I know this post is coming a bit late, but a year like 2020 takes a while to digest. I’ve also taken the holiday break to have a breather from my laptop as much as possible, to get out of the house and to meet friends, since I’m usually stuck inside with the entire working from home situation still unchanged. In this post, I’ll reflect on 2020 and also draw some conclusions from this for 2021.
Recently, I read back through my post after 2019 and I had to laugh. I was detailing the whirlwind of that year, leaving the UK, getting my visa and moving to Australia, thinking that 2020 will be much more chilled out since I would just be more settled into life in Australia. Little did I know that life as we know it would change entirely, making 2020 100% more crazy than 2019.
Personally, I’d describe my year 2020 as the most controversial year I’ve ever had. Being in Australia, I’ve had moments where I’ve been so incredibly lucky and happy, and at the same time, moments where I’ve felt at times more isolated, more anxious, more lost and more torn than ever before in my life.
Starting in Sydney, ending up in Perth
Early 2020, I was working in Sydney, and I had just put these awful bushfires behind me when COVID properly materialised in the land down under. I realised that the shit was really hitting the fan when I was in Melbourne, about to deliver an event with my company. Our entire Sydney office was asked to work from home in the morning of the event, until further notice. Since this was the day of the event, said gathering went ahead but it was to be the last in-person event I managed in 2020.
Back in Sydney, around ten days later, my boyfriend and I were scheduled to fly together to Tasmania, an island state of Australia located 240 km to the south of the Australian mainland. Liam was supposed to come over on Thursday and our flight was due to depart on Saturday. On Thursday morning, just hours before his flight, we heard on the news that state borders to Tasmania had been shut because of COVID, and moreover, that rumour had it that Western Australia wouldn’t be far behind. I called my manager to ask if I could work from Perth rather than Sydney, since we were all working from home anyway, told Liam to cancel his flight and booked myself a flight to Perth that same day. Less than 24 hours later, Western Australia had shut down its state borders. They reopened a little while back but have recently shut again because of more cases of COVID in other states. The country currently doesn’t process visa applications from people outside of Australia, and even Australian citizens have a hard time returning home. There are caps on the number of people allowed to enter Australia any given day, and Emirates Airlines has just suspended flights to most major Australian cities until further notice.
If someone had told me this in 2019, I would have thought they’d smoked some seriously bad stuff.
In Perth in times of COVID
What this means for me is that I’ve been working from Liam’s house in Perth since March of last year, and my flat in Sydney has a new tenant. The situation here is almost normal. Western Australia hasn’t had any community transmissions in 9 months as the Prime Minister announced last week on Facebook. There are currently 11 active cases in the whole of Western Australia, who are all returning travellers in quarantine. Living in Western Australia means that we can meet as many people as we like, all pubs, restaurants, night clubs are open. I have been able to do amazing stuff throughout most of this year, starting with camping trips to Belvidere and down south, a beautiful roadtrip to Exmouth and lots of hiking. Summertime in Perth brings along time spent at the beautiful beaches here, a variety of night markets, outdoor cinemas and festivals such as the Fringe. Plus, we have a wonderful road trip planned to the white beaches and turquoise waters of Esperance next week – roughly 800 km from here (and yes, still in Western Australia).
From that perspective, I consider myself incredibly lucky. Lucky that I can do my job from here, lucky that I can be with my boyfriend and that we’re currently living free in this Western Australian, almost-COVID-free, bubble. Had I booked that flight back in March just one day later, I would have been stuck in Sydney with my family on the other side of the world and my boyfriend, even though “only” a six-hour flight away, out of reach for the entire year.
Yet 2020 has been incredibly challenging for me on the other hand, the biggest challenge of all being that I haven’t seen my family in Germany for coming up to 16 months. I haven’t even met my baby niece who was born in December 2019.
This is the longest I ever spent without going home, and I still don’t know when I’ll be able to see them again without jeopardising my visa, my job and my relationship. This situation, together with all the worry about everyone back home and not knowing what’s going to happen, has been really hard. It’s probably easy to get anxious about all sorts of stuff when we’re finding ourselves in a situation that was previously unimaginable.
Looking ahead to 2021
Notice how this paragraph is quite short?
For 2021, my main focus is going to be to take care of myself, my family and friends. Despite all the beautiful things that happened to me in 2020, I struggled to cope with the worry, adjusting to working from home full time which can be isolating and means less moving about which isn’t necessarily great for your overall health and wellbeing either, and missing everyone back home. Right now, I think that the only thing we can do is to wait and see what happens while at the same time keeping ourselves healthy and making sure that, despite the distance, we keep in touch with people we love. I’ve pretty much stopped watching news last year and I’ve also tried to avoid and adjust social media feeds – unfollowing certain types of news and conspiracy theories for example – and I really think it has done me well. I’m not listening to any type of speculation as to when things will go back to normal or the new normal or whatever will be because I really don’t see the point, and I think the last thing everyone needs right now is to get upset (or too excited) about things that might or might not happen.
All we can do now is make the best out of the situation, whatever this may look like for everyone individually. I wish everyone health, happy moments in spite of this crisis, and eventually hopefully a return to some sort of normality for this year.
