Limbo

Now Playing: Liability by Lorde (so they pull back, make other plans; I understand - I'm a liability) 

I've been home for a month or so now.

Life is great. I help mum with laundry. I got a job. I procrastinate and put off things as always. Sometimes the dark clouds come but they're always gone by sunrise, only leaving behind strange purple bruises under my eyes. 

Going to Canberra was acting on the impulses of the very lonely child I once was. I spent a lot of time feeling stuck in Perth, feeling like I had nothing to lose; and then, of course, as I was leaving, I felt like I was losing everything.

When I left, I wasn't the desperately lonely child grasping for any chance to escape. I was a young, confident woman with friends and a partner and a life that was so incongruous with the big serious things I was throwing myself into. I've written before about how people never stop to think that the smart girl has feelings, has complex emotions and ideas about things that aren't strictly scholastic. Nobody will ever understand what I gave up on. 

It is hard to explain how utterly bereft I sometimes feel. For the first time in my life, I'm not really in any academic community, and I do miss it; and I do know, as I struggled with my demons, I was taking ANU for granted. Alma mater, indeed. Quod me nutrit me destruit. My friends have all moved on; we have all left each other behind. My dog died just before I got home and it has been...lonely. A year of gloomy solitude has not been enough to acquaint me with the kind of loneliness you feel deep in your bones; the kind of loneliness that simmers gently in the background and bursts into flames in the dead of night, when stray tears start to fall.

I live in limbo; too afraid to put down any roots, enduring the dreadful insecurity of living as a visitor, as a guest in a place you once called home. I feel like life is on hold.

But I have faith. I have faith that, one day, I will look back and have no regrets; in the same way that I look back at the things that devastated my younger self and can really only laugh. I take courage where I can and give thanks for all that I have. And I have never doubted myself. I never will.