An Unusual Year

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.”

T.S. Eliot

I spent most of the first day of the year feeling ill and sorry for myself in a nondescript airport hotel in Lisbon. I watched the sun set through squinted gaze in my pyjamas before shutting out the street lights, ate a bowl of watery vegetable soup, and fell asleep in front of whatever film was playing on the only English-language channel I could find. I’d be up early the next morning to catch my first flight of the year.

It would be a picture of the year to come, albeit feeling healthier for the most part. It was a year of airports and hotel rooms, of buying the same staple set of groceries to get started in new city after new city. A year of unpacking and repacking. A year of introductions, and of goodbyes. 

It was an unusual year, the likes of which I don’t expect to have again. The likes of which, I’m not sure I would want to have again.

It was the year I needed, and the one I’d planned for, for several of those that proceeded it. My year as a nomad; my year on the road. My year to find a place to call home; my year to let the creative threads flow. 

And in many ways, I achieved what I set out to do. I found a home. I found places that I loved, and places I could part with. I gained a quiet confidence in my own senses of adaptability and resilience; a knowledge that in the good moments as well as the bad, I could find my way through even alone as I was. 

I wrote, although perhaps not as much as I expected to. But what I did write was transforming, opening up avenues of my imagination that had been previously unexplored. I gained a sense of direction in my creative work, and lost it, and found it again, several times over. I accepted that as part of the process, at least sometimes. 

It was also a year of recovery that I hadn’t quite realised I so badly needed. It took several months to understand that what I’d been shedding along the way was the weight of a decade of burnout. All that time to find a way to back to a clarity of mind that I had lost under the tangled weight of stretching myself too thin at every turn trying to be everything, to everyone, at all times. 

Amongst all of that, however, it was the most lonely year of my life. There were times where I felt so alone that I could have been on the moon. Times I felt so lost to everyone I knew that there seemed no chance of finding my way back. Video calls and text messages, when they came, couldn’t fill the place of human contact that was lacking during those difficult periods.

But that, too, was a lesson. That for all I know myself to be fiercely independent with no need for reliance on others, there is strength that comes from connection with others. That community matters to me, just as much as I might thrive from short bursts alone to recharge. And it is the memories created with other people around me that stand strongest amongst them all. 

This year is not one told in stories of grand buildings ran past in training for a race, nor in statistics of flights taken or number of beds slept in. It is not one of monuments visited nor countries crossed off my list. It is a year told through the people I have met or experienced it with along the way. Of moments with family and friends that I have known for a lifetime, right through to those that I met here and there, if only for a day, if only for an hour, in my journey across the globe.

I confessed to a few friends recently that I was growing anxious for the year coming to an end, that I was now in a position of needing to make decisions for my future that I had been able to put off while my focus was solely on getting from one place to the next, or one day to another. I said I didn’t know what I wanted, that I was lost.

Then I arrived to stay with family in Melbourne, and something clicked. Maybe it was simply that a weight came off for my time there; that I didn’t need to think about travel logistics or even where to eat that night. Whatever it was, my mind cleared.

Of course I knew what I wanted. What I’d been craving for the back half of the year, with every zip of my suitcase and plane boarded. I wanted stability. I wanted a home of my own. I wanted a community. I wanted routine. I wanted all the things that we complain about bitterly, the mundane, the everyday. I wanted that.

Many things about next year and those beyond it are still uncertain. I don’t have a place to live finalised. I don’t know exactly what industry I’m going to settle into, a return to the old or something entirely new. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a place where writing can be my full-time focus. 

But here’s what I do know. I know I’m working to get each piece of the puzzle of emigrating to a new country into place. I do know what I’m going to write next. I know that I’m going to cherish all the moments with those I love the most. And I do know that the rest of it is out of my hands, and that the best thing I can do is take each day for what it gives and keep going.

See you in 2026.