our-ig-reality-blog

[our-ig-reality-blog]

“All the other Erasmus students I’ve met seem like they’re having the time of their life, why aren’t you?” The voice of my roommate startles me from my top bunk where I lay silently crying, or so I thought. I didn’t know how to answer.

Unlike most students, I didn’t have any expectations upon coming to Spain. My only goal was to learn Spanish. When I arrived at my dorm, surrounded by 78 students from Andalusia and one Italian, I should have been overjoyed at the practice opportunity. However, I felt sadder than I had in my entire life. For the first month, I couldn’t communicate with anyone and I had no idea what was going on in any of my classes because I didn’t understand the language. Though I tried to force myself to see everything Sevilla had to offer- art, flamenco, architecture- I still wasn’t happy. The stress was overwhelming, I had few people to talk to in person, and I found myself counting down the days until I could return home which resulted in an inmense feeling of guilt. However, with time, it started getting better. My language skills started improving and I felt more comfortable talking in Spanish. I stopped pre-gaming the daily dinners at the dorm and started hanging out with the Italian girl, who felt the same degree of isolation that I did.

Then my boyfriend of three years cheated on me. I was devastated and spent the entire weekend in bed. In spite, bought a hate-flight to Barcelona. Two weeks later, I spent a day and a half with my ex-boyfriend’s best friend’s ex-girlfriend and her cousin (complicated, I know) in the city. However, after they left, I still had a day and a half left, alone. At first, I relished the time being able to do what I wanted, when I wanted. I went to the Picasso museum and some random cultural history museum which ended up being the coolest museum I’d ever visited, but after a while, being alone in the big city took its toll. I cried the entire 45 minute walk from my hostel to the Sagrada Família, feeling more isolated than I’d felt for the entire exchange so far, which really was saying something. I didn’t know how to talk about it with anyone either. “I’m feeling sad because I’m in Barcelona all alone,” certainly would’ve been up there with the most privileged complaints I’d ever had. So, I kept it to myself, trying to manifest happiness. I wandered around the streets feeling lost, missing home, but still looking for the best shot.

I needed a good picture to show the world I was happy.

[our-ig-reality-blog]

I sat in the Jardín Americana with my feet draped over the edges of the concrete stream below, tears streaming down my face. As I sat, motionless, a short man with a long beard peered over at me over his small fishing rod, plopped into one of the small concrete channels. I wondered if he could possibly be catching anything larger than a minnow in the manmade chambers.

As I sat, I reflected. Physically, I have always loved being alone. I remember being disappointed when my friends asked me over to sleepovers when I was young. Does that mean I’ll have to spend the entire night there? However, despite the physical barriers I put up between myself and those around me, the emotional barriers were a lot harder to handle. I spent weeks wondering if I was the kind of person who could tolerate being alone, emotionally, as my time in Sevilla had forced me to do. The past few weeks had almost killed me and I wondered what kind of person I was if I wasn’t strong by myself. However, I had finally gotten broken down just enough to realize that I needed something, anything, to show me that I could handle the next months. During this time, I began seeking out anything and everything that Sevilla had to offer, looking for proof that I had interests and hobbies or things to make me happy outside the things I had left behind. And I didn’t find anything.

Until this park. Maybe it was a culmination of emotional growth that just so happened to hit me whilst I sat on the man made stream beneath the cactus tree, or maybe it was simply a deep rooted love for cacti. Whatever the reason, I felt okay. I felt my heartbeat increase as I wandered around and felt the same wide-eyed wonder I remembered as a child. I began the beginning stages of realizing that maybe it’s true that I have no interests, but that doesn’t mean that things can’t make me happy. Despite the fact that I knew I was, as the pink flower petals from the tree above floated past my feet in the crisp stream, I didn’t feel alone.

[our-ig-reality-blog]

After four hours squished into the car, mountains of camping gear piled around us, we finally arrived at Grayson Highlands State Park. Circling around the campground, looking for the best plot to spend the next few nights, we finally settled on an isolated but central site plopped on a small hill in the middle of the park. It was perfect, mostly barren except for the sprawl of green brown grass and a small cluster of trees providing the perfect amount of shade, until I realized there was no phone service.

I didn’t say anything, but still I felt disappointed at the inability to stare blankly at my screen all day. Business carried on as usual, assembling tent stakes, cutting watermelon, collecting water, etc. until my mom got sick. She’s always had Achalasia, a disease in which a culmination of stress and eating certain foods can trigger uncontrollable vomiting, and that day her symptoms began unexpectedly. We spent the day at the campsite with her, comforting her, but her symptoms remained overnight. That night, as if the heavens opened up, it rained and rained and rained. We sat awake in the tent for hours, feeling the howl of the wind lift up the empty corners of our temporary home with each coming gust, occasionally jolted by a loud crash of thunder or the sound of my mom excusing herself throughout the night to head into the pouring rain to avoid getting sick inside.

