You can’t escape yourself.
There’s an ominous opening line for you. I don’t mean it as a threat, the way the nuns who taught me at school meant it when they said that “God sees everything”. It was my turn to sweep the classroom at lunch that particular day and my heart, along with my back, clearly wasn’t in it. Even then, I remember thinking that God surely doesn’t have time for the likes of this, checking to see if I’d swept any rogue Meanies packets out from behind a 17-year-old bin in a freezing cold, chronically underfunded convent school, but you wouldn’t tell Sister Mary that. She always crackled with a menacing static energy that, in hindsight, may have been more about the viscose skirt and cardigan combinations she wore generating friction as she hovered the halls than any inherent threat of danger.
It was the nuns who taught me that Himself above sees everything – though I really do dispute that he was ever rifling through or around the bins in a now defunct Limerick secondary school – and that wherever you go, there you’ll be. Or perhaps that latter one was one of my aunts, who were indisputably nun-like in demeanour, by which I mean somewhat coercive and prone to vocally judging others.
You do lie to yourself a good deal prior to emigration, imagining versions of yourself who might do things you’d never, ever do at home
It’s easy to get them confused but the idea itself is true: we all have that friend or acquaintance who went travelling to “find themselves” and came back with no discernible alteration apart from a farmer’s tan and a new penchant for wearing beads, which may or may not be denigrated as cultural appropriation depending on who you ask. Whether it is or not, you can’t be wearing beads in Limerick or Cavan or Trim and talking about the wisdom gleaned on your travels (two months in your friend Sarah’s studio flat in Melbourne, plus a week in India) and expect not to be reminded where you came from.
Brianna Parkins: ‘The Irish have a natural instinct for nosiness’
Washing up in Iberia: ‘We realised we weren’t ever going to sail the world, so we moved ashore and sold the boat’
Irishman in Canada for 50 years: ‘I was about to return home after three years but then things changed’
Laura Kennedy: Australians respond differently to nature compared to Irish people
Fierce notions altogether.
Since moving to Australia almost a year ago, however, I have discovered that the nuns and or my aunts were incorrect in some respects. Not all your problems follow when you run away, and we were in fact too young to appreciate that school day trip to Aillwee Cave (I still can’t remember whether the stalagmite is the uppy one or the downy one. So much for formal education). Almost 11 months into my time here, I’m still very much the same person. No farmer’s tan, because exposing a Celtic complexion to Australian sun is a bit like taking a belt sander to a leather sofa, and no beads. Heaven forbid.
You do lie to yourself a good deal prior to emigration, imagining versions of yourself who might do things you’d never, ever do at home, such as taking a cheesemaking course or going truffle hunting or not waiting until the last minute to file your tax return. Perhaps in Australia I would become magically extroverted and gregarious after a lifetime of being precisely the opposite. Perhaps I would become a hiker, taking to the famed nature reserves here in Canberra with a good pair of boots and an unprecedentedly precocious appetite for adventure.
Maybe in Australia I would become infinitely healthier and decide that actually cake is horrible and I’ve never cared for it myself. I’d only eat avocados and tropical fruits and whatever their version of cod is here – I haven’t quite been able to figure it out.
The act of leaving and beginning again opens a new plain of possibility before you. Suddenly, you land in a place where people have no fixed conception of who you are. They don’t remember that your hair always smelled like cat food in your teens no matter how much you washed it. They weren’t present when you burst your shorts in an unfortunate senior hurling match incident, long since known in your town as ‘arsing Sunday’. Nobody here calls you Jean-Paul Sartre because you had the audacity to wear a scarf into the pub one Baltic December night 15 years ago.
You learn to see yourself as a product of different environments and that you can be different depending on where you find yourself
When you emigrate, you shed the version of yourself that others consider to be who you are and what you’re left with is an intoxicating, intimidating vastness of potential.
Australia has changed me.
There are elements of yourself that you take to be inherent and then realise, once in a new environment, aren’t necessarily so. I’m far more active here than I was in Dublin or London – it turns out it simply is objectively easier and more pleasurable to move your body when it’s bright outside, temperatures are milder and you don’t work late every night. What was a constant battle with myself at home, frequently featuring negative self-judgement (you lazy waste of . . . etc) has become more pleasurable.
Australia also hasn’t changed me. I still like cake, for one thing, and they have lamingtons here – little cubes of buttery sponge dipped in a chocolatey glaze type affair and then rolled in coconut. I tried one with jam in it recently and it would take the legs from under you. God isn’t behind the bins in Limerick but he/she/it might be in a small cake in Australia.
This, I think, is one of the lovelier elements of emigrating (and I don’t just mean the joys of foreign cake, though there’s that too). You learn to see yourself as a product of different environments and that you can be different depending on where you find yourself. It shows you that there are many potential ways you might live your life, and that each new place brings with it a lifestyle that may show you something new about yourself as well as the world.
Who we are here and now can change in unanticipated ways if we relocate. We can’t escape ourselves but we can augment ourselves.
We can learn which parts of us are malleable, and which are less so.
We might even find a self we’re less eager to escape from.
