I used to think leaving was the hard part. like once you’ve packed enough shit into a suitcase, gotten on enough planes, changed enough addresses and eventually stopped knowing which number to put under “permanent residence”, you’ve done it. away. far enough from whatever version of life you were supposed to inherit. and I know how ridiculously privileged that sounds. I get to leave. I can leave. I have passports stamped, cities I can temporarily call home, people to call in different timezones, work, music, coffee, a roof, another roof somewhere else, and enough audacity to still complain about all of it. some people spend their entire lives trying to get exactly where I am. sometimes, so did I.

recently I said no to something I know many people would probably kill for. a sponsored visa here in less than a year since I set foot here, a job attached to it, and eventually, if everything went according to plan, permanent residency. australia. security. a pathway. the sort of thing people spend years calculating points for, changing careers for, paying lawyers for, refreshing immigration websites at 2am for. sighs. and there I was, somehow standing in front of a reasonably paved road and thinking… no? or not no, perhaps. just not this. so I resigned instead. which sounds either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid depending on what day you ask me. (yeh sucks hey). I wish I could say it’s because I’m gravitating towards some grander calling, that there is this crystal clear thing pulling me somewhere else. music? home? another city? building something of my own? becoming someone I haven’t met yet? idk. all I know is my heart isn’t where I am at the moment, and apparently that was enough to make me walk away from something I once thought would mean I’d finally made it.

then again, leaving things isn’t exactly new to me. I sold the business in jakarta. sold the car. the house. gave away, packed up, abandoned, outgrew — whatever word makes it sound less dramatic — so many little pieces of lives I had spent years putting together. weirdly, I don’t think I regretted most of them. maybe that’s the scary bit. even now there is this very real, very well-funded business plan sitting somewhere between jakarta and bali, with people I trust, actual money behind it and the kind of growth opportunity that the supposedly sensible version of me should look at and immediately say yes. and yet I can’t. not firmly anyway. imagine complaining about having too many good options. I know. sighs again. but I’ve learnt that an opportunity can make perfect sense on paper and still feel completely foreign when you try to picture yourself inside it.

and then there’s home. I miss home quite a lot lately, which would be a much easier feeling to deal with if I knew where the fuck home actually was. is it lombok, where mum is, who isn’t exactly getting any younger while I’m busy constructing lives elsewhere? there’s something uncomfortable about measuring time in trips home now. you come back and things mostly look the same, until they don’t. people age quietly while you’re away. you notice something small — how they walk, how they get tired, some story you’ve already heard three times — and suddenly another year abroad feels heavier than it did five minutes ago. I think about how many ordinary afternoons with mum I’m trading for whatever it is I’m trying to build out here. not necessarily with regret. just awareness. which might actually be worse.

or is home somewhere in upstate new york, with my other, adopted mum whom I haven’t seen since covid? someone half a world away I somehow get to share almost everything with, who checks in on me and asks about the stupid little details of my life like they matter. like I matter. it’s funny how someone can be absent from your physical life for years and still occupy such a permanent room in it. there are versions of me she knows that people physically around me probably don’t. and I keep thinking I’ll make it back there soon. then a year happens. and another. borders reopened ages ago but somehow life remained very good at creating distance. (yeh, sucks hey).

and my friends? fuck knows. the people I grew up with are scattered across cities and countries so far apart that maintaining a friendship sometimes looks more like watching each other’s lives happen through little rectangles. marriages, careers, children, heartbreaks, new apartments, new countries, promotions. birthdays reduced to story replies. we say we should meet again and I genuinely mean it every time. but sometimes I wonder what exactly I’m missing. them, or the time when all of us existed in the same place? if we were somehow put around the same table tomorrow, would it feel like nothing changed? maybe. or maybe we’d have a few drinks, laugh hysterically about shit nobody else would understand, briefly become 21 again, then wake up the next morning and return to lives that no longer really intersect. and perhaps that’s okay too. perhaps some people don’t need to remain beside you to remain yours. maybe I’m perfectly happy rooting for them from afar. loving them from whatever city I happen to be in. missing them without necessarily wanting the past back.

which makes the whole concept of home increasingly inconvenient. because maybe I’ve scattered it myself. a bit in lombok. some in new york. bits across jakarta, bali, sydney and wherever everyone else ended up. maybe home stopped being geography a long time ago and became a collection of people I can no longer gather in one room. and what do you do with that? where do you go when you’re homesick for five places at once? pls advise.

perhaps that’s why “away” feels a little meaningless now. coz what exactly am I running away from? I left places, jobs, businesses, people, expectations, possessions, versions of myself I swore I’d never become again. then somehow carried tiny pieces of every single one with me anyway. funny. you travel 5,000 kilometres just to discover your brain also booked the fucking flight. and when life becomes this collection of choices — sydney today, jakarta next month, bali maybe, music if I’m brave enough, business if I want to be sensible, corporate if I need the security, another country if this one stops making sense — freedom starts feeling suspiciously like nowhere to belong. privilege gives you doors, apparently. nobody tells you having too many of them can leave you standing in the hallway.

I think I’m still looking for roots. or maybe my voice. probably both. the annoying thing is, I actually know what I want. I don’t think I’ve ever not known. there is a version of my life I’ve been able to see ridiculously clearly for years — what I want to create, who I want to become, how big I want to dream, the places I want it to take me. what scares me lately isn’t the absence of direction. it’s that I seem to have become less audacious about following it. somewhere along the way the kid who would’ve jumped first and figured out gravity later started checking the distance to the ground. understandable, maybe. age does that. bills do that. disappointment definitely does that. you accumulate enough evidence that things can go wrong and suddenly being reckless with your own life doesn’t feel as romantic anymore.

and I don’t know how I feel about that. because for the longest time my drive was probably the most reliable thing about me. even when everything else changed, I could trust that I’d want more. lately that engine feels quieter. not dead. just… tired? I find myself negotiating with dreams I would’ve once chased without permission. calculating things. postponing things. asking whether something is realistic before asking whether I fucking want it. perhaps this is just what growing older feels like and nobody bothered to tell me. perhaps I’m burnt out. perhaps I’m simply between versions again. or perhaps one day you really do become less hungry and have to learn to live with the person left behind.

will it be like this forever? idk.

maybe.

but I’ve left enough things behind to know that “forever” has historically been a pretty unreliable word in my life anyway.

so for now, I guess I stay the course. here. in this ridiculously pretty city that apparently goes to sleep at 5pm but at least has really good beaches. keep making things. keep figuring out what I’m actually trying to get to instead of constantly finding somewhere to get away from. maybe the roots will come. maybe the voice gets louder again. maybe I leave anyway. who fucking knows.

for now, sydney it is.

sighs. could be worse.