Home Is Where the Heart Is

I was asked to write an article for my school's newspaper, and I figured something Australia related would be good. Anyway, here it is. : )

Love,

Bec*

Home Is Where the Heart Is

We’ve all probably seen cute little wooden ornaments with this saying on it, and we’ve also probably heard it a million times growing up. The thing is that I don’t think I fully understood what that actually meant until my heart was split between two homes; two cities; two countries; two continents.

“Home is where the heart is” has taken on a whole new meaning to me.

I went on a three month trip to Australia this summer, leaving at the end of May and arriving back in Canada at the end of August. My plan was to go ‘down under’ and make some friends, get a job, have some fun and come back ‘home’. I figured I may or may not get back down there at some point in my life, and also figured that that would be alright with me. Once I arrived though, things changed completely.

I started meeting tonnes of people, got a great job, gained a crazy-busy social life and started fitting in immediately. It’s a strange and probably impossible feeling to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it, but all I can say is that you feel like you’ve been there forever, when in fact, it’s only been a short time. It feels like all of the friends you’ve made were friends that were with you watching you grow up. It feels like they were there for every argument with your parents, every failing grade, every party, every boyfriend or girlfriend, every moment of weakness and every victory, big or little. It feels like all of the years you spent at ‘home’ weren’t actually necessary to be comfortable in your situation. And it feels like even though we call home the house you live in or the city you were born in, your home isn’t necessarily that place at all.

Having grown up in Kingston, I figured Kingston was home and it always would be home, regardless of what happened in the future. Little did I know that I had a trip waiting for me that would take me half way around the world and to another ‘home’. No one could have told me and had me believing that anything would keep me in Australia or make me feel the same about it as I did the country, city or community that raised me, but now I’m seeing everything in a whole other perspective. Not only am I incredibly happy to be here but I’d be incredibly happy to stay here and incredibly happy to call Brisbane, Australia my home.

Home really is where the heart is. I’m not sure how going home is going to work for me. I’m not sure if it will be exciting, seeing how things have changed since I left. I’m not sure if it will be disappointing: going back to life as it was before I came here. I’m not sure if it will be weird, stepping back into the life that I used to live and was fully satisfied with, or if it will be easy to get back into the swing of things.

I do know that I’ve changed drastically this summer. I do know that I’ve made friends that I’m going to have forever. I do know that whatever coming ‘home’ and leaving ‘home’ at the same time is like, it will be bittersweet. And I do know that wherever I am geographically at whatever point in time, home really is where the heart is.