It can be easy to feel that you have failed when, after setting a goal and telling everyone, you realize that you won’t be able to complete your goal. This is briefly how I felt after deciding to cut my trip to Australia short. My original intention before setting out was to live in Australia for one or two years, with the hope that I could stay even longer. The truth is that my journey will only run from December 6th to March 6th—exactly three months (and 21 months short of the original goal).
Looking back at the attitude I had before leaving my home country, I recognize pride. I thought that finding a job would be easy. I thought that giving up the comforts that I had become accustomed to would be easy. I thought that staying longer would be easy. The truth is, there was little that was easy about it.
When I left for Australia, everyone told me that I would have no issue finding a job. This is because I have a bachelor’s degree in nursing and have been a nurse in the US for five years. But I started the process to get my Australian nursing license too late. The process can take several months and they don’t provide a list of all the required documents until you pay the fee to start the process. It wasn’t until I had already paid a couple hundred dollars that I learned I would need to get documents from my university, which had closed several years earlier. One thing led to another and it quickly became clear that the process was more complicated than I previously thought.
I began looking for other types of jobs without luck. I applied to positions that ranged from office work to general labor. At my lowest moment, I applied to and was rejected from a job working at a grocery store. I was stunned that I could hardly be counted capable of placing boxes of cereal on shelves. After more than 100 applications, I only received one positive response for a part-time, unskilled labor job that has only provided me with two half-shifts over the course of a month and a half; this didn’t even pay back the cost of the work outfit and training that I received. I believe that a real limitation was my visa type, which would only permit me to work for the same employer for six months. It’s hard to convince someone to train a person just to have them leave in a few months.
Another challenge was that I longed for the comforts of home as much as I tried to deny it. Before I left Alaska, I had a job with a steady income and a two bedroom apartment in the middle of Anchorage. I took for granted that I had a place to sleep, cook, and lounge every day. This is definitely not the case when traveling from place to place in hostels. Sure, these needs were theoretically met, but they were never as good as they sounded on paper. Each hostel had a kitchen, but there was never a guarantee that we could use it when we wanted. And there is a particular frustration to searching the overstuffed fridges only to find that our food had been stolen. We had a place to sleep, of course, but time and time again we roomed with people who slept all day just to return in the middle of the night, crashing around in the dark and waking us up. It wasn’t easy to sleep in a bunk bed on the opposite side of the room as my wife or to have to tiptoe around mazes of open suitcases with their contents spread onto every available inch of the floor. There were common spaces, but these were full of people passed out on sofas at all hours and it was relatively normal to find all available surfaces coated with mysterious and sticky substances.
Things weren’t completely ideal even after we found a more permanent place to live. We got an apartment in Southbank, a neighborhood in the largest city in Australia, but we came to find that the space wasn’t ours as much as we thought. Our roommate asked us to not have any parties, which was an easy and reasonable request. But when we had our two friends over for tea and a quiet conversation, we learned that we actually weren’t allowed to have guests over at all. We were required to clean the entire stove with a special process every time we cooked and couldn’t have dirty dishes left over from a meal. The remote for the air conditioning was conveniently always inaccessible to us as a means of saving money on electricity, even on days as hot as 100 F.
Don’t think for a moment, though, that I would consider these experiences as bad. If it weren’t for the quirky living conditions, I never would have found myself partying with strangers and accidentally walking miles to a liquor store in the middle of the night. I never would have met such interesting individuals, many of whom I remember fondly. Like the mine worker who offered to bring us to a place outside of town to pick magic mushrooms if only we had a car he could borrow (I shut this idea down as quickly as possible). We never would have gone on a boat party with a Swede, a Korean, and an Englishman, experiencing the Sydney Harbour and the Sydney Opera House in a unique way.
It is through these uncomfortable experiences that I have grown and learned more about myself. They say that it’s good to get out of your comfort zone and I can confirm that, while not easy, it’s true. Even though I didn’t stay as long as I thought that I would, I stayed long enough to get a better view of international living than I ever had before. I will return home with a new perspective and with appreciation for things that I hadn’t previously considered. In the US, when did I ever take a moment to be thankful that I could work as long as I wanted without having to get a visa? When did I truly appreciate my ability to live in the country for intervals longer than a year? When did I understand the privilege of having my qualifications recognized?
I now know that being an immigrant (even a failed one) is terribly difficult. There is continual uncertainty in all aspects of the living situation. There are those that are biased against you and don’t want to hire you or be friends with you based solely on your nationality or accent. There is a complete lack of a safety net and a noticeable lack of the familiar faces of your friends and family.
So, yes, I can’t wait to go home.