It’s sometimes said that coming home is the best and worst part of a trip. I feel like this is amplified a lot when your homecoming is a) a lot sooner than you expected and b) after a really, really long time away! Prepare for a very honest blog post – this is very different from the tone of what I’d usually post but I feel like I need to share a few things about how the last few months have been for me.

Anyway, my stupidity aside, I think we’re all finding coming home a little bit tougher than we initially expected. Once the excitement of seeing our pets and our families wore off, reality quickly set in. Now we need jobs and money, we have to reconnect with all the friends that we haven’t seen for a year and we have to try and settle back in to family life (because let’s be real, who can afford to move out in Sydney).

On top of that, after all living together for a year (literally in the same corridor), we have to DRIVE to visit each other. Hanging out involves actual planning and not just running up the hallway yelling at everyone to come to the second floor. We actually PLANNED a Macca’s run two days in advance instead of just jumping on e-bikes or ordering it to the front steps of the dorm. We have to Skype our overseas friends just to hear their voices and see their faces, and it’s just not quite the same.

On the flipside, it is really bloody nice to be eating Western food again. As much as I love Chinese food there are some things that just aren’t quite the same over there. And of course it’s great to be surrounded by Aussies again who understand our slang and don’t spend their lives giggling every time we say something slightly weird (arvo is definitely a word okay?).

I think part of the reason I found coming home such a huge adjustment is because I can’t do a lot of the stuff I used to do before, mainly due to my injury. It’s  getting better (largely thanks to my physio who has been working really hard to get me moving again, even though I complain every step of the way), however, sometimes I go to do something and then find I can’t because I’m not strong enough or don’t have enough movement in my foot, which in itself is really frustrating. Having said that, my friends have all finally come home now and we’ve basically spent the past week living in each other’s pockets, laughing and celebrating together as they try and go through the massive adjustment of living overseas and then moving back home.

Everyone copes with these things differently and I think it was my Mum who pointed out that this is the first real setback I’ve ever faced in my life. It’s been a good learning experience and hopefully next time something of this magnitude goes wrong I’ll know how to approach it and how to deal with the fallout. And really in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t end up costing me anything – I still passed my second semester of uni and managed to go back to work and even find a new job.

Anyway to finish, here’s a photo of Kay and I smashing 24 nuggets at Maccas. It was a struggle and we couldn’t quite get over the top but we tried our best and that’s the most important thing. Thanks to Jess and Cynthia for all the support and for loving us unconditionally even when we gave up at 22. And for eating the last 2 nuggets so we didn’t feel quite so bad.