Sven's life in Oz

Perhaps I am too old for New Year’s resolutions, and based on my performance against last year’s commitments it seems almost pointless to suggest any. (For the record, I did actually work out more AND write more poetry. The rest were utter failures.) However, given that I almost had some kind of a breakdown at the end of last year, I think a resolution to avoid the same fate in 2012 isn’t such a bad idea.

By the end of last year I was a complete wreck, and I really didn’t know or like who I had become. It wasn’t until I had a few frank conversations with family, friends, loved ones and colleagues that I realised I was trying so hard to be who I thought I should be that I had forgotten how to be who I am. This year I will stop making such an effort and just do what comes naturally: be a nice guy.

I’m going to be nicer to myself in 2012, and if you’re going to do this with me there’s one thing you have to learn. It’s probably a lot harder than it sounds, but if I can do it, so can you:

MAKE BETTER CHOICES.

I’ve turned into the kind of person who sticks with a predictable catastrophe because it’s less risky than taking a chance on something. Unsuitable men, impossible situations, and overworking myself by refusing offers for help: they’re all destined to failure and when they do it’s easier because I knew it was coming. It’s time to get back the person who gave up everything for a life on the other side of the world, and who isn’t afraid of the mysteries of things working out just fine.

Making better choices means thinking more about what I actually feel and less about what I think I ought to feel. It means knowing and doing what feels good without feeling like a failure for not enjoying the things that make me feel like crap. It means not beating myself up over failed relationships or chasing after unavailable men, or thinking I’m a failure for still being single. None of those things matter, and they just make me feel cheap and miserable. I’m worth so much more.

Clearly every day can’t be a blinding daze of happiness and self-awareness. I’m not one for Deepak Chopra and the happy-clapper revolution, as I’m sure you have guessed. But recognising that I’m feeling crap because I’m making a bad choice might curb some of my more self-destructive tendencies; with any luck in January 2013 I won’t be tunnelling myself out of depression again, but looking back over a year where I actually made myself happy.

Making better choices isn’t making safer choices or turning down opportunities, and it certainly isn’t reckless hedonism either: it’s saying yes with confidence, and saying no without malice or regret. It might take more than a year to learn, but I have to start some time. I choose today.

Let’s go.

It’s time to admit that I am depressed. Not just blue, not just stressed out or unhappy: proper, joyless, why-am-I-crying-in-the-shopping-mall depressed. However, admitting I’m depressed also says I’m ready to do something about it. I have felt like this before, and I have beaten it before. I know that I can do it again.

For the past few months I have been getting worse and worse, more and more withdrawn and less and less likeable. I have gone from “an all round good egg” (Twitter bio, Feb 2011)  to “cynical, sarcastic, cold-blooded, ruthless and cruel” (Twitter bio, Dec 2011), and while I tell people I am hard and unfeeling, no one is fooled. I’m frequently mocked for being far too likeable, incredibly caring and surprisingly easygoing. Lately, I am my worst self.

There’s no single reason for my depression: I could blame my moribund love life, a stressful project at work, disrupted sleep patterns, miserable weather to put up with and a Christmas looming with nary a hug in sight. I have tried not to complain about these things because I don’t like to whine and I’m really very lucky – I’m not starving or homeless or dying – but thinking about how I could be worse off hasn’t really helped. Depression feeds these things and you get more depressed about them. They become self-sustaining.

I can go out and have fun but my default feeling lately is sadness. I feel depleted, run down and miserable. I feel like I should be ill, though I have nothing wrong with me at all. I can enjoy myself for a while but the feeling doesn’t last, and I don’t ever feel like I have used my day well or spent my time wisely; more often I feel like I have failed somehow, or simply not bothered at all. I know that I love my friends very much, but I don’t really remember how to feel it. That’s an awful thing to say – there is nothing more important to me than the people in my life – but I feel kind of dead inside, like the real me has checked out for a while and there’s no one at the helm.

Yesterday I stared at my office computer for seven hours and achieved practically nothing. Then I went to the gym for the first time in a week. While I was in there, all I could think about was how sad I felt. The class is hard work but I usually look forward to how I will feel at the end. Today I couldn’t see that at all. I realised I couldn’t remember or imagine what feeling good or happy or satisfied was like. As I left the gym I started crying for no reason, and that’s when I realised that I am depressed.

Today I will do something I rarely have to do, and certainly never enjoy: I am going to ask for help. Not professional help – I know that I can beat this and I know that I can do it on my own – but practical help to do all the other things I need to do so I can sort myself out. I need someone to share my workload and I need people to share my feelings with. Thankfully I have great colleagues who are happy to help, and I have fantastic friends who have probably known that I’m depressed for a lot longer than I have. They have been hanging out in craft shops with me, and watching crappy films while I sit around in my pyjamas, and forcing me out of the house when I would have otherwise stayed home. They have listened to my joyless stories and my miserable tone and they have come back for more. I am very grateful.

