International student moving out
It’s 2024. I step off a plane in Sydney, jet-lagged and slightly terrified, clutching two suitcases like they’re lifelines. I had prepared myself mentally for the international student experience – the loneliness, the bad instant noodles, the crying in a tiny room while FaceTiming home. I was ready to suffer beautifully, like in the movies.
What I was not prepared for was being immediately absorbed into a Mallu family of twelve, all in their early twenties except one, who is older in age only, and who fits into the group so naturally that we will simply say he is mentally ageless and leave it at that.
I came here expecting to find myself. Instead, I found a shared bathroom, a walk-in wardrobe, and twelve people who immediately had opinions about how I was cutting the chicken. Aah, the walk-in wardrobe. If you know, you know. My soft little heart took one look at it and said: We are okay here, we are more than okay. The bar for “I can survive this foreign country” was, it turns out, a walk-in wardrobe and people who genuinely wanted to teach me things. And teach me things they did. How to cut chicken properly (apparently I was doing it wrong in a way that offended everyone present). How to get an Opal card. Where the good rice is. On my very first night in Sydney, jetlag still sitting on my chest like a small malicious animal, they had a sleepover. A sleepover! I had barely unpacked and I already had twelve friends. International student moving out
Two years passed. Fast. Embarrassingly fast, in the way that only the good years do.
Uni ended. People started scattering – jobs, cities, life going in seventeen directions at once. And me? A fresh graduate with a diploma in one hand and approximately four dollars in the other, staring down the barrel of Sydney’s rental market. Fantastic.
After some search (a whole new story for another full column), I landed a place in Newtown.
I’m moving. Suddenly it hits me. That person who arrived here with two suitcases, she’s gone.
In her place is someone standing in the middle of a room surrounded by so much stuff that it genuinely cannot fit in a car. Possibly not two cars. International student moving out
Clothes I forgot I owned. Clothes I bought for a personality I was briefly trying out and then quietly retired. Things I kept “just in case” of an occasion that has still not arrived and frankly probably never will. Somehow, I’ve accumulated the belongings of a person who has lived here for a full decade and also has a storage unit. It’s all here. All of it. Documented. Incriminating.
Somewhere between the third carton and the existential crisis, the penny drops. I didn’t just collect stuff over two years. I collected a whole life – late night dinners, friendly fights, all-nighters, three apartments with zero boundaries and twelve people who never once let me feel like a stranger in a strange country – the junk is just proof it happened.
That’s growth. That absolutely counts. International student moving out
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