On
the verge of flying back to the United States, an entire year out of college
and an entire year away from the country, I am still sometimes amazed that I
left the country for the year. I
do not know if anyone ever expected that of me, let alone if I ever
realistically expected that of myself.
Leaving the country always seemed like a thing people much braver than
me, people much less attached to people and physical things than me, and people
much happier with much less than me, do.
Perhaps I envision them as such because to me those people do not seem
vulnerable. I know am vulnerable—I
draw strength and energy from my friends and family. I like living in a place that I have made my own. Without those constants my footing is
like that in a strong riptide: One
second solid and OK, the next second not evening being able to distinguish
where my feet are. Therefore I see little of myself in
those voyagers.
I
knew that when I decided to go to Germany for the year—That I am a vulnerable
and emotional person. I look back
on my decision process and I remember even saying things like, “I know it’ll be
hard and a big adjustment, but I want to do it.” I said those things so casually, like I was just saying them
out of obligation, not like I really believed them. I wonder if I had been able to transplant some of the
emotions I have felt this year into my brain as a second semester senior in
college, surrounded by more people who care about me than ever before, if I
would have been so gun-ho. It is,
however, an undoubtedly very good thing I could not accurately foresee this
year.
As
another PPPler once summed up the year very well to me: This year has been lessons in
loneliness. Never in my life have
I ever spent so many moments by myself, alone in my head and with my own
thoughts. Except for those truly
rare super-humans—the ones I imagine as the perpetual traveler—for most people
an extended time away from your home country, culture and language strips away
the footings you have built over the last decades of your life, paving the way
for emotions you may never have felt before. The new paved street also makes way for many
positives, but I will get to that.
I have been reflecting on this a
lot in the recent weeks because of my own recent history and the fact that I
have now been away from Elon for more than a year. But also because of an article I read, written by a 2012
Yale Graduate. This girl, Mariana,
wrote for the Yale student newspaper and wrote a special feature discussing the
“opposite of loneliness” she and her fellow graduates felt in their last weeks
at Yale. Mariana failed to find a
word to describe this feeling and the right world fails me as well, but the
meaning and implications are obvious:
It is like being constantly surrounded by a warm nest of soft blankets
in the form of people you know and have shared a small, but deeply valuable,
part of your life with. At college
everywhere you look are people who are all there, working at the university,
for the sole purpose of educating you and your fellow students so you, too, can
taste and experience success. Then
there are your advisers who you build personal relationships with, whom you
show pictures of your adorable triplet cousins to and in front of whom you break
down in tears the day before graduation.
And then there are the students.
I did not know the names of everyone I graduated with, but there was
rarely a walk across campus without seeing someone I knew. Then when I came “home” at the end of
the night, roommates and friends surrounded me. My nest was so warm and snug that there was barely any room
for loneliness.
Leaving Elon was like slowing
taking away the first couple of layers from the nest and then flying to Germany
was like ripping off several more, leaving me more exposed than ever
before. But. I was never without some layers of my
nest. I now believe it was
the firm existence of my nest that gave me the bravery to decide to “just go”
for the year and do something I could not really understand. My nest was built by 22 years of love
and friendship and I knew that one year away—one measly year in hopefully a
long life—would not change anything that I did not want changed.
In her article, Mariana, writes
about her fears and worries about leaving her “opposite of loneliness” at Yale
and having to take away layers just like I had to do this year and just like
every graduate must do.
Tragically, though, Mariana will not experience this exposure, seeing as
she died in a car crash shortly before graduation. As a girl only a few months older than Mariana, a
22-year-old dying strikes a powerful fear in my heart. I know little about Mariana’s death,
but one thing that I have thought about since reading her article is that she
died at one the highest happiness peaks of her life. She will not need to feel the sadness and loneliness that
comes with leaving the college nest.
In one respect, that is an enormous blessing.
But fear is struck in my heart and
my heart breaks for Mariana and her family because after this year I can say it
was not only lessons in loneliness, but rather, lessons learned from
loneliness. Call me crazy, but
loneliness is not a bad thing. I
cannot help but wonder if Mariana would have learned the lessons this next year
as I have learned this past year. Yes,
loneliness brought me to tears and made me question why I wanted to do this
year anyway. So I wanted to learn
German. Well, I thought to myself,
is this really worth it? I made
some wonderful friends fairly early in the year and I always had my PPP net
(which is more valuable than I can express), but there were times when as soon
as I stepped onto that tram to go back to Oberneuland (my neighborhood) and my
host family’s house, the trap seemed to close again.
It was about January when I finally
could not stand it anymore and became so frustrated at what I labeled as lack
of progress. Sitting at the table
in my host family’s kitchen with my mom eating breakfast the day before she
left I broke into tears and could not stop crying for over an hour. It was through that conversation
with my mom I realized I was not the only one who had ever felt that way
before. Being lonely happens. After my mom flew home and I was faced
with the reality that I still had six months in Germany and that it was up to
me to make those months good, I began to realize that maybe I had been focusing
on the wrong things. Sure, I was
lonely, no question. I had much
too much free time on my hands and my social calendar could not hold a flame to
my life at Elon, but I began to realize, that is not necessarily bad. And these feelings were not exclusively
mine! I began to really realize
that what my friends at home had expressed was also loneliness and even though
I already knew and appreciated that, it made me realize that I was not failing
at my year abroad. To fail means
to first have set standards of achievement. I will admit I had a few of those, but in hindsight I was so
foolish to do so. Success is not a
calculable number, not in this scenario.
I was trying to put a quantitative value on something that hardly even
fits into such categories. I
realized, one can’t just do that to oneself! Loneliness is a very normal emotion and if you go through
life expecting never to feel it, then you are going to hit a bottom that is a
lot harder than that moment where you cry to your mom over your bread and
marmalade for an hour.
That is what I have learned this
year. That is what is loneliness
has taught me: You deal with
it. You have those moments where
you want to crawl in bed and fall asleep because then no one will care that
your social calendar has large gaps of unplanned time. Sure you give in sometimes and just go
to sleep, but for me that could only happen so many times before I realized that
I was hiding, trying to find those pieces of my nest that were unreachable,
because they were in the US.
I would not say that I do not have
moments where I am still lonely.
Of course I do. But now I
gained a perspective that only comes with time and honest talks with those you
trust. When I arrived on August 1,
2011 in Frankfurt I had only experienced a little bit of loneliness in my
life. I had no idea what I was
facing, but I will say it again, here I am. I made it through.
I think my biggest tool in fighting loneliness has been the strength to
not give in, the perspective to revaluate and the wear-with-all to just keep
going. Emotions are extremely
strong, but they do not control us.
We have power to affect our own happiness, you just need to figure out
what it is that makes you happy.
These are characteristics are innate
in people; I am not particularly special because I am abroad and have been
thousands of miles away from my family and friends. I mean, heck, I could be a whole lot farther from the US and
in a much tougher country to live in.
These characteristics just need to be found. I sincerely wonder what sort of loneliness I would have felt
this year without making the separation larger and, even more, I wonder how
long it would have taken me to learn these lessons. This is exactly why I keep thinking of Mariana and her
tragically cut-short life.
Twenty-two years is not long enough to learn the lessons that make
people wise. I know now, more than
ever, that I still have much to learn.
I cannot even begin to imagine what I have left to learn. But I genuinely encourage people if
they want to learn something and want to be challenged, go abroad. You might not like the lessons and you
might not like the teaching styles, but through those crazy roller coaster
moments and stomach-flipping bends and curves, you are learning. I promise you, you are learning.
