I still remember how sad I felt and how much anxiety and fear I had before I left. I had wanted this thing so much, but two steps from the start and after greetings with my relatives and my friends the sadness took over. Seeing away my loved ones together and returning to an anonymous hotel room alone is certainly not a good feeling. Add to it that my best friend gave me a photo book representing our 15 years of friendship, and crying was served. How many tears I poured that night. Luckily, the presence of other Italians blocked on a plane like me in New Dehli has distracted me.
In short, this was the phase of anxiety and certainly not excitement before leaving. I was not just starting on a trip alone, which I really like, but I was going to the other side of the world for a life experience, looking for work and home, all alone, without anyone I knew.
Weeks and days before departure people asked me how excited I was, and I honestly answered that at this time I was feeling much more anxiety than excitement. Obviously, if I thought of the places I’d see I was happy and impatient, but before I went through the Country I would have to find a job, a home to share, in short, I had some goals to reach.
After the first week in a hostel where I tried to get in touch with the city and to deal with bureaucratic issues, I was hosted by a family of friends of my Italian friend, the only contact I had hoping to have more chances of success compared to others.
How wrong we were, because the friend of this family, an Italian, an important man working for the government, beyond so many words, he didn’t serve practically nothing, but he just gave me the illusion of finding me a place at the Royal Botanic Garden.
Beyond work, having met this family was a good luck to me because it was an opportunity to be in a familiar environment and also to receive help and advice. But above all, it was a great opportunity to live in the quiet suburbs of the city surrounded by opossums, parrots and a flourishing vegetation.
Although the family was very nice and kind the month in the family was hard, first of all, because I didn’t have the opportunity to meet young people like me and second because the job search was tougher than expected and I felt frustrated.
I would not have imagined it would be so difficult and there would be so dumb dynamics. The frustration was accompanied by the continued queries of relatives in Italy who were still wondering if I had found work or not, and this put me in a great deal of anxiety for performance.
It’s as though I felt all the weight of the expectations that others had on me and I did not want to disappoint them but above all, I did not want to disappoint myself. But above all I knew I did not leave for this, I needed to know people, to feel independent and free, to live alone, to go shopping, and decide what to eat, etc.
Now two months away from my arrival in town I’m fine, I have two jobs, one as a waitress in a Lebanese restaurant I really like because I like to talk and play with many people and the other as a nanny for a little girl 7 years. I live in Last, a stone’s throw away from Glebe where I work and which remains my favorite neighborhood in the city and near shopping malls and Central Station. My constituents from all over the world are nice and as far as everyone has their own commitments you can often see it and it’s great to be back in the evenings from work and continue the evening drinking and joking. Now I have reached my balance and I’m fine, but above all, I’m proud of myself, and I’m glad to have had patience and tenacity and not having given up. I can tell you how to walk the city on foot without a map and have taken any kind of means in many areas and neighborhoods of the city and I am very pleased with it and I think if I did this I can do it all!
Now I smile, thinking about the girl in Elizabeth Street (one of the thousands of Central Station exits) who wondered, and now where am I going? What do I do now? Who comes to the hostel with his backpack and wonders where to start…