The Reinvention Tour — I Left Geelong Once. I Am Going Back to Stay.

Raffs Beach Barwon Heads

By Alli · Simply Simpatica · 8 min read

I have a complicated relationship with leaving.

In July 2024, I packed up my life in Melbourne and moved to Geelong. Not as an experiment. Not as a trial run. As a woman who had been through more loss than she knew how to carry inside a city that held the memory of all of it — and who desperately needed to put some distance between herself and everything that hurt.

The losses had come in layers. My mum, who passed in 2018, and whose absence I was still learning to live with. My beautiful dog Harry, who had never been just a dog to me. For a woman who never had children, Harry was my child. His loss was a grief most people do not know how to acknowledge, and so I carried it quietly, in the way women learn to carry things that do not have the right words attached to them. And then there were the other losses — the ones that come when a chapter of your life closes, taking people and places and belonging with it. The kind of losses that do not have clean edges or public permission to grieve. The kind you carry in silence because the world does not quite have a category for them.

And then there was Melbourne itself. Every street, every suburb, every familiar corner holding memories I had looked at and healed from — but was ready to move beyond.

So I went to Geelong.

It Was Always Going to Be Geelong

I am a Surfcoast girl. Eighteen summers of my childhood were spent at Barwon Heads — that glorious, salt-soaked, unhurried stretch of coastline that got into my blood before I was old enough to know what belonging felt like. The smells. The sounds. The particular quality of light on the Barwon River. That region is not just somewhere I love. It is in my DNA.

Geelong was never a compromise destination. It was always the destination. The place I was quietly moving toward my entire adult life without quite realising it.

When I finally arrived, I understood immediately why. Geelong is peaceful in a way that Melbourne — for all its beauty and energy and culture — simply is not. The people are friendlier. The pace is slower. The air feels different. I was twenty minutes from Barwon Heads for walks along the beach, walking the Barwon River in Newtown, breathing in the place that had always felt more like home than anywhere else I had ever lived.

I started to heal. I started to make friends. I started, slowly and tentatively, to feel like myself again.

Why I Came Back — And Why I Wish I Hadn’t

Then there was the commute.

Three days a week back to Melbourne for work. Long. Arduous. Exhausting in a way that slowly undid everything Geelong was giving me. After twelve months, the tiredness won. I made the practical decision. I moved back to Melbourne.

Am I sad about that? Yes. Deeply.

Melbourne solved the commute problem. My days are shorter now, my mornings less brutal. But life here does not offer the joy that Geelong offered. I look around at this city, and I still see the layers of loss — softened now, less raw, but present. And I miss the peace. I miss the river. I miss the twenty-minute drive to stand on a beach that has known me since I was a child.

Could have. Should have. Would have. The three most useless words in the English language. I know this. And yet.

In the eight months I have been back in Melbourne,, I have quite often said out loud to myself, "I want to go home." But I did not know where home was. I felt lost. I felt like I had failed. Like coming back here was a deficit. A step backwards in a life that was supposed to be moving forward.

The truth is, my life in the past six years has changed so dramatically that I sometimes barely recognise it. I have gone from what I perceived as enormous love, days filled with many people, a fullness that felt permanent, to living alone in a small one-bedroom apartment. It has been tough. More than tough. There have been days when the silence has been very loud.

But somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realised something important. I was gaslighting myself. I was not seeing my own growth. Not the spiritual growth that has quietly and profoundly reshaped who I am. Not the growth in this three-dimensional world — the blog being built, the life being redesigned, the woman who is standing back up and choosing differently.

The brightest colours come from the darkest days. I have lived that. I am living it still. And the colour is coming. 💛

Why This Time Is Different — And What Geelong Gave Me

I left Geelong because I was exhausted and the commute was taking its toll. But if I am being completely honest, it was more than that. I felt pressured — by friends, by my job, by the practical voices that said, 'This is not sustainable; come back.' And I listened to them instead of myself. The truth is, I had not yet found myself. I did not yet trust myself enough to stay in the face of difficulty. That is the version of me who came back to Melbourne.

She was not ready.

Geelong gave me peace at the hardest time of my life. It held me through grief that had no proper name. It gave me space to breathe when Melbourne had stopped feeling like a place I could breathe in. It gave me friendliness when I needed warmth, slowness when I needed to stop rushing and beauty when I needed to remember that the world was still beautiful.

It did not solve anything. Grief does not get solved by geography. But it gave me the conditions for healing to become possible. And that is not a small thing. That is everything.

My mum loved this region. My summers here as a child were the happiest of my life. Harry left us in 2021 — but in Geelong, I felt him anyway. Walking along the Barwon River, breathing in the salt air at Barwon Heads, I would connect telepathically with him and my mum. I felt their spirits there. Their joy. I feel the breeze, and I know they are close. As though the place itself carried them somehow, and being in it brought me close to both of them in a way that Melbourne never could.

Women in Their Prime — So Why Do We Stop Ourselves?

I want to talk about something I see a lot of and that nobody is honestly saying.

There is a rise in angry women in their 50s and 60s. You know what I am talking about. The woman in the supermarket who snaps at the checkout operator. The woman at the restaurant who cannot be pleased. The woman whose default setting has become bitter and hard and immovable. The woman the internet has unkindly named Karen.

And I want to ask — why is she angry?

Because I think I know.

She is angry because she is not living her life. She is angry because she spent decades — her most vital, most energetic, most capable decades — pouring herself into a husband, into children, into a family structure that consumed her completely. She sacrificed her dreams quietly and called it love. She put herself last and called it selflessness. She made herself smaller and called it devotion.

And then one day, the children left. Or the husband left. Or she looked up from the life she had built entirely around other people and realised there was nothing left that was hers. No passion. No purpose. No sense of who she was outside of the roles she had played.

That is not bitterness. That is grief. Unprocessed, unacknowledged, with nowhere to go but outward.

I understand it. I have felt the edges of it myself. The difference is I caught it. I named it. And I chose differently.

We are women in our prime. I want to say that loudly and clearly because the world does not say it enough. Our 50s and 60s are not the end of something. They are the beginning of the most powerful, most self-aware, most liberated chapter of our lives — if we choose to claim it.

The Reinvention Tour is my claim. This blog, this business, this deliberate redesign of everything — this is what it looks like when a woman in her prime stops sacrificing herself and starts building something entirely her own.

You do not have to be angry. You do not have to be bitter. You do not have to be Karen.

But you do have to choose. Yourself. Your life. Your joy. Deliberately and without apology.

February 2027 — She Is Ready Now

The woman who came back to Melbourne was not ready. She listened to other people instead of herself. She had not yet found who she was.

Coming back was not something I wanted. But in the grand scheme of things, it was something I needed. Because this woman is different.

She sets boundaries. She puts herself first. She does not take any nonsense from people the way the old version of me did. Always with love and graciousness — but firmly, unapologetically, herself first.

This woman is ready.

The blog is growing. The income is building. Life is deliberately and consciously being redesigned so that nothing pulls her back to the place that gave her peace when she needed it most. This time, there is no commute to win. No pressure from outside voices. No version of herself that does not yet trust her own knowing.

This time, she is going back with a business that travels with her. With an income that belongs entirely to her. With the absolute certainty that this is not running away from something. This is running toward the place that has always been home.

Geelong. February 2027. For good.

If you are reading this from Melbourne — or from anywhere that has started to feel like someone else’s life — I want you to know something.

It is not too late. It is never too late. The Reinvention Tour is proof of that.

Come with me. We are going home. 💛

Have you ever left a place you loved and spent years trying to find your way back? Tell me in the comments. I would love to know I am not alone in this. 💛