Home?

The question I am asked the most since moving to Melbourne is always: ‘Where are you from?’. Sometimes this question begins with a guess of the country which is more often than not incorrect because I do not sound like Billy Connolly or anyone from Highlander. Surprisingly to my friends (particularly those who used to love playing accent bingo with me on a night out) and my family, I have not picked up the Australian accent even after 9 months of living here. It is also a little surprising to me because when I lived in France for less time but with an Essex roommate I somehow ascertained an Essex accent. However, my code-switching or recent lack thereof is a topic for another day. Often, when people find out I am Scottish, they congratulate me (as if I ever had a choice of where I was born) or they tell me about their ancestry. I will say that I am proud and often grateful to be Scottish but Scotland is far from a perfect nation and has done many problematic things in its time that I am not proud of. The idea of being proud of something you didn’t choose is very confusing to me and yet it is a big part of most of our identities. Recently, I have been spending a lot of time considering the idea of home and what it is to belong in and to a place. 

Unsurprisingly, a big part of this pondering has been because I just sent away the paperwork to stay in Australia for a second year. A sentence I am not sure little Kirsty would ever have believed to be true. I grew up in the same house for all 18 years of my childhood, and I’m very grateful for that. Anytime my parents discuss the possibility of leaving that house, I do turn into a bit of a brat. When I was younger, I always dreamed of the future (probably why my therapist wants me to work on living in the present) and all the dreams were set in Edinburgh or maybe occasionally cosying up to a fire in a cottage in the Highlands. Never in a million years would I have imagined I would be living in Melbourne at 28. 

 I am very privileged to be in a position where living abroad is an option, and that is a privilege I certainly do not take for granted. When I first moved to Melbourne, I very much saw this as a one-year blip, a moment of youth and excitement that I would surely get over and then be happy to crash back down to my cosy, comfortable reality back where I came from. And yet, there is a pull in me I can’t explain that draws me closer to this city. I no longer try to plan 5 years in advance but right now when I picture the future I see it here. Now that is partially probably because I have no flight booked back to Scotland in the foreseeable future. But it is also something greater, something bigger, something I can’t quite explain and have been trying to put my finger on. At 28 years old, I really thought my life would have more of a sense of direction, but hey, age is indeed just a number (unless, of course, it comes to problematic age gap relationships). When I first moved to Melbourne, I found myself yearning for diagonal crossings, cup sleeves, cobbled streets, and castles on hills. Now I have grown accustomed to adding extra time to my journey to cross the road. My fingers have adjusted to the heat of the coffee seeping through the cardboard. My thighs thank the Earth for flat streets and dare I say it my eyes sometimes enjoy a modern building. All of this is to say that I’ve been grappling with the idea of a home and what it truly means. Recently, I took a quick trip back to Scotland to watch one of my oldest friends marry her soulmate, and at this wedding, I was asked the question: ‘So when do you fly back home?’ This question has swirled through my mind for weeks since. Was I not already home? The wedding wasn’t that far from my parents' house that I would need to fly. Was Australia now my home? It is a question that as you can probably tell from this ramble I am still grappling with, and I’m not sure I will ever find an answer to. So for now I will just keep correcting every person who thinks my accent is Irish and keep ensuring they know my name is Kirsty and not Kristy.