To be fair, I had never really wanted to move to Australia to begin with − I was just a victim of peer pressure and my own desire to see the world. I also had no real way of making friends, as I wasn’t in school and for some reason decided to not get a job for my first few months down under and spent all of my savings drinking Goon with my housemates instead. In hindsight, not my wisest decision… but hey, I was 22, what can you do?  I was so unhappy during this time, that I even told my family and friends back home (multiple times) that I was going to come home after six months rather than staying for the entire year. Needless to say, we were all a bit surprised when I did not come home after six months, or even one year, but ended up staying for seven years instead.

So what changed? How did I get from the point of almost giving up on the country, and end up saying for seven years?

First, some context on why I moved to Australia to begin with:

Mandy and I at Sydney Mardi Gras in 2011, shortly after we moved.

I moved to Australia more-or-less on a whim, as my friend Mandy had gotten into a Masters program after graduating from Uni and PROMISED that if I moved with her to Sydney for one year while she completed her program she would move with me ANYWHERE in the world that I wanted. Who could resist that offer?

I had wanted to move abroad anyways, so figured that doing a year in Australia before going somewhere I really wanted would be a pretty good tradeoff for the assurance of having a friend go with me somewhere more exotic later.

As her program didn’t start until the following February, I started waitressing at a fantastic little dive bar in DC (Capitol Lounge) to save some money prior to the move. Here I was having the time of my life−meeting new people daily, making more money than most of my friends in entry level jobs, and finally living in the same city as my high school friends again. But because I had been having such a great time living and working in DC, when the time came to move to Australia I felt innate sadness at leaving this stage of my life behind. This combined with the fact that I hadn’t ever really wanted to move to Australia in the first place (as well as the aforementioned WIFI/alcohol issues) left me in a huge funk that I have never experienced at any other point in my life, and surely made me very depressing to be around.

I was basically just moping around our apartment counting down the days until I could go home without it seeming like I had “given up”.

So what changed?

After kindly dealing with my shit for a few months, Mandy yelled at me one night that I was “ruining her dream of living in Australia” (or something similarly dramatic that only a good friend can say). That one sentence somehow changed my entire outlook as I immediately realized that I hadn’t been giving the city a fair chance.  As cliche as it sounds, as soon as I acknowledged my negativity it felt like a giant weight had been lifted off of my shoulders and I could see everything in a new light. From that moment onward, I vowed to give the city a fair chance in my remaining time there and make an effort to meet more people.

Just a few short weeks after this, I met my (now) fiancé, Johan− and the rest is history.

The moral of this story is NOT that a man makes you happy or anything related to that, but simply a reminder that perspective really does have such a massive impact on how we view things, so we should endeavor to look for a positive outlook whenever possible. Had Mandy not called me out for my negative ‘tude that night at the bar, I likely would have continued hating Australia and moved back to the States after six months, never knowing what I would be missing.

… And of course, sometimes we all just need a good friend to call us out on our shit.