A word on Sydney

I realised this morning how much I miss this space, this place to write & express myself. Lately I have not made time to curl up here and share my heart with you in part that has been because I have been away and with going away comes the catch up that happens the week you get back. In part it is because I have been journalling away privately. I tend to hide away & privately process when a shift happens that I don't understand, I think that was what happened while I was in Sydney.

Those who know me well have watched me struggle with the love/hate relationship I have with Sydney on and off for the last year. Like a woman just out of an emotionally abusive relationship who doesn't quite know what to do with the love she once had, in one moment I would spit vile hate-filled words about the place and who I became there, who I allowed it to make me be vowing never to return. And in the next breath I would fondly remember the good times, the moments of pure joy and love would pulse through my body urging me to return. I was a woman confused not wanting to return to the person I was but still loving the place. Over the weekend I think the love/hate relationship settled into one of old love.

You see a shift happened over the weekend and I realised that it wasn't Sydney that I had the hate feelings for it was the person I was when I was in Sydney and the life I got caught up in and chose to live. Without a doubt Sydney provided the perfect platform for that, it is an excessive city so for an excessive personality like me the opportunities for excess were taken. There was the excessive working, excessive drinking, excessive dancing, excessive dating, excessive going out, it became my lifestyle to the point where I was so sucked in that I didn't know how to be anyone except that excessive person when I was there. I am restless by nature and living in an area of the city where peace is accomplished through doing destruction prevailed and I completely burnt out and broke down.

You see I am a doer and when you "do" in order to find yourself what you actually do is lose yourself in stuff, in work, in people and then you wake up one day and realise that you don't know who you are anymore and that you are in so deep that you can't find yourself in this place. For me, finding me meant leaving the city, coming home to a place and people that knew me when I didn't, walking away from the toxic lifestyle and the toxic people. For a long time I thought that because I hated who I had become there that I hated the place but last weekend was different.

Last weekend I walked the streets I used to love to hate, I ate in the places I used to eat, I stood on train platforms where I once cried tears of despair, crying out to God for a solution to the madness that had become my life but this time I didn't get lost in the city. This time I was me and I flowed through my weekend, like a comfy old pair of jeans I slide into the city. It was warm, cosy, comforting, it was peaceful, it was home and I realise now that it will always be home. It might have been the place where I lost myself but it was also the place where I found God and the courage to walk a life of purpose and for that reason I will always love Sydney. Like the thought of an old love, a smile will cross my face when I think of it and I will give thanks for my other home.