Identity crises

'Love's not the easy thing
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind'
                'Walk On' U2

My apologies for the break in transmission, but it's been a weird and busy and weird week.  On the upside, I now know more about British history than a lot of Britishers.  Yep, the Life In The UK test has been studied for and done and smashed.  I now have the all important pass letter to go with my permanent visa application. First hurdle cleared whooo!!!!

I have been hugely appreciative this week of the number of people who've offered their support with the whole visa process malarkey despite probably being utterly sick about me ranting about the stupidity of it all on Facebook for the last few weeks.  I have great friends and largely lovely acquaintances, and for that I am truly grateful. It hasn't always been that way. It is a sad fact of life that if you think you are shit and act like you are shit you attract people who treat you like shit, making you feel more like shit and act more like shit.  Many of the airy-fairies who believe in the law of attraction do my head in, however, there are some principles you can't deny.  As you think in your heart, so you are.  That's Biblical, yet somehow still true.  I'm a recovering Catholic, which accounts for some of my whackjobness, but some Biblical stuff actually makes sense.  Nothing's entirely good or entirely bad, not even the Bible. Yin and yang and all that...

I like to think that the many fabulous people who are more or less in my life are there because I am more accepting of my own fabulousness these days. Of course, they could just be really nice and want to support a whackjob. Either way, as they say in my country...love youse all!

Apart from making me grateful for the people in my life, this visa application malarkey is having a few other effects on me I wasn't expecting.  Applying for a UK visa has increased my focus on the UK, as you'd expect, but in the same breath I'm also looking back to where I came from and feeling a certain amount of grief...not really helped by the people saying that I'm a Pom now, or a Brit, depending on which hemisphere they come from. It's a joke, of course. I know it's a joke. It doesn't feel like one, though. I'm not a full on Shazza (proper Aussie 'sheila'), but I am not and cannot be a Brit. No offence to the Britishers.  I like you a lot, but I can't be you.

By the same token, after getting on for three years in the UK, I can feel some of my Aussie roots getting pulled up. Sandy is evolving in many ways at the moment. This particular evolution is probably inevitable, but it's not thrilling me right now. All the lovely messages from home this week wishing me good luck but at the same time saying don't forget us and we wish you'd come back have taken the breath from me at times.  I made a crack earlier in the week about wouldn't it be easier if the Border Agency made Peter Andre go back to Australia and let me stay here in his place, wouldn't that be a win-win, and had a few people say well no, it's a lose-lose because then we'd have Peter Andre back and you won't be here.

What can I say about that that won't leave me in tears?

Anyway, I'm properly stuffed now because I have good friends in the UK too and if the kindest man in the world and I do go back to Australia I'm going to bloody miss them too, aren't I?

I think where I find myself now is that point where you've moved forward and onward to such a radical degree that you can't go back. And by that I don't mean I can't go back to Australia, I mean I can't go back there the same.  And that doesn't have to be a bad thing, does it? I'm working on moving forward and not going back in a lot of other areas and I'm happy and positive about that.

This particular path forward.....aaaaggghhh. But I'm here for love and it's given me not only that but a chance to remake myself.  In order to remake myself, parts have to change or be replaced. For parts to be changed or replaced, some pain and sacrifice must happen.  The pain is definitely happening at the moment.  The benefits will come. I'm sure of that much.