I have only six more weeks to go in London and I really should be starting and ending each day with wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
Instead I am having night after night of brilliant conversations with friends who are already becoming a wrench to leave behind, and it is entirely because I am leaving that I am having such a good time.
I was afraid that my moment of fear, which inspired the entry below of the same name, was going to be a permanent state. That my fear of the known would hamper my ability to settle my affairs over here. Yet the limits of my time here and finality of my imminent departure from my real life has woken something unusual in me.I have become a grinning martyr to my love of Britain.
Instead of wallowing, I am barefacedly declaring that I am leaving a fulfilling life behind to be buried in a cultural backwater. I am declaiming right, left and center my ambitious plans for my stay in Perth, the writing and the reviewing and the wonderfulness that I will bring to Perth from my travels. I am blithely listing off the many Visas I will be completing in the next six years, confident in my endless cultural elasticity.
Far from putting a brave face on it, I am staring my devils in the face and it is paying off, because I am now the most soothed, complimented and beloved of people. As each friend meets me in ‘Non-denial’ stage and is calmly regaled with my horror at going home, they rise magnificently to the occasion and not only assure me that it is entirely unfair that I am going, but that I was well on the way to being a dangerously brilliant Londoner and that they had every confidence in my ability to get out of Perth at the appropriate time.
I should try this leaving thing more often!
Instead I am having night after night of brilliant conversations with friends who are already becoming a wrench to leave behind, and it is entirely because I am leaving that I am having such a good time.
I was afraid that my moment of fear, which inspired the entry below of the same name, was going to be a permanent state. That my fear of the known would hamper my ability to settle my affairs over here. Yet the limits of my time here and finality of my imminent departure from my real life has woken something unusual in me.I have become a grinning martyr to my love of Britain.
Instead of wallowing, I am barefacedly declaring that I am leaving a fulfilling life behind to be buried in a cultural backwater. I am declaiming right, left and center my ambitious plans for my stay in Perth, the writing and the reviewing and the wonderfulness that I will bring to Perth from my travels. I am blithely listing off the many Visas I will be completing in the next six years, confident in my endless cultural elasticity.
Far from putting a brave face on it, I am staring my devils in the face and it is paying off, because I am now the most soothed, complimented and beloved of people. As each friend meets me in ‘Non-denial’ stage and is calmly regaled with my horror at going home, they rise magnificently to the occasion and not only assure me that it is entirely unfair that I am going, but that I was well on the way to being a dangerously brilliant Londoner and that they had every confidence in my ability to get out of Perth at the appropriate time.
I should try this leaving thing more often!
Originally posted on Exiled Britophile, a blog I updated for about twelve months when I returned home from London. Due to it's frank discussion of how horrid I found Perth, these pieces had only been read by my London readers until 2011.
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