Hometown
Life seems punctuated with scenes of leaving. As a teenager I had a ill-conceived long-distance relationship that reached an emotional crescendo every couple of months at the airport. Since then I’ve managed to repeat the pantomime in variation every couple of years.
Today I decided that I’ll leave Sydney and move back to my hometown of Brisbane. It may seem like a strange choice given that the common practice seems to be to move to more populated cities, but I moved here thinking it was the proper next step in my life as a filmmaker and my future goal of living in New York City. The reality is (obvious to anyone following this blog) that I have made no forward progress in these endeavours — a difficult truth to reconcile after nearly two years gone. This isn’t to say that Sydney isn’t a good city for filmmaking or that it isn’t an amazing world-renowned city in its own right, just that whichever doors those filmmaking opportunities lay behind I didn’t manage to pry open. Before I moved here I worried that I’d spend five years getting a life set up and that would be my twenties gone. Now I’m 27 and I gotta start thinking about proper grownup stuff, like where I’m to start a family.
I’ve long believed that most if not all difficult decisions reduce to the conflict between what one wants to do and what one needs to do. (This is probably the heart of dramatic narrative.) So it’s with a heavy heart that I’m saying goodbye to some of the best friends I’ve ever had, friends who made me feel I fit in somewhere, friends who recently proved to me just how great people can be. I will miss them all dearly. I’m returning to the University of Queensland to finally get my degree, I’m gonna work like mad on film (probably still shooting something in Sydney in about a year) and hopefully soon I’ll have another “leaving scene” but this time onto a more prosperous future.
