Resigning, Residing & Revelations

Well, what a weekend it has been boys and girls, and it all started with a very nerve-wracking Friday morning at work.

As suspected, I didn’t get much sleep on Thursday night and I even managed to wake myself up an hour before the standard alarm time. Naturally this caused me to lie in bed for the next hour and a half rehearsing the ‘I’m quitting my job and moving to London’ speech that I was about to deliver to my bosses. Since I was now running half an hour late, I decided to treat myself and catch the tram to work rather than the muster up the energy for the usual walk. In hindsight, the walk probably would have done me some good to help clear my head and exert some of that nervous energy – I guess I’ll just store that piece of advice away for the next time I need to quit a job.

Thankfully I managed to make the first move on Thursday night and send my boss an email asking him if we could have a ‘chat’ in the morning, so there was no going back. My boss came out of his morning meeting and pulled me aside into an empty room where I delivered the speech that I had practiced down to a tee the night before, only slightly less elegantly than originally planned and there were also a few awkward swallows thrown in mid-sentence, just incase he couldn’t already tell just how nervous I was.

The reaction was standard I guess, a bit of surprise followed by lots of general questions about passports and travel plans, then some reassuring words of support closely followed by the minor work-related details such as my last day and what will happen next.

The second I walked out of that room and back to my desk I felt like I was gliding – it was as though someone had just lifted a giant elephant off of my shoulders. The hardest part was now over and I felt like I was on cloud 9. I now had to deliver the exact same speech two more times to my other boss and a colleague, and by lunch time I was ready to get drunk retire for the day.  The rest of my day was spent breaking the news to my colleagues and chatting about how much I still have left to do before I fly out. By 4pm I found myself sitting in the kitchen drinking a well-deserved glass of red and I had still not managed to even get one tiny bit of work done – there was zero concentration and zero motivation. Oops.

A big thank you for all your well wishes last week, they seemed to have worked as I wasn’t told to leave on the spot, so you can now officially uncross all your fingers and toes.

On Sunday it was time to get things moving (literally) and my boyfriend and I held a market stall at the Camberwell Market to start selling off all of our belongings – everything from clothes to soup bowls to furniture and DVD’s.

It went really well and even in spite of the rain that came through around midday, we still managed to get rid of a lot of clutter and also make lots of money in the process. I have booked another market stall for the weekend before we leave so we can sell off even more things and hopefully clear out as much as we can so that we don’t have to throw everything away. It’s such a great way to make some extra money (we made over $1000 all together on Sunday) and it makes parting with certain things like my favourite dress or dvd a little easier, knowing that someone else will now love it and get some great use out of it.

Luckily today has been a public holiday in Melbourne, so we had plenty of time to catch up on some sleep, go out for a delicious breakkie and even give my car a scrub and vacuum so that I can finally put it up for sale online. I also remembered that since I’ve now quit my job, I can stop being so paranoid about hiding my identity on my blog (just in case a colleague was to stumble upon it) so I’ve put up a new photo on my ‘About Me’ page to celebrate.

So now that I’ve quit my job and sold half of my belongings, I really feel as though this is move it becoming a reality, it’s a very scary and exciting feeling.
This week I plan to do some research and post up a new page about job hunting in London, so if anyone has any job hunting or resume tips for me then please do share.

Until next time,

The London New Girl
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