Been back in Melbourne for nearly six weeks.
I keep waiting for it to feel like home again and mostly it doesn’t, not quite, not in the way I expected. The city is familiar in the way that a dream about a place you know is familiar: the right shapes, the right streets, but something slightly off in the light.
The noise hit first
The traffic. The pace of conversation. The way people here answer “how are you” before you’ve finished asking. I’d been living at a different frequency for long enough that Melbourne registered as genuinely loud, which surprised me because I grew up here and never noticed.
The cost of living is what everyone warned me about and they were right, but the number that actually stopped me wasn’t the rent or the groceries. It was seeing what a coffee costs now and doing the maths on how many classes I’d need to teach to cover a week. That was the number that made it real.
The expectations I’d set for myself were high before I even landed. I’d had a year. I’d done the work. I’d come back clearer. I told myself I’d hit the ground with momentum and I did, technically, but momentum and groundedness are different things and I had one without the other.
What nobody tells you about coming back
The re-entry is its own kind of adjustment that doesn’t get talked about much, probably because it sounds ungrateful. You went travelling. You chose to go. What’s hard about coming home?
What’s hard is that you changed and the place didn’t, and everyone around you is operating according to a set of assumptions about what a life looks like, what success looks like, what you should be doing by now, and those assumptions no longer match the internal landscape you spent a year rearranging.
I had a few conversations in those first weeks where I could feel myself reaching for the old language, the version of me that knew how to talk about career and plans and the future in the way that Melbourne expects. And I couldn’t quite find it. The words were there but they didn’t fit anymore.
And then there’s the teaching
This is the part that keeps surprising me. I came back to build something and to teach, and the teaching is the part that’s working in a way that cuts through all the rest of it.
There’s something about standing in a room with people who have shown up to do something honest with their bodies that resets everything. No performance required. Nobody managing an impression. Just people breathing, moving, trying to find a little more space than they arrived with.
The yoga community here has been generous in a way I didn’t fully expect. I walk into rooms where people are genuinely glad to be there, genuinely glad I’m there, and that’s not a small thing when the rest of the city feels like it’s moving too fast to look up.
The lessons keep arriving through the students as much as anything else. Things people say at the end of class. The way a room feels after a long hold. I’m learning as much as I’m teaching, which is probably how it should be.
Nothing is ever as it seems
I thought coming back would feel like returning to something solid. It doesn’t. It feels more like landing on a surface that’s still settling, trying to find my weight on it without gripping too hard.
I miss Bali in a way that’s specific: the quality of the morning light, the smell of incense before the heat arrives, the particular slowness that the place almost enforces. I’ll go back. That’s not a wistful thing to say; it’s just true.
But right now I’m here, and here has its own texture. The cold. The familiar streets that feel different now. The students. The process of building something in a city that doesn’t make it easy, in a life that doesn’t look the way I thought it would, with a clarity about what I’m doing and why that I didn’t have before the year away.
Some seasons are about blooming. Some are about quietly putting roots down in hard ground.
I think this is one of the second kind. And I’m starting to understand that the second kind matters just as much, maybe more. You don’t get to bloom without it.
If you’re in your own season of re-entry or adjustment, the Contemplations app has practices for sitting with the in-between: short sessions for the moments when you’re not quite there yet but you’re on your way
