Lot's Wife Edition 1 2017

Going Home: A Cycle Of Self Discovery
,
edition one
Some students know how it feels to re-locate to study and go back “home” over the
holiday period, away from their new friends, partner(s) and Melbourne summer events
and atmosphere. Whilst some travel for an hour or two by car others travel by plane for
three or more hours. And still both struggle with existential questions, displacement,
and the cyclical nature of living away from home to study. Although, whilst it all sounds
serious, seeing family once (or more) a year is a pretty cathartic experience where you get
to live like old times, where your housemates are your own flesh and blood.
My existentialist side comes out to play only in Darwin, where I grew up and started to
decide the kind of person I wanted to be. And with this, it is the place where I can no longer
run away from answering the dreaded questions of “Who am I? Where am I going? And
what am I doing?” which are common amongst uni students, especially during exam period
and semester breaks. But there is something much more poignant about trying to find the
answers in the place you grew up. And whilst I never have an answer for these questions,
it’s the process of seemingly long stares at the ceiling, extensive journal writing and asking
overly complex questions to my parents about what they did when they were young that
bookends the end and beginning of my year. And every year my soul search spirals into a
several day period of depression about how I became who I am, until I snap myself out of it
to think about who I am, where I’m going, what I’m doing... until next year. I feel extremely
lucky to have a home away from home and to get away from the intensity of Melbourne
to a place that’s inhabited by nothing but crocodiles and grey nomads. I can explore my
existentialism and reflect on the year past and the one ahead. However, it isn’t always a
calm reflective time.
Displacement feels inescapable when you’re living between two places. For me it feels like
I have three separate lives that are all sewn together through my experiences in Darwin,
and my memorabilia there. All with contrasting experiences, they feel disjointed and
fragmented. I grew up in Melbourne where I engaged with the natural environment and
walked home every day with my best friend through the most beautiful Sherbrooke forests
and made new friends in my first years at high school. Then my family moved to Darwin
displacement
where I started all over again, making new friends, exploring new interests and wishing to
return to Melbourne. Those years, of course, were stained with teenage angst. My current
life in Melbourne feels like I’m returning to a reoccurring dream where everything is so
also a strange hunch that they’re memories from a life that isn’t mine. My displacement
feels
stems from living away
inescapable
from family where we have a shared history for a great majority of
my life. Where I am now, living an environment where I have a future, I’m still unsure
whether I can confidently call two places my home – for remotely different reasons – but
I’m willing to try.
familiar but isn’t the same and not quite like how it used to be. Visiting where I used to
grow up and my old friends there, I am engulfed in a wave of nostalgia and familiarity but
The cycle of going back and forth between two places not only feeds into the idea of
displacement – never really settling anywhere or feeling completely at peace – but also
feeds the cycle of annual self-reflection. Every year the cycle continues to uncover personal
growth, reflection and boundless possibilities. But will the concept of entropy ring true
to the point where the regularity of my annual self-reflection will decline into a greater
disorder and further disassociation with memory, and the feelings of displacement and
fragmentation? Or will it, alternatively, become so regular, where the time spent away
when youre
from Melbourne no longer harbours the effects of personal reflection as the years go past?
I honestly don’t know which I prefer but can feel slightly more at ease, knowing there are
other students in the Monash community who face the same challenges of the cyclical
nature of living away from home.
I definitely feel I’ve grown as a person since the last time I visited Darwin but I can
imagine I said this last year and will say it again next year. But I don’t know, it just feels like
living between
there’s something more to living away from home than just being in two places at different
reasons.
two places
times of the year, in places that hold such personal relevance, for completely opposite
lot’s wife