Thursday 30 June 2011

What I Expect From Australia, Or Please Cut Me Some Slack

Today's post is very much a continuation of Tuesday's blog post (http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-i-am-leaving-netherlands-forever.html) on my reasons for leaving the Netherlands. As my target country where I am escaping to is Australia, I'll try to outline in this post what my expectations and hopes are.

First of all, I'd like to state my desire to really contribute to Australia, both its economy and its culture. I'm the type of person who likes to give back. My hope is that I'll get what I need to get started from people in Australia as well as its government. This is also one of the sources of my fears. The last thing I would want is to end up all alone in Australia, in a place I can not afford to pay for, with dwindling financial resources and no backup. Notice that I have never known financial security so far, and that the only reason why I haven't ended up on the streets is because I have had family and other people support me, even if it did turn out they had ulterior motives.

Being able to support myself hasn't been an option for a long time because of my struggle to first understand myself, leading to the discovery of my giftedness and my intersexuality, and then against the medical and other parts of the Dutch healthcare system in a futile attempt to get them to help me. Meanwhile I haven't neglected my intellectual side, however. I know various languages, many programming languages, system architectures and basically at least something of every branch of science and technology. My photographic memory and insatiable thirst for knowledge and understanding have been a great boon and still form a major part of who I am and where my interests lie.

Where things get tricky is that I need financial stability in Australia, but thanks to my traumatic experiences in the Netherlands I'll need a recovery period, both for my physical and emotional injuries. My hope is that something can be arranged here, together with some medical treatment. I'd still like a diagnosis of my intersex condition and treatment options. I guess the central theme here is that I require safety and acknowledgement of my physical condition. A stable platform from which to proceed after the dust of migrating has settled.

I will be moving to a completely foreign country after all, where I do not have any friends I have ever met in real-life. At the moment they're just contacts via IRC and email. What I am so terrified of, as I described earlier, is to end up all alone and without support. I would just have fled from a country where the system has actively pushed me towards my death, only to end up in a place where I'll be forced to fight for my survival again. I'd very much like to get a break here. Take away the worries about finances, a place to live etc. for at least a few months until I can get onto my feet.

Above all I require lots of love and attention :) Here in the Netherlands my mother cares a great deal about me, but is helpless on her own to improve my situation. My younger brother, who has been in New Zealand and Australia in 2009, supports me completely as well. Further I have my current beautician who has been very kind to me so far, and a couple of Dutch people I know via IRC who also support me, some of whom are eager to go along with me. I crave for people who will similarly be kind to me, help me where they can and above all make me - a stranger in a strange land - feel welcome.

I hope this rambling post has made some sense to you. It's very hard to put things down when they're mostly emotional in nature. My hope is that the impression it left you with are that I'm an asset to Australia and a good person to have around or even befriend, someone who will repay kindness in kind. The impression it shouldn't have left you with is that of an unstable, homicidal maniac, in which case I probably should rewrite it :)


Maya

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