Leaving Sydney
Feb 15 2025, Vancouver
How do you sum up some of the best years of your life?
This is a question I’ve been lucky to ask myself a handful of times in my 30 years. I’m asking it again as I sit in my childhood home in Vancouver, finally processing that this chapter in Sydney is at an end.
I moved to Sydney three years ago, following the rest of my family who relocated there a decade before me. I fell in love with the city over many yearly visits and bit the bullet myself post-pandemic. It’s genuinely one of the best decisions I ever made.
It’s always nerve-wracking committing to an international move. You (rightly) wonder if you’re going to like the new city, if you’re going to make new friends, if you’re going to adjust well. None of this is guaranteed, but the idea that maybe you’ll be happier than ever is an impossible-to-ignore draw for those that do take the leap.
As expected, starting over in Sydney wasn’t easy. I moved into a cockroach-infested apartment with my brother. Now that I’ve lived in Sydney for three years, I’m more used to the roaches (I can’t even believe I’m saying that). But my first few weeks I was horrified and overwhelmed and cried myself to sleep more than once. Eventually, I got settled. Living with my brother was great when we were bonding and giggling, not-so-great when he left his dirty dishes in the sink for a week, and definitely a cherished time in my life. Not everyone gets to live with their sibling as an adult, so it was a special experience.
Moving was rough, but making friends in Sydney was actually easier than I expected. I got on Bumble BFF and quickly met people to explore the city with. The first person I met off the app became one of my closest friends and was integral to my Sydney experience. She introduced me to so many people, brought me to local events and venues I would not have heard of, and helped me navigate dating in Sydney (which was definitely harder for me than making friends, but brought a lot of self-discovery and healing). Through many nights out, crafternoons in the park, and lazy hangouts at local haunts, she helped me settle into Sydney life.
A few months into living in Sydney, I found out an old university friend was moving there. She and I hadn’t spoken in a long time after our four years in university, where we were oftentimes friends and sometimes just acquaintances. But through circumstances that felt like kismet, we reconnected and developed a close friendship filled with so much love, care, and understanding. She introduced me to friends that shaped my Australia experience into something better than I could have ever imagined.
I’ve always been good at keeping one-on-one friendships, but I find circumstances only align every once in a while to create a good friend group. Things really aligned and I felt so accepted into this mish-mash crew that turned into a kind of family. Many of us were from Canada (and one Ireland) with shared interests to explore Sydney and beyond. When I reflect back, so many of my memories from this chapter are with this tight-knit group.
This was a friend group that laughed, cried, travelled, and simply enjoyed time together, almost every weekend for years. We had many game nights together (that often became a little too competitive). We travelled together to Jervis Bay and Tasmania, and these trips created the type of bond that comes with sharing a space with close friends. We explored Sydney’s nightlife, tearing up dance floors and hopping around breweries. We lazed at the beach together on long summer days. We celebrated Canadian holidays, far away from home. We banded together through tragedy and grief. We teased each other mercilessly in the way that you can only do with friends that know just how much love and care exists beneath the surface.
In this group, I also met my housemate who I became incredibly close with in a short amount of time. Our year living together in Redfern was filled with lots of laughter and off-key singing, too many cats for two girls, and necessary introvert time, where we could feel at peace ignoring each other around the apartment and sitting at cafes in silence with our respective books or crafts.
(my housemate was a human but we really loved this special cat we rescued)
It’s these friendships that made my time in Sydney so special. I was so fortunate to find the type of friends that I could be completely myself around. The type of caring friends that would volunteer to help you move (like literally, some of them would jump at the chance. You didn’t even have to ask). I wasn’t the only one from the group to leave Sydney this year, and I think knowing that we only had a limited amount of time made our memories all the more significant. I plan to move back to Sydney in a year or two, but I know it won’t be the same. That was the hardest part about leaving. The city will always be there, but those specific memories are already the “good old times”. I know we’ll reminisce on them when we cross paths again, creating more fond memories at different times on different continents.
Speaking of friends on different continents, lots of stuff happened while I was gone. Friends scattered across Canada and Europe changed jobs, went back to school, moved cities, bought homes, fell in and out of love. I made it back to Canada for some weddings. My best childhood friend had a baby (I finally just met him. When he’s older, he’ll probably know that he gets all the credit for making me love babies). It’s scary being the long-distance friend. Life quickly moves on without you and you can get hung up on this feeling. I think since I know I made the right decision for myself, this didn’t bother me as much. Sydney felt like home to me, much more than Vancouver did. I can’t describe why—it’s truly just a gut feeling. My friend’s lives were like a movie that I had the privilege to watch, while I wrote my own story elsewhere. I was so excited for them to hit milestones and create the lives they always wanted. The distance brought a new sense of confidence into my old friendships with the knowledge that we could weather many kilometres and time zones. And this year, I get to reunite with many of them again.
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of selling and packing all my possessions (I decided not to put anything in storage, so it was not a small job). Things were moving so fast, I’ve had little time to process. I’ve shed a few tears, I feel rather untethered and uncertain, but most of all, I feel overwhelming gratitude for the last few years and the life I get to live. I can’t believe I’m going to put more adventures under my belt, and I am unsure how I’m going to even handle the gratitude and excitement of the upcoming year. ♡