Home(sick)

I promise, I will write some more posts about what I actually did this summer eventually, but I just talked with my friend about this and decided I want to write a post about it.  She was saying, and I agree, that it's hard to talk about this with people who haven't studied/lived abroad, so maybe someone will find this who feels like no one understands and they will know that they are not alone :)

One of the most difficult and most rewarding parts of studying abroad is setting up a new life in a new place with a new family and new friends.  A wonderful feeling is when you realize that this new place has become home.  Yes, it may not replace your original home, but it becomes a home nonetheless.  Being homesick but feeling at home in this case feels a little odd, but you expect it.  What you don't expect is the reverse when you really do go home.  You are so happy to be home, but after a while that excitement wears off and you realize that you are homesick for your other home.  You are still happy to be home and feel completely at home, and yet you are homesick for this other place that meant nothing to you X months ago.  Maybe this doesn't happen to everyone, but it happened to me.  I didn't realize what the weird feeling was that I had when I came home from Costa Rica until I came home from Morocco: It's weird to feel homesick when you are at home.  I don't know what the answer is because I still feel this way when I stop to think about my other homes, but with time it has gotten easier to let those feelings of homesickness recede a little.  It helps that I really do love being home and my hometown is really where I feel the most at home, but I still ache with homesickness when I think about those other lives, other families, other friends.

I guess these last two posts have kind of been downers, but again I must emphasize that studying abroad is still worth it.  I loved my other homes, my other lives, and you know what they say: Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.  And hey, nothing makes you appreciate home like coming back to it after time away :)

Goodbye

This sounds like a final post, but it actually isn't at all.  It came to my attention today that it has been exactly 4 months since I last posted here.  As my dad pointed out, it was on the last 28th day of a month beginning with the letter A.  To try to get myself back in the habit of writing here so that I can attempt to catch this up to everything I've done, I will write a quick post about the hardest part of this year, on this current 28th day of a month beginning with the letter A...

In getting ready to study abroad, no one ever warns you of how emotionally draining it is to say goodbye.  I expected to be physically tired from all the traveling and packing and mentally tired from all the language- and culture-learning, but somehow I never thought about how exhausting it would be not to set up a new life, but to leave it.  Yes, I am tired of packing and unpacking, of planes and trains and airports and buses, of always having to plan where I will be next, of facing whatever stereotypes of Americans the world has, basically of everything I expected to challenge me this year.  But what has tired me the most, what almost stopped me from going to Berlin this summer, what had me more ready to come home than I have probably ever been in my life is the exhaustion of saying goodbye.

Saying goodbye to people at home was actually easy compared to the goodbyes I said before leaving my homes abroad.  When I said goodbye to my family and friends, I said it knowing that I would be coming back to see them again in the very foreseeable future.  Yes, pulling myself out of my life to go set up a new one somewhere completely different was tiring, but it was such an adventure!  The adrenaline made it easy.  However, when the time came to pack up my life back into suitcases and go back home, I found it much harder to say those goodbyes because, to be perfectly honest, I will probably not see or even talk to a lot of the people who were a part of my life abroad.

Costa Rica was hard, but it was just the first round so I didn't think too much of it while I was in Morocco.  But as the time came to say that second round of goodbyes to another place, another family, another set of friends and teachers and amazing program directors, I wasn't sure I could do it again.  It was around this time that I had to decide if I would go to Berlin for a 4 week program over the summer and I almost couldn't make myself do it because of the daunting task of making new friends only to have to say goodbye to them 4 weeks later.  What finally pushed me to do it was knowing that I could never regret doing it, no matter how much it hurt, but that I would probably regret not doing it.  I hate having regrets, and I don't have any.  When I got home from Morocco, I just remember feeling tired.  I was so tired of goodbyes.  Two rounds of setting up a new life away from home and then ripping myself out of it again was harder than I expected it to be.  But of course it was worth it and I wouldn't change a thing.  And I am so happy I went to Berlin!  There will be more on that later, I hope :)

Basically, the moral of the story is go anyway.  Just do it.  No matter how hard it was to say goodbye, it was so worth it.  I will admit that in the 2 weeks I had to travel after my program in Berlin ended I decided that I just didn't want to meet any new people because if I didn't say hello, I wouldn't have to say goodbye.  Cynical, maybe, but I just couldn't face adding more goodbyes to my list since I still had some old friends to see.  I just want people to realize that those goodbyes will hit you harder than any culture shock ever could.  Maybe they don't tell you about them when you are getting ready to study abroad because it wouldn't matter.  You can't prepare yourself for them.  All you can do is hope that you will see these people and places again one day and appreciate with all your might the life you had because no matter what, it will never be that way again.

After all that time getting ready for this year it feels completely surreal for it to be over.  But then again, after over a year away from my university it will be a whole new adventure that I am getting very excited to go back to...