It’s hard to believe that one year ago I was counting down the days until my parents dropped me at Newark Airport and I took off for ten months in England. Now, having lived those ten months, I’m still learning how to integrate everything that I experienced and learned abroad with my life here.
How do you explain a year of your life? How do you share all of the things that you did, all of the places you saw, the people you met, all of the things that you learned, with people who weren’t there living it with you? I’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t really, because no matter how hard you try to explain, no matter how detailed your account, people are either going to lose interest quickly in your multi-hour tell-all or you’ll find yourself generalizing so much that you don’t say much of anything at all. But I think that’s okay. Going abroad for a year is actually a very selfish thing in the sense that you do it entirely for yourself, so that you can experience a new way of life, meet new people, see new places and expand your own horizons. And yes, many times the best part of an experience is sharing it with the people you love, and I certainly didn’t stop doing that, as my verbose blog posts can attest to. But part of it is absorbing the experience yourself and letting it change you, and that part is inherently yours. It changes your life, your attitudes and opinions, and no one else can have the same interpretation that you do, even if they lived it with you. The things that I did and felt in England have shaped me in ways that I don’t even know in their full extent yet, and explaining that is next to impossible.
This became evident in the car on the way home from Newark. My mom asked me what I missed most about England, and I was at a complete loss for words. This is partly because I’d been travelling for eighteen hours on next to no sleep after saying goodbye to several of my best friends, only to find myself at a rest stop in New Jersey, of all places. Let me tell you, a rest stop on the New Jersey highway is not a gentle transition back into America. Oh man. But there weren’t really words to describe what I missed, which was the people, the scenery, and just the Englishness of England. See? That doesn’t even make sense now, and I’ve had almost two months to think about it. So I gave some horribly inadequate answer like, “Everything,” and went back to staring in dismay at all of the obese people in track bottoms standing in line at various fast food vendors.
I’ve just spent a lot of space explaining to you that there’s a lot that I can’t tell you. Awesome. So what can I tell you? I can tell you that this was without a doubt the most incredible year of my life, and that I absolutely fell in love with England. It’s kind of like a quirky relative – full of idiosyncrasies and absurdities that can be trying at times, but you learn to look past that because they’re family and you love them for all of their quirks, even the fact that there’s no tape in the post offices and three inches of snow results in apocalyptic-type conditions. But it’s okay, because there’s really good tea and chocolate.
Apart from all of the seeing and doing and picture-taking that I was able to do this year (most of which has made its way to this blog), I learned so much about myself and about how to be a person in the world. Yes, technically I went abroad to take classes and do some academic learning (that’s what I had to put on the application, anyway), but most of the education that I got this year did not take place in the classroom. I learned how to plan trips, how to navigate airports and public transportation, not just in English but in other languages as well, I attempted, with varying success, to stick to a budget, and I did a lot of things for myself. These are all invaluable lessons, but they’re only part of what I learned.
I also discovered so much about myself. I have a better idea of what I want out of life now, and maybe even what I want to do with myself after this great thing called college comes to an end in a year. Maybe. But I feel that I grew up a lot and grew into myself more, if that makes sense. I learned to embrace the more spontaneous, ridiculous side of myself, which I honestly thought that I had lost. I know that sounds crazy – I head to the land of people famous for keeping a stiff upper lip and for doing everything properly and get in touch with my ridiculous side. But I was allowed to be the excited American all year, and it was so freeing and wonderful. Going to college taught me that I can’t change the essentials of who I am. Going to England showed me that I shouldn’t want to – I just have to embrace them. And yes, I was laughed at. A lot. But I was laughing, too.
I’m proud of myself for that – that I let myself go and got invested and fell in love with the full knowledge that I would have to leave, and that it would hurt when I did. But that didn’t stop me. For once, I didn’t choose the safe option, which is really what I think study abroad can teach you if you let it. That’s the key, though – you have to be open to all of those experiences and you have to want to grow and change, otherwise you can just recreate your life at home, only with an accent. And home is good, home is wonderful. But it’s hard to appreciate if you don’t distance yourself from it sometimes.
I just finished reading Bill Bryson’s book Notes from a Small Island, an account of his travels through Britain before he and his family moved to America, where he was born, after living in England for twenty years. It was essentially a personal letter to Britain in which Bryson acknowledged its flaws but more or less declared his undying love for its people, landscape, and culture. I connected with it on so many levels, and I think that he puts it better than I could ever do (you’re also probably quite sick of reading my writing by now, so this will mix it up a little bit). This excerpt is from the very end of the book, at the close of Bryson’s farewell tour:
“What a wondrous place this was – crazy as all get-out, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket? Who else would have a constitutional form of government but no written constitution, call private schools public schools, think it not the least bit odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, seat the chief officer of the House of Lords on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? . . . Who else could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, Salisbury Cathedral, double-decker buses, and the chocolate digestive biscuit? Wherever else would I find a view like this? Nowhere, of course.
All this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you. And then I turned from the gate and got into the car and knew without doubt that I would be back.” (From Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island [New York: Avon Books, Inc., 1995] 316-17.)
I know exactly what he means.
All that’s really left for me to do is to say thank you to the people who made this past year what it was, and to the people who kept up with my adventures through my sometimes infrequent and tangential blog posts. I couldn’t have done this without any of you, so thank you so much. Flatmates, friends – I love you all so much and I miss you all of the time. But I know that, like Bill Bryson, I’ll be back. And I’m sleeping on your couch when I get there.
