study break

Visited the Grove for the first time in months. I thought I’d gotten the stoned spooning and matching rainbow thermals out of my system (‘growing up’) but when I crossed the threshold it felt like coming home.

Everyone is moving in and out of sharehouses, shacking up and streamlining and saving for their South American Dream. “You should move in here!” I would if it weren’t for my thesis, you know it.

In the past month I’ve turned down three other rooms with amazing friends. I roll my eyes—“goddamn honours”—and wonder what will happen at the end of the year when I run out of friends left to move out with. Bachelorette pad?

But the truth is I really enjoy my life right now, all the stress and reading and furious theory, writing, writing, keeping design student hours (9am-5am) until your body overclocks and you spend the weekend sleeping it off. Mostly because I know the end will come sooner than I think, October, my god. And by then I’ll be ready for the next step (whatever it is), and there’s no point worrying about the future until you get there, so you may as well enjoy the present.

Not that I’m studying as much as I should. You’ll still find me at exhibition launches, pubcrawling, warehouse gigs + midnight larceny, dancing in empty clubs to a friend’s viral blog hit, early-morning driving with jazz bands (I don’t even like jazz. or drive.), walking around with a camera, being a tourist in my own city. Flaked on a heap of house parties and gastronomy nights out of a misguided sense of responsibility, but I know I’ve still got plans at odds with rapidly-approaching deadlines. Plus June is for zine launches, roller derby and film night volunteering, and writers’ retreats in alpine cottages. PRIORITIES: get them straight, jeez

I regularly skype my Canadian friend J, because our time together (4 humans, 2 cats, 2-bedroom basement suite) is still the yardstick against which I judge all twenty-something sharehouse experiences. We swap stories and advice, and remind each other that things are pretty damn good. She’s currently living on an English farm, I’m still at home, but by the end of the year our roles will reverse. She plans to return to the east coast and resume her studies; I want to head north for a bit and see if my plans work out.

The more I work towards these plans, the more I find it difficult to talk about what I’m doing. This is probably a good thing: for a lot of last year I felt cast adrift, and broadcasting this was more of a hindrance than a help.

But it does make me question the purpose of this blog. Two years ago I set it up so my friends would know about my time overseas. One year ago I came home feeling pretty torn-up, wishing I were anywhere but here. I was reliving the past rather than dealing with the present: it was so obvious to everyone except me. In the end I had to pick myself up and get on with it.

Now, almost exactly a year since my return to Sydney, I find myself falling into these patterns of wistful nostalgia with decreasing enthusiasm. I no longer count off the months that mark significant moments. When I think of the stories that helped shape my persona, I can only grimace and chalk it up to youthful experience. It’s amazing, the habits you can shuck on and off like a winter coat. Learning to deal like a grown-up.

Growing up, to me, doesn’t mean getting a full-time job or finding a life partner or worrying about the mortgage. It means doing things you enjoy, and also doing things you don’t enjoy because it means you can continue doing the things you enjoy. It means living with the knowledge that other people are shitty but also kind of great, and so are you, and that kind of self-awareness means you have nothing to hide behind when you mess up. Which is going to happen at some point, most likely when you least expect it, but don’t be a dick about it, okay?

This started out as some photos from one moment in my life, and turned into a farewell paean to—what? A lifestyle? The person I was? The writing approach that informs my worldview? Something pretty significant. Nothing I write ever goes according to plan: story of my life. But then I remember the Sartre quote behind the title of my scrapblog:

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. 

But you have to choose: live or tell.”

I’m not sure what to do with this site, now that I no longer feel the urge to relay ‘the stories we tell ourselves.’ Perhaps I’ll let it morph into the insular photoblog it’s inclining towards. Perhaps I’ll let it rest as a courtesy to the people who’ve told me my writing resonated with them. Thank you. That was an unexpected but very nice outcome, and I appreciate it.

In the meantime I’ll keep posting to my scrapblog and other social media sites, because it’s easier, because I still like putting bits of me out into the ether, because I can’t give it up entirely. I’m saving my personal stories for email and our face-to-face conversations, though, because it’s more interesting that way. Because I choose to write. Because I choose to live.