Leaving everything behind, in middle of a pandemic, to begin again in Australia

Holly Hughes had what she thought was a dream job with the UN Environment Programme. And then she quit. From a hotel room in South Australia where she's quarantining, she explains why.

Holly Hughes gazing out her hotel window on day nine of her quarantine in Australia.

In a time of global uncertainty but near-certain recession, I have decided to emigrate to Australia. I have quit not one but two lucrative jobs, spent extortionate money to come to a country I know next to nothing about, and left behind every anchor of security and safety in search of the worst of all possible clichés: Happiness.

When people talk of gambles, it's typically in retrospect: When the big risk has already led to another success. When the terror of upending your life or quitting the job or leaving that relationship is a memory or scar, no longer a living, breathing demon on your shoulder. We speak of that pain almost fondly, generously, from our higher plane of knowing: It always works out in the end. 

Except, when we’re IN it, the tumult, the uncertainty, the self-doubt, we don’t know that. In the gory, underwhelming, uncertain middle bit, there are no tangible results to point to and say “this is working, I’ve done the right thing!” There is no grinning ‘after’ shot to justify your ‘before’. I — in state-mandated quarantine — am in the middle bit.

In October 2020, precisely one week after beginning a “dream job” with the UN Environment Programme, I quit. 

It was the best possible job with the best possible organisation with the best possible opportunities. It was a stepping stone to infinite career possibilities. It was, since I first became an indignant vegetarian aged 10, the pinnacle of my ambitions. All this and it was PAID — unheard of! — at a time when unemployment numbers were rising daily.

Yet here I was, after being handed everything I had ever proclaimed to want, ugly crying as I regretfully but insistently resigned.

As one person asked of me, Why? Why would you walk away from a door that’s already open to you? Well, because it wouldn’t make me happy.

But why couldn’t I just wait? It was only a year contract, it was a fantastic opportunity, I had so much potential — why would I throw it all away to move to Australia and become a waitress? Don’t I realise I’m lucky?

Holly Hughes enjoying the great outdoors. 

I know. It sounds frivolous and ungrateful, wasteful and weak, particularly in Ireland — a country that doesn’t accept ‘I don’t feel like it’ as an excuse to get out of hoovering, let alone gainful employment.

We are not quitters. In fact, our nation’s survival and progression — slow as it has sometimes been — is characterised by our refusal to quit. Our civilisation was almost wiped out by famine: We continued building the roads we still drive on. Our language was on the cusp of extinction: We not only brought it back with a vengeance, we ensured its immortality by tying it to two of the most formative and integral cultural experiences in existence: Irish college and GAA. Just look at our continued optimism in our annual Eurovision entry, our World Cup attempts. Clearly, we are not a people familiar with the concept of ‘throwing in the towel’.

This national refusal to say ‘no’ is extreme to the point that I didn’t know I could quit. I didn’t know that if you didn’t want to do something, you didn’t have to do it and the not doing it didn’t make you a failure. I was like the grannies made viral during the same-sex marriage referendum — you know the ones who hated “the homosexuals” yet loved their one, exceptional, gay grandson? — but in reverse: “Well of course it’s OK for people to quit, but I could never do it.” And this is damaging — physically and mentally — particularly to a generation who’ve been told repeatedly that they can “do anything”. How most of us have internalised this is to feel that we must do EVERYTHING. To live the life unlived by the ancestors who sacrificed and sweated and struggled before us.

We have grown up in a world of opportunity — the first true generation of possibility in Ireland — where, for the first time, education was a given, travel essential, and potential bestowed upon you at parent-teacher meetings like a precious diamond necklace. At first, that necklace felt like a gift — had been intended as such by the many encouraging voices that told me I could achieve whatever I set my mind to. However, the constricting weight of this pressure soon turned that necklace into a choker. I was suffocating from the unrelenting, ever-tightening grip of my ‘potential’.

Holly Hughes standing at her hotel windown during her quarantine in Australia. 

To take the UN position — stressful, demanding, all-consuming — was to fulfil my potential but asphyxiate myself in the process. It was to accept a life of wading through my apathy each morning, searching for excitement. A life of 8pm Zoom calls and ten hours spent alone at a desk with only the buzz of my Fitbit to propel me away from the screen every ten minutes to the hour. It meant feeling slightly dimmed, a touch duller, a smidge down ALL THE TIME, and being unable to pinpoint why, so then assuming that maybe that’s just who I am now: A beige person masquerading in bright clothes. It meant continuing to equate my worth with a LinkedIn update, believing that what I have to offer the world is only valid, like a dodgy coupon, between the hours of 9 and 6 or the one to two pages of my CV.

No, I couldn’t — can’t  — do this. No matter how wonderful the opportunity, how great the honour. You see, walking through a door simply because it’s open isn’t a reason to say yes if my heart is screaming no. Great opportunities are only great opportunities if they fulfil, nurture, and content me. ‘Only a year’ is only 365 days of refusing myself permission to be happy; denying myself the space and self-respect to be fully, woefully, immaturely, and contrarily ‘me’.

When my best friend also quit her job last year, she said something that has become a kind of mantra to me, so deeply did it resonate. She said, “I don’t want to be a CEO.” That, ludicrous as it may seem, was a revelation to me. Unconsciously, I had grown up ingesting an idea that if I was not constantly reaching for the next best thing, then I was somehow failing.

Think of how much of our professional life is predicated on the idea of progression. Consider the energy and effort we expend attempting to prove not that we’re good at our job, but that we will be good at the next job. It feels taboo to admit contentment with standing still, of not seeking to move up any kind of ladder, of being happy to simply sit in stillness and familiarity. It never occurred to me that the goal wasn’t Everest, that I could pitch my tent at base camp. That I could wave others upwards on their climb and rest at whatever stage or level I wanted. 

Because, the truth is, I don’t want success right now — or at least this narrow ideal of success that society has foisted upon us, which, in case you needed reminding, does not exist.

So, here I am, quarantining in a hotel room in South Australia and paying $3,000 for the pleasure, in the crappy middle part that nobody ever talks about. I am a permanent resident of the world of ‘un’: Unemployed, unsure, unprepared, uncertain this gamble will pay off. I have no job, no idea where I will live (I’m talking state here, not neighbourhood) and, as you’ve probably guessed from the $3,000 I am soon to part with, a fast-diminishing savings account.

My life is one big, sprawling question mark, an ellipsis that I have no idea how to fill. And I couldn’t be happier. Because finally — finally! — I am giving myself permission to be a badass disappointment, a layabout, a privileged narcissist, a failure.

Holly Hughes enjoying a hike. 

I know most reading this don’t have the luxury or economic and social privilege to abandon ship and run away to Australia right now. Yet, while the pandemic has robbed us of so much, it has given us one, invaluable gift: A glimpse at an alternate way of being. An opportunity to return to the infinite wisdom of our intuition, to pursue what truly makes us happy, and, finally, resolutely, free ourselves from the shackles of ‘should’ and ‘must’.

We can’t live every day as if it’s our last. That is as unrealistic as it is infuriating. But we can live with the integrity, gumption, and sheer terror of knowing each day is ours and ours alone — to destroy, to waste, to embrace, to love.