Mixed Messages

This morning I was woken up by an SMS popping up on my phone. It was from my cellphone company, T-Mobile. It said, "You have been a T-Mobile customer for one year. Thank you for being a loyal customer". When I read this, my stomach gave a little twist and I barked out a short ironic laugh: ha! You see, as touching as it was for my phone company to want to mark this auspicious occasion, the pedestrian nature of the message stood in pretty stark contrast to the crazy mix of emotions I have to this anniversary. Not the anniversary of me joining the ranks of mildly satisfied T-Mobile customers - today is the anniversary of my arrival in the USA.

Actually, technically yesterday was the day I arrived in the USA. The 22nd August. But I arrived late in the day and so the 23rd was the first day I woke up a resident of New York City. I still remember the sunlight streaming through the window of my brand new bedroom, almost completely bare of furniture, and feeling completely at ease with the world. I lay on my bed listening to the murmuring city outside and contentedly mused on the fact that I had achieved something that for years I thought was utterly impossible: I had moved to the USA. I felt reborn. I had a totally new lease on life. Anything was possible, and the only way was up. I was a mess of optimistic cliches, and it felt fucking awesome.

It's twelve months later, and in case you have trouble discerning the slightly cynical tone subtly tucked away in the last couple of paragraphs, things don't feel quite so rosy for me at the moment. I've known this anniversary was on the horizon for quite a few weeks now. I've seen it looming in the distance, like an iceberg in the fog, and I've tried not to think about it. I wasn't really sure if it was something I wanted to mark. A lot has happened since that day a year ago that I woke up in my nice, shiny, brand-new life. I'm not the same person I was then. I've learned a lot about the world, music and myself. Some of it is good. Not all of it is nice.

I know now that I am definitely a composer. That's a big one, and a good thing to know. When I first arrived here I still had my doubts, that maybe I was still just play-acting and eventually I'd have to settle down and get a "real" job. No longer. I know in my heart I'm the real deal. I'm confident about showing strangers my music or declaring that I am a composer - that's a pretty significant change from the person who woke up in that empty room a year ago.

But I miss home every day. I get homesick regularly, and wish that I would walk into my local cafe or bar and see familiar friends sitting there. For a long time I felt ashamed of myself, or ungrateful that I could get so homesick. But I've recently concluded that my homesickness wasn't me being ungrateful, it's a genuine longing to be with people I love. So now I feel pissed off when I express my homesickness to someone and they say stuff like, "What? You're in New York. Shut up, you shouldn't be homesick. I wish I was living in New York." For the record, I never said I didn't like living in New York, I said I missed my friends and family. Would you prefer me to say, "Friends? Family? Oh shit! I totally forgot about you guys! I'm having such a blast here that relationships that took a lifetime to foster are completely meaningless to me now!" (Just keep that in mind next time someone, like me for example, says they're homesick).

And this leads me to probably one of the biggest realisations of all. I've always known that I am an ambitious person, and for a long time I thought that was a good thing. A great thing. A completely 100% positive characteristic. But I'm coming to realise that ambition is impersonal, like the weather. It can go both ways; a force to nurture or a force to destroy. It is good to be ambitious, but you need to temper your ambition with the things that nourish that ambition and created it in the first place, otherwise you'll end up a long way from where you started with no idea what you're doing there. This is where I am now. I spent so much of the last few years fixated on moving to the US, to "prove" to the world that I was a real composer, that I've sacrificed the simple joys of being around the people that I love to do it. Now I'm faced with having to figure out how to continue on the path I've set myself without having these people around me. The fruits of ambition are pretty bland unless you have someone to share them with.

Anyway...

When I was 18 I marveled at how I could finish high school and suddenly... BAM! I was an adult. I didn't feel any different. I still felt like a kid. Then adult stuff started happening to me. My first job, finishing uni, accepting that I was gay, deciding that I needed to go back to school to pursue music, my first love and heartbreak, my first real professional recognition, the death of my cousin, the marriages of close friends... a gloriously misguided attempt at moving overseas, humbly returning to Australia to rebuild my life and triumphantly moving across the globe to one of the greatest cultural powerhouses on the face of the earth... the transformation of my parents from brutal overlords to two of my best friends, the ups and downs of my beloved siblings' lives and loves, and the three incredible people they've brought into my life, and the sudden death of a friend that we all thought would live forever.... becoming an adult isn't a smooth upward trajectory, it's a series of calm plateaux interspersed with dramatic upheavals that launch you further into the realm of being a grown-up and further away from your childhood. Some are unexpected, others are self-inflicted, but almost all of them change you in ways that you never thought you could be changed. Right now I know I'm in the midst of one of those changes. It's not pleasant. And I don't really know what the outcome of this upheaval will be. A year ago today I was naively certain that everything from here on would be smooth sailing, and here I am more confused than ever, because I've never felt more like a kid and an adult at the same time than I do right now.