My friends can’t sort me out, and I wouldn’t expect them to – I’m the only one who can do that. But just having someone I can tell is halfway to feeling better. I don’t want you to do anything for me – in fact I want you to do exactly what we have always done together – but if I can just say that I’m depressed, and I won’t be forever, and thanks for understanding, then you’ve done more for me than you know.

Last Saturday I joined 6000 of my closest friends to march on the Australian Labor Party conference and demand equal marriage rights for all. After guest speakers whipped up the crowd at Hyde Park we marched through the centre of Sydney and on to the Sydney Convention Centre to make our voices heard by the governing political party. It was one of the most self-affirming and positive days of my life.

After the event I spent the afternoon having drinks with old and new friends, and we compared stories from the day. I was surprised when Steve said their most memorable moment was not the feeling of unity in the face of a shared injustice, but “the face of hate” they encountered on their way to the rally. He tells the story better than I could, and if it had happened to me it might be the thing I remembered most too. Nothing is worse than teaching your children to be afraid.

Steve’s experience might make you despair of the future, but mine was quite different. In contrast to his story, I want to talk about this boy:

I have no idea who this child is or where he came from. His parents could be gay or straight, married or not; he might have brothers and sisters or none at all, and he could be from a broken home or one as stable as my parents gave me growing up. He could be anyone’s child.

As we marched he ran around under the giant rainbow flag having a fine old time. He looked like any other child under there, laughing and reaching up to touch it, but he wasn’t just having his own fun. He was shouting at the top of his lungs for marriage equality. He was leading chants calling for rights he won’t be old enough to use for another decade, and the crowd chanted along with him. I don’t know that boy from a bar of soap, but I was proud of him. His parents should be too: at ten years old he was screaming for justice when many of us, myself included at times, felt too self-conscious to shout for ourselves.

For every parent teaching a child to hate and fear and mistrust, like the mother Steve encountered, there is another parent out there raising a child like this little boy: teaching him to get involved, to do the right thing, and not to be afraid to shout about it.

It may be slow going but one side is winning. Change is coming, and this little boy and his family are the ones making it happen.

———–

You can find more photos of the marriage equality rally in the usual place.

I’m back in the UK for a couple of weeks, which brings with it the usual conflicting emotions: joy at seeing my family and friends again, nostaliga for the life I left behind, and eventually a wrenching sadness as I have to leave and go back to Australia. But there’s another feeling that is seldom mentioned, probably because there’s no nice way to say it. It’s a sort of tedium about being back in your old life, a yearning to return to your new one, and a self-reproach for feeling this way. I call it ‘expat guilt’.

Over the next ten days I will get to spend time with people who made me the individual I am today. They are people I love more than life itself and I am sad that I don’t get to spend more time with them all. I don’t regret moving to the other side of the world; I just wish they could all have come too. I am looking forward to trading all our stories; meeting their new children and seeing their new houses; and having a wild time reminiscing about our youth.

However much fun that is, I still feel that telling everyone about my great expat life is some kind of judgment and that nothing here could be so amazing. I feel guilty about having so much fun and coming home to tell people about it. I feel bad for wanting to go back.

The truth is: I love my life in Australia. Even the shitty parts aren’t that bad. I have great friends and so much to do that I don’t know where to start. I love my job, I love my house and I love Sydney. It seems odd to come back say to people I love: “You’re all amazing, but I don’t want to be near you.” It’s like “it’s not you, it’s me” on a global scale. I’m afraid to type the next sentence – the ultimate expatriate rejection – but I must: this isn’t my home anymore. I love the people, but the place is just somewhere that I used to live.

It’s daft to feel this way, of course. My friends love me and want me to be happy, but feelings don’t go away just because you know they are irrational.

Tell me, expats, do we all feel like this, or am I just insane?

For the past six years, almost to the day, I have been lucky enough to have a friend like James. We dated, lived together, moved to Australia, broke up, fought and cried and laughed and danced together and throughout it all – even the parts where we couldn’t bear to speak to one another – I have never for a second doubted that he has been my most brilliant and dearest friend.

Today he leaves Sydney with no plans to return.

He is heading home to the UK for a while, then returning to live on the other side of the country. Perth may not seem like a long way away, but it’s the same as moving from London to Moscow. My friend won’t be just down the road any more.

I feel a lot more affected than I should since we have been broken up for years, but I am sad that he is leaving. I have done most of my growing up in the past six years and it is strange to think that he won’t be around any more to cook me dinner when I’m feeling down, or watch UK soaps when he’s feeling homesick, or drink wine and dance like a fool to YouTube hits from the 80s with on ‘quiet’ Saturday nights in.

I truly wish him well in changing his life into something he wants and following his own happiness. But is it ok if I feel sad that the time has come to close a chapter that I had hoped wouldn’t really end? When he flies out today it will be the end of an era and the start of something new. Nothing lasts forever, and it all had to happen one day, but I will miss him deeply.

Everything will work out for the best in the end. There are brighter days ahead and we will be friends forever – just further apart. For now I will be sad, and there will be tears and time to mark the change, but that too is temporary.

Don’t look back: that’s not where you are going. But don’t forget how you got here either: you had a pretty great time on the way.