Some things in life are pretty certain, and while we may not always be ready for them, transitions are one of those things. They come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes we have choices to make alongside those transitions, and sometimes it is the choices we make that result in the transitions we go through. 

I recently met up with Charlie and Chiara from my creative marketing team to discuss whether our transitions are something we are controlling, or are we letting them make the choices for us? 

Chiara is the youngest of the three of us sitting around this virtual table and I wanted to know more about the transitions and changes in her life and how she navigated those. 

Chiara: “Gosh, that is a very large question. I grew up in a very small town in a place called Toowoomba, which is a little country town, and it very much felt like I couldn't ever stay there. If I wanted to do big things, which I did. I'm an aspiring, let's say actor, and performer, so if I wanted to do that, I couldn't stay in this little town. So I had to make the decision that I would have to move to a bigger city that would accommodate my dream. I finished high school when I was 16, I moved out of home and moved to Brisbane to study there. I studied and I finished university at 19. Then everybody said: ‘well, if you want to be an actor, you can't be an actor in Brisbane, you've got to go to Sydney, Sydney is the place to go.’ So I went. 

I had a high school boyfriend that I had been with for a couple of years and within about two months of me leaving, we broke up. He was 18 and he didn’t know what he wanted to do yet, which was fair enough. I think his experience watching me chase my dream and take proactive steps to achieve what I wanted made him feel a little like he couldn’t match up, and I think I got quite overwhelmed by that. So I lost him pretty quickly, as well as some other high school friends too. They were also at uni, but their classes were less frequent - drama school is Monday through Friday, 9am-5pm - and so the only friends you have are people that are in your class, because they have the same time schedule. But everyone else I pretty much lost, to be honest, because it just wasn't lining up. 

And I think I'm finding out, the older I get, the more often that happens. Then, you kind of wind down further and further until you have this quite small group of people who you like to be around. But it's interesting seeing how many people drop off throughout.”

In the podcast, Chiara talks more about her independence and the challenges that came with moving away from home so young. As a member of a large, Italian family, feeling somewhat separated from her people was something she was ready to move back to. I think this kind of transition at such a young age is so admirable, and it demonstrates the ever-adapting nature of our life transitions. 

I love the song Englishman in New York by Sting, but my other guest, Charlie, is an Englishman in Australia. Obviously he didn't get there without some transitions, so we had a chat about that. 

Charlie: “I've been doing transitions my whole life so I'm very familiar with it. I'm very familiar with restarting and reassessing who I am, who I want to be, who I want to be portrayed as. And as every time that I've transitioned, every time I've moved life and started again, which has been, maybe, every four years or so through my life, I've had a major total life change transition. And that's, but the miracle is that it's taken me so long to realize that, the more authentically you you are, when you're not trying to fit in with what people are doing, but you arrive and are yourself, then you fit in. The coolest thing is to be yourself, the most effective thing is to be yourself. 

My transitions have always been from institution to institution. Now I'm getting less and less institutionalized and I am more focused on standing on my own two feet. 

I went to boarding school when I was eight and that was hardcore - it was prison. Basically it was the people that are there to protect you in loco parentis are brutal. In Britain,  if you're anywhere from the sort of middle middle class, which is me, right, all the way to the top, you go to boarding school. And I was running away from home because I frickin hated school. I didn't fit in. My father was in the Air Force, so I would be at a new school every couple of years. I was always going to new places. I wouldn’t say it was a good experience, I didn’t have a lot of friends and I felt like a complete outsider. But I’m aware now, I've always been institutionalized my whole life, my mindset is institutionalized. But my heart always wants to kick the institution as hard as possible. So I'm sort of on the periphery of it, needing it and hating it all at the same time, it is a sort of quandary of my life. 

And so finally, my big transition in life really has been getting to a point where the qualities that the institutions taught me, whether that was through 10 years in boarding school or 11 years in the Army. Those institutions try to teach you certain things or they support and encourage certain qualities of you. And those qualities are really useful wherever you are in life. They're really useful to me as an actor now. They're good qualities to bring along to a theatre company. But it’s also being aware of the qualities that are left behind - these institutions don’t encourage free thinking, they don’t support heart centered openness, or sharing, or listening to people.

I think I kind of have a fear of putting roots down. I feel this innate need to be able to move at a moment's notice. So I live in Melbourne at the moment, I’m here working with a theatre company, where I live in a sort of 30 foot by 20 foot room with everything in it. And that's the same as the room that I also have in the middle of Sydney. That is exactly the same measurements of the room that I lived in, in the army. And that's only an extension of exactly the same thing that I had in boarding school. All your life in one room.”

Listening to Charlie talk about these fairly constant transitions but always coming back to some level of familiarity, it got me thinking. I have to be honest, I don't think I'd make it. For me, that's really a foreign experience. I've had transitions; I've had quite a few. But physically, I've lived within a 10 mile radius, all 55 years of my life. My childhood home is about two and a half miles away from where I'm living right now. Don’t get me wrong, I've traveled the globe, and that gave me a really great way to see the world and get a sense of smallness and perspective. I suppose really, perspective makes you feel small.

This blog is taken from Podcast 1. 

Link here:  TBC