note of shame within me–leaving my home made me adventurous, brave, and different to those that I left behind, yet here, I was just one of many that made the same decision and none of it made me very special.

I quickly shrugged off any sense of unwelcomeness from any of the-bad-kind-of-patriotic Australians, after all, immigration is completely relative and is arguably designed to support the economy rather than destroy it (remember I said arguably). If they disagree with that, tell that to all the Aussies that are the main population of London’s Clapham and Brixton residential areas.

Yes, there are a lot of Brits out here on Working Holiday visas, but that doesn’t mean that their stories and experiences aren’t all incredibly unique. I’ve been so lucky as to meet some of the most interesting people who have developed extremely moral value systems–there seems to be a shared understanding between all of them that starting a life from scratch and leaving the rat race forces you to recognise the things in life that are actually important.

2. People are the same everywhere you go

For some reason, I believed I would discover another archetype of person in Australia–someone whose walk and talk would completely shift everything I thought I knew about human behaviour. It is the other side of the world after all.

However, I’ve realised that geography has little to do with how similar or dissimilar we are from each other. People don’t act any differently just because I am 10,000 miles away from home.

Brits and Aussies are the same in many ways; we share a lot of the same humour based in self-deprecation and sarcasm that the rest of the world can’t seem to get quite right, in my opinion. Conversations flow easily and they most probably had a similar childhood to you in many respects as per western standards–grew up on the same TV shows, cereals, and playground games.

People here can be great; they can make you laugh like you’ve never laughed before. They can show you amazing new places. They can share with you heartwarming stories about their families. They can be vulnerable with you and real friendships and connections can be made.

And people here can also lie. They can be cold. They can possess the ability to hurt you, and leave you questioning where things went wrong.

The only difference is they might have an Australian accent.

3. Everything is far away

I’ve never understood up until this point how restrictive it can feel to not have your own vehicle. Back home, I could walk to everywhere I needed to go, or at the most a 30 minute drive, whereas here, my nearest supermarket is 45 minutes away and that’s considered a short drive. I’d heard about the European tendency of assuming things are closer together than they actually are, but I didn’t think I’d be part of that. From looking at a map, it seems like A to B shouldn’t take that long of a drive, but it really, really does. Driving around in the outback, the scenery, albeit beautiful, melts into one continuous loop of empty, barren land, and will stay that way for hours before you see the next sign of civilisation. Even the drive from Melbourne to Mount Buller takes nearly three hours and I should know because I’ve made the journey a couple of times now.

I’ve also reluctantly been made a bus wanker, trudging back and forth on coaches that remind me of being dragged about on school trips that no one wanted to go on aged 14.

I am quite literally no longer in the driver’s seat when it comes to making spontaneous trips anywhere. For the time being, I am at the mercy of the Victorian rural bus line timetable anytime I want to escape the mountain.

4. It will give you confidence you never knew you had

Last year, I lost all my confidence. I felt like the ghost of the person I had previously been and I had no desire to live a life that felt true to me; I felt like I didn’t deserve to. I had only last minute made the decision to do a ski season in Australia to seem more interesting to the people around me, and even though making a decision based on peer recognition probably isn’t the healthiest way to come to any conclusion, it was still a decision that I got to make.

So I just did it.

I didn’t think too much about; I booked a flight and told everyone I was leaving, even hosting a going-away party where only three people actually showed up. I had every intention of coming back in September–returning to a ‘real life’ to go back to school in something I didn’t really want to do. I had managed to convince myself for the longest time that going to graduate school back in Liverpool was the ‘right’ thing that would bring me some kind of renewed worth in this fleeting world. I had been so certain that it was the place where I had to be and was so desperate to return to that I never stopped to think whether I could belong somewhere else.

Liverpool is a very special place for me–it broke me down and built me up again but somewhere in the last year, I outgrew it and didn’t even realise that I had.

Since being in Australia, I’ve met people from all walks of life that I would never have crossed paths with if I had not come here. People who have lived here their whole lives, and those who gave up everything to start afresh. I’ve picked up a certain joie de vivre from the latter who told me some of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever heard that drove them to this country, then will end it with “but that’s just life.”

I felt like I had been passed on an occult scroll from a sorcerer that had given me the secret to leading a fulfilled life. I needed to stop trying to control bad things from happening to me. Bad things just happen; there’s often no reason behind any of it, or any that’s good enough to even be considered satisfying. Once I accepted that I can’t prevent any and all harm from coming my way, it gave me a confidence that I had never felt before–that I was completely in control of how I reacted to anything that got thrown at me. Like Jesus Christ himself, I felt part of me come back to life.

It has been the biggest kick up my backside that I’ve ever received and I needed it. I began doing things that I actually wanted to do. I began writing again. I started to take myself out into the sunshine and let it soak into my skin. I developed a sense of belief that I had the power to achieve whatever I wanted to. I went from being someone who always said they were going to do something but never actually did it, to being the person that actually does it.

I even went on a date, something that I haven’t wanted to do in a long time. And I’m glad I did. There’s something incredibly freeing about introducing yourself to someone new–a metaphorical clean slate.

5. Koalas may or may not be real

I haven’t seen any. Until I see one in real life, I refuse to believe that they’re real.

6. It won’t solve your problems

It’s incredibly easy to assume that moving to a new country will magically resolve a lot of your life issues. Especially on social media, Australia has the natural beauty and charm that can entice you in and make you feel like you’ll be granted with the perfect beach body, glowing skin, and new identity at passport control. It seemingly promises things that currently seem like a dying dream back in the UK such as a work-life balance and dignity.

However, in spite of the personal revolution that I feel myself internally navigating due to this experience, I now understand that the simple act of moving to Australia can’t solve all my problems. In many ways it has created new ones for me–for the first time ever, I have to worry about visas, the employment restrictions of being on a ‘working holiday’, whether or not I put my things in storage, and plotting my every next step.

And it certainly won’t solve any personal dilemmas inside of you; those emotions will just lay dormant until they sneak up on you one day and surprise you with their sudden return.

Despite the new setting, characters and plots, you will still wake up one day, look in the mirror, and realise that you are still you, and you can’t run from yourself forever. The foundations will always be the same.

And that’s not necessarily even a bad thing.

There’s a scene in Lena Dunham’s Girls that I think about all the time, season five, episode ten, to be exact. The one where Dunham’s self-involved but lovable alter-ego Hannah Horvath gets up on stage at The Moth and delivers a monologue on jealousy, choosing to talk about how her best friend and ex-boyfriend started up a relationship behind her back. She says, and I quote:

“I’m Hannah forever, no matter what I do, no matter whether I start a new nuclear missile crisis with my emotions or I just sit back, and chill, and give someone a fruit basket.”

And those words ring true to me, and can be applied to all situations that I find myself in.

I have to be Liv forever.

I can scream, and cry, and kick at things that don’t go my way, no matter how unfair.

Or I can choose to put on a brave face and pick myself up time and time again.

I can stay in my old life and surrender to the environment that made me miserable.

Or I can move somewhere new and break the patterns.

I have to be myself no matter where I am, and only I can solve my own problems.

And trust me, I’m really trying.