Words by: Marileigh Valeroso 
Art by: Kenneth Toh

I spent 12 years of my life in the rural regions of Queensland. My school shoes would tread in red dirt every time I walked home from school, and I lived only five minutes away from all my friends. It was small. It was quiet.

Hence why moving to Melbourne was a big change for little old me. The city was loud and boisterous, alive with all sorts of noises at every hour of the day.

One of the major things I struggled with was sleeping. I was used to going to bed in complete and utter silence, with nothing but a couple of crickets and the occasional car passing by. But just my luck, the apartment I had moved into was right in front of a busy highway and down the street from a hospital. This meant my beauty sleep was disrupted by endless sounds of traffic and sirens at 3am in the morning. It took me almost a year of tossing and turning and endless trials of melatonin to finally develop a proper sleep routine.

Small towns are quiet, yes, that much is true. But there was one noise in the country louder than anything in the city: gossip. If everyone knew everyone, then that meant, everyone also knew everything.

Back home, there was very little to do, so what would people do in their spare time? Stick their noses in everyone else’s businesses. Gossip exists everywhere but more so in towns where there’s nothing better to do.

Now, as a busy 20-something-year-old in the big city, there’s barely time to care about other people’s lives. The rush of the city drowns out the noise of gossip and I quickly came to the realisation that we’re all in a similar situation: no one cares. Everyone is too busy wrapped up in their own world and trying to make something of themselves.

You can dress how you want, act how you want and be who you want without worrying about judgemental eyes following you all the way back home.

Without the blabber of gossip or the wandering eyes, I was welcome to try on different versions of myself that were hidden in my little cookie-cuttercountry town. In a small town, you shy away from the unconventional, in fear of the hypercritics, but in the big, boisterous city, it’s the first thing you pick out from your closet every morning.

Despite its vast, green fields, the countryside is a prison of conformity that tends to suppress creative individuals with ideas and personalities that are far too big to be contained. The shackles are removed once you step foot outside those confines, your shoulders feel lighter and there’s a spring in your step as you enter the concrete jungle.

As someone who was raised in the country, I have gained a certain type of freedom found in the tiny alleyways between tall buildings and busy pathways of streets. I have been able to develop and grow as a person in the three years I’ve lived in Melbourne in comparison to the 12 years I spent in a rural town. That being said, I can’t say that I don’t find myself occasionally craving the slow pace of the countryside; it’s a hole in my heart that only fresh air and dirt roads can fill.