It happened! The visa was approved! What a relief!
It's been a hard 7 1/2 months waiting for this visa to come through. I've had difficulties with jobs, stress, fear, loneliness and isolation. A big part of the whole horror of this process was that I gave the immigration department my blog address as part of our relationship evidence. What I didn't realize until later was that by giving them my blog address, I would have to self-censor this place--my place. My place for self expression.
Out of fear that they would deny me the visa if they knew how unhappy and dissatisfied I am with life in Australia, I decided to either post relatively neutral posts (I tried but usually failed) or say nothing at all. Which is why I went so many weeks without saying anything.
Life here has been hard and so many of you will never know the extent of it. It's not just the finances. I would say my number one problem with Australia is the people and for that reason, we will probably leave. Soon. As in, likely before January. I'm not 100% sure where we will go. I've been working on my visa documents for Korea since August and they're almost ready. We also applied for jobs in Japan back in September with ECC and have been put into a pool of accepted teachers waiting for placement offers.
But the main thing is that I don't have to keep silent in solitary confinement anymore. It's been hard. I haven't made any close friends here at all save one German exchange student who left Sydney and returned home a year ago. Instead, I've met a lot of really "nice" people. "Nice" as in, not really interested in knowing you or being your friend but will happily pretend they're interested as long as it doesn't require too much effort. When I tried to reach out here on my blog, watering down my feelings of isolation for immigration but still looking for some support, I got a surprising range of responses: a bit of loving encouragement, a bit of ambivalence, a bit of denial, a bit of hope, a bit of "you should just get happy," and even one glorious piece of hate mail.
Thanks so much to those of you who knew what was really going on and stood by with a metaphorical arm around my shoulder. I can't thank you enough. I'm not sure how much I'll be blogging here anymore but I'll try to post the random update here and there so you at least know what's happening for the next few months.
Ciao my faithful readers!
