Introduction

One night, you lie awake in bed, dreaming about the life you want to live. All the possibilities you will have, all the happiness, all the experiences you’ll make. And one day you will live it…and you won’t even notice. 

Ever since I can remember, leaving my small hometown, seeing the world, doing something big, that was the dream. I couldn’t stand anymore walking the same old street up and down twice a day every day. I couldn’t stand anymore that the days blurred together due to a lack of variety. I couldn’t stand the same old tree that had been growing tilted slightly to the left since my childhood, and which we used to use as our secret headquarters. I despised the smell in the air, just a bit too familiar. I hated the sounds of ‘home’. Car doors being thrown shut, muffled voices talking, the grey Seat Ibiza leaving the apartment complex’s parking lot at six a.m., when the flight attendant from across the street left for work. I hated this small town. And I hated myself in it. 

I’m an ’04, you know, a Gen Z, the hopeless, futureless generation, addicted to phones, unable to function without sending out a life signal via social media hourly. The generation whose favourite question is ‘Is there wifi here?’. I belong to the generation easily influenced by said internet and the ones who diagnose themselves with all sorts of mental illness, because some guru on the internet said there’s a 95% chance you’ve got ADHD if you’re favourite colour is black and you can’t concentrate enough to read a whole book in one sitting. Ridiculous, I know. But we all believed it at one point – at least hopeless Generation Z did. And so, I, too, fell down the rabbit hole of ‘I think I’m suffering from depression’. Now, I know that never was the case, but I do believe that I had been a bit depressed during my late teens. I had never been too keen on staying in my small hometown, and with the internet came a huge window to get a cheeky glance at all these other lives, all around the world. Without even intending to do so, you compare your life to theirs, which, in retrospect, is totally absurd, of course. You compare the life of a 17-year-old teenager, growing up in the working class, to a 24-year-old nepo kid, who gets paid a yearly working-class wage to show certain products and share them with the internet in just one week. Someone who gets facials, hair extensions and lip filler and spends another average wage purely on maintaining this extravagant appearance. It’s unrealistic, but that doesn’t clock for the 17-year-old girl, who is currently failing exams, popped three pimples the night before and can’t figure out how those girls on her screen have achieved so much, yet she can’t maintain a simple skin routine. During these late years of my teenage life, I felt a deep, unhappy feeling towards the life I was living, and naturally, I blamed it on the small town that I would later escape desperately. 

I don’t want to paint the wrong picture; I never had a particularly bad life in that sense. I grew up in a generously sized house, a loving household with my mum and dad and a little brother as partner in crime for all the mischief kids have in mind. I had two gorgeous girls on my side, two friendships which I would describe as the closest things to unconditional that I’ve got. We weren’t rich, but had enough for a yearly family holiday, enough that our parents would give us an allowance, but brought us up in a way we’d learn to work for our own money and how good it feels to be independent. We were an average modern family. I had a lot of liberties growing up. No curfew, no grounding, etc. I know some parents might not agree with a laissez-faire kind of bringing up, but it taught me how much trust my parents have in me. It also taught me independence. While they’d let me meet my friends until later hours and let me go on holiday without them at an early age, they also let me handle things on my own. I’m a very stubborn person, I have to note, and when I’ve got an idea, it’s practically set in stone. Even though there were a lot of ideas, my parents knew better than doing, they would let me go through with it to learn from it in case it went wrong. It taught me that I’ll be on my own in a lot of situations, that there won’t always be someone to bail me out. With that said, leaving the country was set in stone, at least for me, and I knew my parents wouldn’t tell me off. They were set to let me go and make my own experiences, whether they would be good or bad. 

While I had a few years filled with struggle, tears and the occasional argument between me and dad over a simple math problem, my last years in school went relatively smoothly. With my last year, not only was graduating an eager goal of mine, but graduation also marked the day endless doors opened for me. Some might think about uni or work when I say this, but all I had in mind was to leave. All I was thinking of were the, so far, still unimaginable memories I would make and all the people I would meet. Not an ounce of fear or uncertainty stained my vest when I prepared for my departure in the days after graduation. 

So what drove me away? If it wasn’t family issues, friends or bad circumstances? Why was my longing to leave so intense?

I got that question a lot. Friends, the parents of friends, my own parents, even I asked that question a had full of times. The simple answer is, I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for why I wouldn’t last a single second that I didn’t have to stay. Maybe there is no plausible reason for it, maybe it’s an indescribable draw. Or maybe I’m still finding out the reason, discovering the world and myself with it. Travelling is not only learning about different countries and cultures, it teaches you about yourself, the way you act and react, why you think the way you think, what kind of people you connect with and why you don’t with the other hand full of people you meet. Maybe after another year of travelling, I’ll come back to this question and finally have an answer to share with all the curious people. After all, my travels aren’t over yet. 

As for the country of choice, I went with the number one runner at the time, the land down under, Australia. Without an actual plan – much to the distaste of my parents and all adults I’ve told this for that matter- and just our flight and ten days of accommodation booked in Sydney, two friends and I left in August, ready for this uncertain adventure that we would dive into headfirst, and which held so much potential in our hearts.