“Do you own or rent?”
Rent.
“How long have you been at your current address?”
Not very long.
“And your previous address?”
Another rental.
It’s funny how a few questions on a form can suddenly remind you that you are starting from scratch. I looked at the keys in my hand the other day and thought about it.
For most immigrants, the first keys we carry in a new country are keys to somebody else’s house. We arrive already adults, but somehow we have to start again. You rent. You save. You build a credit score from zero. You start your superannuation from zero. You learn a new system of taxes, banks, leases, insurance, Medicare, visas, everything. And you do all of this at an age when some of the people around you are already talking about the house their parents helped them buy or the suburb they grew up in. Or moving back home for a few months because things got hard.
That option hits differently when home is an eight hour flight away.
When you have a bad week, you cannot just drive to your mum’s house and eat whatever is on the table. When money is tight, there is no childhood bedroom waiting for you. When you are tired of trying to figure everything out, there is no familiar street outside your window reminding you that you have been here before.
You chose to leave all of that. I think that is the part of immigration that people don’t really talk about.
You don’t just move countries. You give up your head start.
Whatever credit history you built. Whatever network you had. Whatever reputation came with your name. The people who knew someone who knew someone. The place where you understood how everything worked without having to Google it first.
You trade familiarity for possibility. And possibility is expensive.
Not just in money but also in time, in birthdays missed, in parents getting older from a distance, in friendships that slowly become group chats, an in constantly calculating whether you can afford the flight home this year.
And then you start collecting little things.
A Medicare card. Your first credit card approval. A payslip with super on it. A driver’s license. A permanent visa. A savings account that finally looks like it could survive an emergency. A set of keys.
Maybe eventually, keys to a place that is actually yours.
These things sound ordinary when you have had them your whole life. But I think immigrants understand that ordinary things can be trophies too because every little piece of stability was something you had to rebuild.
Maybe that is why so many of us work the way we do.
Why we keep saving. Why we keep saying yes to another shift, another project, another opportunity.
It is not always ambition.
Sometimes you are just trying to rebuild the safety net you left behind and maybe one day you will stand in front of your own door, put your own key into the lock, and it will look like such a small thing.
But you will know that key took years to make. A salute of respect to all immigrants making a sense of home in a new place every waking day.