Short essays on life.
Originally written in May 2025, on a long bus ride while I was back home in Brisbane.
This year, I turn 35. It’s been a lifetime of hundreds of funerals and baptisms; growing more into myself; shedding all I am not and all that is not meant for me; a cycle repeating, the snake eating its own tail.
There’s a settling, a grounding in my bones where there was once some jittery ache. An urgency to make something of myself; an angst to keep momentum, as if I would drown in an empty purposelessness if I didn’t constantly move forward.
Now, I patiently play the long game, rather than living as if I’m about to run out of rope. I better understand the value of slowness and rest; of the valleys that follow the peaks. The mountains taught me that.
I look at the life I’ve made, and I realise, I very much have made something of myself. I have, in actual fact, achieved what I set out to achieve. There’s nothing more to prove.
When there’s nothing more to do to get to where you’re going, can we simply be?
At times, not having something clear to strive towards has felt a little empty. I thrive on having purpose; on feeling connected to my calling, and connected to what is meaningful to me. But the purpose of my life is to live it; to actually enjoy the gift of being here; to love and be loved.
I have met strangers who became lovers who became strangers once more. I am alone again, and sometimes, I miss intimacy of romantic partnership; of living the day to day with my person. I don’t know when I will fall in love again. I hold both hope and fear in the same palm, and they live in a twisted harmony, an ache as cavernous as it is persistent. Yet, I also feel empowered, confident and self-assured, and perhaps now, in loving myself, I truly am in a better position to love somebody else.
I feel a yearning to create more art; to carve out intentional and dedicated space to nourish this part of me. Creating for a living means creating for yourself can take a backseat. You burn the candle at both ends to make it work, but you burn everything else along with it. I tend to myself with grace; I have my whole life ahead of me to build what I want to build. There are moments to be fast, and moments to be slow, and I have learnt to flow with the tides.
There’s always a surge of emotion when I leave the Rockies to visit Australia. When I’m home, I soak everything in with eyes that have spent 8 years away. Everything is at once different and the same. One of my high school best friends still loves the same Australian hip hop band; today, I get into her car and I hear it, and it’s like we’re 16 again.
My parents still live in the same house we’ve lived in since 2002—a house they built, and recently, renovated. It feels too big for just the two of them now, and yet, none of us are ready to let it go. The kitchen looks entirely different, but my mother still uses the same food processor since before I was born. She still labels her spice jars (I do, too). In the garden they made, the jasmine bushes are 7 ft. tall. They planted everything themselves, and, many times, employed us to help. My father still has the small fake rock with a lizard on it that says “Dad’s Garden”, something I picked for him for Father’s Day when I was 8 years old. It’s faded from years in the Australian sun, but it’s still there, in the same nook by the pool. I still know the exact way to the bus stop that will take me to all the places I used to know, but now, there are hundreds more houses where the forests once were.
I stare out the window at the gum trees and a cloudless blue sky and the river city I grew up in. How big and full my heart feels, belonging in two places at once; in it, containing various shades of nostalgia, gratitude, grief, appreciation, joy, renewal. How lucky I am, to have called so many places and so many people home. I carry this kaleidoscope of emotion that has nowhere to go, and I wonder if anyone else on the bus ever feels like this—as if my very edges might bleed with the expanse of my feeling. This feeling of realising I am in love with my own life; a feeling that I have made it; a feeling that I am on the path I am supposed to be on.
My friend—the one who still loves the same Aussie hip hop band she loved when we were in high school—is one of many I used to photograph in my parents’ backyard, against the jasmine bushes that are now 7ft. tall. I tell her she was part of my origin story, pivotal in my becoming the photographer and the writer I am today. We didn’t know it then, when we were 15, that I would still be doing all of this when I was 35. I see it all, how all the threads were woven to lead to where I am now. How full a life I have led. How much I have loved, and have been loved. I marvel at what it took to get me here. I remember a time, once, when I didn’t want to be. I would have missed out on so, so much. I smile and I tell that little girl that I am so, so proud that she made it through.
