A Venezuelan wacky guy living his Australian dream

These last three years in Australia have been amazing on different areas and well... different on certain other aspects.

Australia gave me personal satisfaction towards my work as I am working with a group of smart and capable people motivating me to deliver my best most of times; even though my personal life has taken a severe change and the company culture has been changing towards a more corporate/ less creative environment.

Another thing I noticed (and I couldn’t appreciate it when I was in Venezuela) was how close some of my friends really are to me... and when I talk about friends I am referring to the real friends, those that remembers the best of you out of the hard/awful times.

Finally it brought me internal peace from those last seven years in Venezuela (and a few more in here) of charged tribulation, tension and uncertainty of the direction of the country, my relationship and work.

Internal peace brings clarity of judgement, allowing me to see things clearly looking back in time so I can reconsider past behaviour and how I reacted to some of it. It enabled me to self discovery to find spots of improvement instead of plain self critic.

Up to this point, I want to expose something very personal I have found of myself over the last couple of weeks. I am not the kind of people trying to be friend of everybody as most of times I felt I couldn’t communicate with others effectively, wondering constantly if people understood what I was trying to say; making me a very stubborn and insecure person trying to cope with the rest of society just to blend in (regardless to the reasons of why this insecurities took place in my head and my heart). So... for me it was extremely difficult to recognise love or concern others felt for me.

The relationship friends develop over time are not subject of discussion between the members of the friendship; they just know you could count on them for anything in times of need and the friendship is never put under the microscope to find the little cracks, to later on exploit it to tear it down... If they do, they are not your friends.

So based on that definition I got to admit... I was a pretty lousy ‘friend’ as I was constantly evaluation people around me in terms of how much damage they could do to me (psychologically) if I let them get in my ‘comfort zone’... but eventually you meet people that really likes you and wants you to see it even though you might try to push them away as you feel vulnerable as you start caring for them. To me, these special people were four friends I meet over several years that I meet in primary school or university.

To all four of them I tried to convince to come Down Under with me. To all four I invested a considerable amount of time to explain to them the benefits of moving here as I was trying to decide the path I wanted to follow and how I wanted this people to be part of my life. Sadly I couldn’t convince them all; one of them lives in Denmark and the other still lives in Venezuela but struggles to take the decision as she is pretty close to her family.

But two of them decided to take the leap and join me in this marvellous adventure. At least I wasn’t going to be moving for long by myself with any extended family.

But I knew I couldn’t move to Australia without more contacts or support from other people and what’s better than finding a common goal to relate to others?

That’s how ‘The Aussie Neighbor’ and this blog were created, or at least the reasoning behind the impulse of sharing ideas over the Internet with strangers/anonymous/mates/friends; I wanted to meet new people with goals in common to myself (at least common enough to envision a life in the Land of Oz) and feel connected to something a bit bigger than my lonely journey.

That is how I met my new family and friends... that is how I got to open up to others without judging them in terms of how much I was going to suffer in case of misunderstanding (because I do care about people around me and their interactions).

These people were an essential part of me when I need them the most. They decided to support me even though I was shutting down; grieving my problems while failing to comprehend how it all went down that path... and it was when I understood the phrase:

Despair and fear blocks your sight but even though everything looks grim, your friends will help you out to stand on your own two feet while dawn starts to show its true colours.

To all of them: the new and the old ones thank you!

I am truly and deeply grateful of having such great people around me.