As new stats reveal the extent of Aotearoa’s new ‘brain drain’, with a 41% increase in NZers leaving the country, expat Mary Kelly offers an alternative view to the grass is always greener mindset.‍

Within six months of my high school graduation, I was on a one-way flight out of Wellington, heading towards my newer, flashier life in Vancouver, Canada. I had recently quit my roster of jobs as a checkout assistant, waitress, and occasional face painter and managed to complete my NCEA – although not without a few bruises and scraped knees on the way. I was 18 and yearning for a kaleidoscope of city lights, American-sounding friends, house parties with red solo cups, and Vancouver ticked all those boxes. I was determined to find myself, to live this dream of a small-town girl taking on the big city. 

But if I have learnt one thing, now, at the old age of 24, life is about wanting one thing and getting everything else; Dear 18-year-old Mary, you may have left Aotearoa, but you did not find yourself. 

Like many women navigating their mid-20s, I cannot be the only one who has been fed this cultural trope of fleeing your home town for somewhere novel, somewhere freckled with opportunities (have you seen Crossroads with Britney Spears?). Since my adolescence, all I had been taught was to run from things that seemed messy, to run away from the swelling mundanity of my small-town life. Buying a one-way ticket lent me this ego that I could change my life and look back on Wellington like I was living in a coming-of-age montage. 

But as soon as I landed in Vancouver, Covid-19 hit, and my iridescent life announced itself as a mirage. I bounced from one poor-paying fashion job to another, now, naïvely, existing in one of North America’s most expensive cities – as in, $1700 for a large private bedroom in a shared apartment kind of expensive (and yes, that is a real Craigslist listing). 

My picture-perfect plan of leaving behind my old life began to swirl down the drain like a dead goldfish I had begged my parents to buy. This dream of a charming downtown apartment, a sexy hockey boyfriend, and that job for a well-paying fashion magazine had become mottled, and I found myself once again working multiple jobs, barely passing school, and choosing between paying for groceries or my inhaler. 

In recent months, I have witnessed an influx of my old school peers and coworkers taking their own leap across the pond. Whether to Santorini, Melbourne or Denpasar, everyone is everywhere and living their best lives as they do it. 

And I will admit, I am left with this tinnitus of jealousy whenever I see their posts, although I am beginning to understand that this jealousy clings to me because moving overseas did very little for me when it came to starting afresh. Life stayed the same, and seeing posts of other people living this lavish life solidified my unsuccessful attempt at becoming the protagonist of some Greta Gerwig film. 

However, amidst the friction of working underpaid jobs, racking up credit card debt, and stumbling into unbearable relationships, I did come across one thing, glimmering like a coin on a sidewalk – failure. 

Failure, as though an arrow missing the bullseye of a perfect life, rid me of the need to strive for perfection. I had spent so long attempting to find myself, that finding myself became more about others’ perception of me. Failure rid me of these parameters that life has to be a series of successes, and as cringeworthy as this may sound, I realised there was nothing of me to find because I was never truly lost – and accepting that was far more freeing than any one-way flight ever could be. 

If you want to move overseas, do not let this be the argument against it. For me moving overseas was life-changing, even in the most unanticipated of ways. The world is a beautiful place; I have met the most brilliant of people, seen the greatest of art, and visited the most eye-opening places. But you may not find yourself, you may not have any magical epiphanies, and that is more than okay. I implore you to travel with the understanding that you cannot run away from failure, you can only run into it – and I recommend doing so with your arms wide open, as it is there that you may find exactly what you were searching for.