My Story
Five suitcases. Three people.
One very unexpected move to Perth.
I didn't want to move to Australia.
I loved my life in York. I loved the familiarity of it, the people, the places and the feeling of knowing exactly where I belonged.
So when my husband was offered a role in Perth, moving to the other side of the world wasn't something I had ever imagined for myself. But with age restrictions on our visas, we knew we had a decision to make.
We could go for it, or we could always wonder what might have happened if we hadn't.
So we said yes.
8 Weeks.
Then our visa came back much quicker than we expected.
Suddenly, we had around eight weeks to move our entire life to Australia.
Eight weeks to pack up our home, say goodbye to the life we knew, organise an
international move and prepare our son for a completely different world.
In January 2024, the three of us set off.
Five suitcases. Three people. And absolutely no idea what we were doing.
A lot has happened since that January.
The woman who arrived in Perth is not the same woman writing this now.
There have been moments of excitement, homesickness, uncertainty and heartbreak. There is a strange kind of grief that comes with leaving a life you loved. For a long time, I felt like I had two homes and somehow didn't completely belong to either of them.
But somewhere in between the missing, the adapting and the starting again, something changed.
I fell in love with a different way of life.
Australian coffee. Western Australian sunsets. Slow weekends. New places. The freedom of being somewhere that still feels like an adventure.
And somewhere along the way, I fell in love with myself too.
If you've ever wondered what it's like to leave behind a life you love and start again somewhere completely different, you're in the right place.
