Well, a semester has come and gone, and I’m glad I can say with full confidence that it has been a good one. I know that reading this you all probably can’t imagine how thrilling the experiences were, how kind the friends I’ve made are, or how delicious the food I ate was. It’s hard to imagine simply through reading someone’s blog, especially when that blog was only ever written during those snippets of free moments during the day — or night– where there’s no other sensible thing to do. So, you’ll just have to trust me on this one when I say it was an unforgettable experience.
Everyone who has gone abroad this semester will be saying the same thing — it was an unforgettable experience, for better or for worse, and they’re glad they went through with it– and it’s for a good reason that we say these things. Each time I’ve studied abroad, I’ve discovered new things about myself, even if those new things take weeks or months to reveal themselves. Studying abroad increases your patience with life in general, and provides you with a greater appreciation for time and distance. It is because of these things that the return trip home is always bittersweet. No matter how difficult or terrible a semester was, or how smooth and wonderfully it went, there is always at least one thing, place, or person that will come up in your thoughts sometimes and remind you that you’ve not only had an experience, but you’ve made it an experience.
I always tell the high school exchange students that I help mentor that going overseas is the easy part in comparison to coming home. Coming home, the experiences that you’ve had will have changed you in ways that are hard to explain, changes that are sometimes only fractionally important enough for you and few others to notice, and learning how to adapt to someplace you thought you already knew often proves a greater challenge than accepting the unknown.
Unfortunately, this process doesn’t stop. Once you leave a place, you will always be faced with this challenge upon your return. I have come home from Japan three times now, I have lived in the most rural of areas, lived in the most populous areas, and seen a lot of what’s in-between, and I still won’t say I know the country because each trip has given me a new understanding of what Japan is. Likewise, each trip to the US has given me a new understanding of what the USA means. Good, bad, or neutral, we’re all at that point in the exchange cycle where it’s important to trust ourselves enough not to judge, but simply observe, and not to fight reverse culture shock (however painful it may be). Culture shock and reverse culture shock, rather than being attacks on our memories, should be viewed as flags, tidbits of information, and reminders of other, more difficult to recall memories.
I said my goodbyes to all of my friends in Japan before leaving. I lost my phone on the bus that I took to the airport, losing with it all of the photos I had taken for the last month. It tore me up and I sat on the plane thinking about what a waste it was, but I’ll still have the memories. More importantly, even without those photos as souvenirs, going home just means that I have to look forward to making new memories. So, for my New Year’s Resolution, I’m going to do just that.
Happy Holidays Everyone