This move is not as wild as it seems to some. Once I explain that I’m actually an Australian citizen and have family still living there, people begin to put the puzzle pieces together. I’ve grown to hate explaining my move to new people I meet or old friends I’m catching up with. It isn’t their fault in the slightest – it’s my own insecurities that make me feel wobbly-kneed when sharing my plans for my move. As I’m speaking to these people, I realize how unplanned and spontaneous it sounds. Perhaps, in some ways, it is. But I made this life-changing decision almost a year ago.

I was about halfway through my first semester of my final year of college. Like the rest of my classmates, the one question constantly on my mind was: What comes next? This question rattled around in my brain as I felt the importance of its answer weighing me down more and more with each passing day. I decided to start with the broad strokes. Where did I want to live? I fairly quickly wrote off the two cities I had spent most of my life in. While I’ll always believe that Colorado Springs is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I didn’t see the opportunities I desired there. Indianapolis is a wonderful city and precisely where I was meant to be during my college years, but it, too, didn’t seem like the setting for my next chapter.

I don’t know if it’s my natural temperament or if it’s more closely affected by my dual-citizenship, but there comes a time every couple of years where I get the itch to leave the country. That itch has come with more and more frequency, and rather than looking for a nice cream or ointment, I wondered what would happen if I tried to rid myself of that itch once and for all and moved out of the country? The thought appealed to me immensely. The next question, then, was where? Rather than narrowing down my options, I had opened them up tenfold. A hundredfold. The world was my oyster. Well, I didn’t want to live in France again. Tick that off the list. What if I moved… home?

The past several months, I worked at an organization called Mission Training International. Its goal is to prepare missionaries to go out into the world. I worked with children, and I sometimes feel that I learned just as much as they did. These kids were all about to leave the US and become missionary kids (MKs), also known as third-culture kids (TCKs). Working for this organization gave me new ways to understand myself as a TCK. For years growing up, I didn’t even know I was one. I grew up in a home that spoke only English (excepting the rare occasions my mother asked me to grab the Schlüssel), we were all very white, and I never took time to think about why I felt different. But there were inevitably differences in my upbringing to that of my peers. I’ve never felt fully American, nor have I felt all that Australian. I couldn’t even feel particularly Western American because of my family all over the South. Because of this, I think there was always a part of me that desired that ever-elusive feeling of home. It’s wild to think that I lived most of my life in one place, but it doesn’t ring like home.

Toward the end of my time living in Europe, I stopped for two days in Edinburgh. The vast majority of my ancestors hail from Scotland, and for the first time in my life, I felt a strange stirring in my chest. My blood was awakened, my heart pounding. I felt a sense of longing and contentment all at once. I felt a little taste of home. Almost as soon as I arrived, I knew I would want to come back some day.

As I thought about where to move after school, I remembered that feeling. My heart began tugging me home. But what about Australia? Wasn’t it an unexplored homeland, too? In time I realized that if I were to move to Scotland, I would be in a similar situation to what I was in France. Though I would speak (more or less) the same language as the Scots, I would be isolated again. And not knowing anyone in an entire country is a frightening thing. It then naturally fell that Australia might be the place for me to go. The more I thought on it, the more it felt just right. I could explore the land of my father, see how I fit into the culture as an adult, and simply build a life.

The problem I have with talking to people about my plans comes at this point. My planning has gotten me this far, but moving to the other side of the world has meant that it can only go so much further until I get there. I thought for a time that I would be able to find a job from here in the US, or at least make good headway. Part of what has kept me from doing so is my own fear of failure holding me back for trying more, I can admit that; however, another part of the equation is that I know nothing of the landscape of the field I want to work in in the country. All I know is that there are certainly many nonprofit organizations that I could work for, but I feel like I need my feet under me and on Australian soil to get to them.

The days ahead of me are going to be crazy as I prepare to uproot myself and move to another country. I have things to pack, phone calls to make, papers to procure. And these are merely in the days before I arrive. Once I get there, I’ll have to establish myself as a resident of another country. There are bank accounts to open, tax forms to be filled out, drivers licenses to be obtained. And those will be just the foundations I need to have before I could be hired anywhere.

Those are just my first few days. I have a lot of transitioning ahead of me. Miles per hour will turn into kilometres per hour, ounces will turn into grams, and spiders will turn into the harbingers of death I’ve always presumed them to be. I’ll even – heaven forbid! – likely need to change how I write, if I ever need to write in any formal, professional capacity. In Australia, the colors will be quite colourful, and I’ll have the daily realization that there’s plenty still to be realised. Luckily for me, I’ll have family to have my back, as I will always have theirs. My first stop on this journey is to the sheep farm of my father’s youngest brother, where I will learn to sheer sheep, steer clear of anything even vaguely resembling a snake, play with kids, and generally be any help I can while I get my feet under me for the first couple weeks.

In five days, my journey down under begins… Catch you all on the flip side.