What I Carried Home

GRIP: Sales and Marketing Intern in Sydney, Australia

Manifestation is real.

Before applying to GRIP, I had pulpit out into the world that I was going to have an amazing summer. I did not necessarily know what that meant. I was not looking for the internship that would determine the rest of my career, nor did I expect to suddenly figure out exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I was a directionless rising sophomore who simply wanted an experience, something memorable, and, if nothing else, something I could eventually put on my resume.

At the beginning of my freshman spring, I wrote an email to my future self. I wrote how I was going to get into a summer program, spend my summer doing something exciting, meet new people, and hopefully find myself somewhere outside of what had become familiar. Then I scheduled it to arrive months later.

By the time that email appeared in my inbox at the end of June, I was already halfway across the world in Sydney.

Experience for the summer? Check.
Living in another country? Check.
Meeting new people I never would have expected to become close with? Check.
Internship to put on my resume? Check.

Somehow, nearly everything freshman-spring I had written down had happened.

But sitting in Sydney reading an email from a version of myself who had no idea what was coming. I realized that the check marks barely described the experience at all. It felt like a fever dream. It wasn’t as short as a week-long trip but it was not as long as a semester abroad where a place eventually became completely ordinary. There was enough time for Sydney to stop feeling entirely unfamiliar, but never enough time for me to forget that I would eventually have to leave.

For two months, I got to experience both the professional world and simply being a person in a place far away from home. I went to work, learned how to navigate public transportation, took on assignments I had never done before, received feedback, made mistakes, and slowly became more comfortable with things that had initially intimidated me. Outside of work, there was another version of the experience waiting for me: exploring new neighborhoods, making plans to go somewhere in the day and night, figuring out locals use the other side of the road, and slowly collecting routines that made Sydney feel less like a destination and a little more like somewhere I lived.

And throughout everything, I carried a water bottle. Filled to the brim.

It is not necessarily because I expect to drink every drop. I fill it because I want to have weight. Whether I was heading to work or going somewhere around the city, I wanted to be able to feel the bottle pulling against my shoulder. I wanted to know, without having to look inside my bag, that it was still there.

I learned this lesson in a very literal way. The last time I carried my water bottle only half-full, it was so light that at some point I put it down, forgot about it, and genuinely lost it. I had to buy another one. So now I fill it.

It sounds insignificant, but somewhere during my time in Sydney, I started thinking about how strangely well that habit described the summer itself.

I had arrived wanting something to fill my summer.

Instead, I spent the summer filling an experience.

I filled it with workdays and unfamiliar assignments. With train rides and walks around a city I had once only known as a place on a map. With conversations, inside jokes, spontaneous plans, moments of homesickness, moments of independence, and friendships with people I probably never would have crossed paths with otherwise. I filled it with the exciting things that would make good photographs, but also with the ordinary moments that I never thought I would miss until they stopped being ordinary.

Somewhere along the way, Sydney gained weight.

And I think that is what surprised me most.

Before GRIP, I thought about experiences largely in terms of what they could give me. A new line on my resume. Professional experience. Something productive to say I had done during the summer. Those things mattered, and I am grateful for all of them. But they are also the easiest parts of the experience to put into a checklist. A checklist tells me that something happened. Weight tells me that it mattered.

The things I value most from Sydney are much harder to quantify. They are the confidence that came from figuring things out on my own, the people who went from strangers to people I genuinely cared about, and the small routines I did not realize I had grown attached to. They are the moments that made two months feel simultaneously incredibly long and nowhere near long enough.

But strangely, I never felt as though I was running out of time.

I knew Sydney had an expiration date. I knew there would eventually be a last day at work, a last commute, a last weekend, a last walk through the city, and eventually a flight home. Still, I never felt the urge to race against any of it. I did not spend my days counting how many I had left or panicking over everything I had not yet done.

For once, the time I had felt like enough.

That feeling was unfamiliar to me. So much of life, especially at this age, feels defined by what comes next. The next semester. The next internship. The next application. The next opportunity. The next version of yourself you are supposed to become. There is always something else ahead, and somehow that can make whatever you have in front of you feel temporary before you have even had the chance to experience it.

Sydney did not feel that way.

Of course I could have stayed longer. There were more places I could have gone, more things I could have done, and more time I could have spent with the people I met. But when it was time to leave, I did not feel unfinished. I did not feel cheated out of time. I felt content.

And contentment is a strange emotion when so much of what you have experienced is the feeling of reaching upward—always wanting the next thing, always wondering what else you could be doing, always feeling as though there is somewhere else you need to get to.

Freshman-spring me got almost everything she had asked for in that email.

What she could not have known was how much more there would be beyond the check marks.

I came to Sydney looking for something to fill my summer. I left with an experience that felt too heavy to reduce to a single bullet point.

Maybe that is why I keep thinking about my water bottle. I fill it until it has enough weight for me to know it is there. Not until it becomes impossible to carry, and not because I am afraid there will never be enough water again. Just until it feels full.

Sydney was the same.

I did not need another week, another month, or another list of things to check off for the experience to matter. I had filled it enough.

Maybe the things we fill become harder to lose. And maybe, sometimes, enough is its own kind of fullness.

Even now, thousands of miles away from Sydney, I can still feel the weight of it.