A year to forget
The past year has been chaotic to say the least. Family members have arrived and others have passed on. I bounced around the country for a few months on my return, desperately trying to find work. I'd hoped that when I did eventually find work, and beyond that a place to live, things would settle down for me and I'd be back on track. Most importantly, I'd hoped that in settling down, I could put the disappointment of Spain behind me and move on to the next chapter of my life.
But none of that has happened. My work has for the most part been either demoralising, or demoralisingly uninfluential. Working your guts out over long hours, only to have it ignored, watered down or misinterpreted by those charged with implementing a solution is profoundly unsatisfying; and now of course, I have another challenge approaching over extending my contract, something which doesn't seem likely given how over budget the project is. It's just as well I'm keeping my hand in with some freelance work. It at least, ensures my efforts yield some results.
Then there's the whole housing situation, which has been a saga in and of itself. Suffice to say, the dramas of the past 12 months have made me increasingly unsettled. I still search for jobs here and in Spain. I still look at housing options. I find myself thinking about the first time I moved to Canberra and long to have that kind of security. The house and the job had their problems, but they were devils I knew, and I adjusted to them.
My time here has satisfied my primary motivation for coming back to Canberra — I've replenished my finances. But now I want more of the place, and I'm starting to wonder if this city will provide it for me. There is a very real prospect now, that I will return to Melbourne before the year is out, and although I truly loved living in that city, it's a place from my past, one I'd never really pictured as being in my future when I left it nearly three years ago. My greatest concern about retracing my steps like this is that it feels like I am continuing a path of recoil. If I am returning along the path that brought me here, does that mean Spain was the pinnacle, and that from now on I am on a downward spiral?
As I write this, I find I am wishing myself back to that flight from Heathrow to Barajas, where the long legs of my trip were behind me and I thought I was going to start a new life in another country, and when the disappointments that followed were still ahead of me.
The past year has been chaotic. It's one I'd rather forget.