The next day, she still had not gotten better, and my dad proposed the idea of leaving early from our weekend trip. My mom hadn’t been eating and he didn’t want her to become too weak in such an isolated place. However, I too wanted to leave, craving my LED screen like an itch I just couldn’t scratch. I felt lost without it. Clearly I was worried about my mom, but an almost equal worry pulled me towards my phone, constantly disappointed that in every outing to the country store and the camp director, nowhere had any service.

This was over three years ago now, and I still look back with utter disbelief and disgust at my strong desire to leave our trip, not because of my mom’s health but because I missed my phone. Even then, I knew such a feeling was wrong, and hid it carefully. However now, I cannot believe that something so material ever consumed my thoughts like so. With that it becomes clear how the internet allows to to document, potentially accidentally, both our highest highs and lowest lows. I like to think I have grown a lot since this picture was taken. Currently, my phone has been on airplane mode for the past six days and despite it being a mild annoyance when I am lost or walking at night, I have been perfectly fine without it. In the future, I hope to further limit my dependence on material goods and focus on emotional capital through people and experiences. Despite the fact that I know I have not completely made it yet, I think I’m doing pretty well.

[our-ig-reality-blog]

I have lived in the mountains for my entire life. Weekends were always spent hiking the Appalachian Trail and summers were spent fishing in the warm river. Lunches consisting of bread and salami mixed in with a little dirt served on the trail were the norm. To me that was the daily reality. They were quirks of my family that were never appreciated and never desired, only things that simply were.

However, soon after arriving in France for my exchange in high school, I realized my family’s connection to nature was not a universal norm, but something distinct that brought us together. This was something I shared with my host family after a few weeks as they asked what I missed most about home.

“The people... and the mountains,” I gestured around to the flat, dry land surrounding us, showing them photos of the beautiful diving cliffs of Harper’s Ferry.

They laughed and informed me that the Pyrenees were only an hour away by car, that we could make a day-trip sometime. I was overjoyed. I suppose that is to be expected, but still it came as a shock realizing that the thing I missed most aside from relationships with family and friends, wasn’t the taste of a Burger King Iced Coffee or a Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Go Wrap, but instead the fading blue peaks of the Appalachian mountains. This realization changed a lot for me. As I stood beneath the soaring peaks of the rocky cliffs surrounding me, I realized I needed to start appreciating my own mountains more. They certainly didn’t have the same degree of grandeur as the Pyrenees, but they had something different. History.

Following this trip, I started looking forward to my family hikes, disappointed when my parents got home too late to take the dog into Harpers Ferry. I started volunteering in conservation and working as a whitewater raft guide, falling more and more in love with my home everyday.

Nonetheless, I still live in great shame that it took me 16 years to grant my home the respect it deserves. I spent too many years living in a disconnected reality in which I could see the dancing wings of the hummingbirds and hear the sway of the trees in the wind without importance or care. I spent too long observing my surroundings without understanding them. And I spent too long not understanding how lucky am to be able to call the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains my home.

[our-ig-reality-blog]

I sat staring out of the circular window in a small and bumpy plane, my sweaty back pressed against a soft blue seat. My freshly pressed polo shirt reached down to my knees, three sizes too big with Lions Club Rotary Exchange, 2016 embroidered on my breast. I think back to childhood me, skipping on her way to French club after school, saving all her handouts and lessons so that one day, six years later, she’d be ahead of the class, already prepared to learn more. If only she could see me now.

At this point in life, everyone was starting to develop their plans for the future. Erin wanted to be a doctor, Melody a physical therapist. I still didn’t know. I didn’t really know anything or have any dreams, except to learn French. I didn’t even know why I wanted to learn. It had simply just been something ingrained in me since my first day at French Club all those years ago, a desire and passion for something so foreign to me.

This trip was a lot of firsts for me, my first time away from home, my first time flying alone and my first time out of the United States. I had only taken one year of high school French at this point, but I felt confident. Languages were just my thing. I felt a mix of giddy excitement and queezy trepidation as I made my flight from Washington, DC to Paris. The emotions growing by the minute as the plane brought me closer and closer to my final destination. However, this growing bubble of confidence quickly burst as the woman sitting next to me on the tiny plane from Paris to Bordeaux, sneezed.

“Blessez-vous!” I beamed, excited for my first opportunity to speak French.

However, in response, the woman just stared, eyebrows furrowed and lip curled.

“... bleesez-vous?” I tried again in a stronger accent. That was when the reality hit me, my morale lasting only until my first conversation, an inability to say bless you.

“Je suis désolée,” I murmured as I turned back to the window, fighting to keep the tears from falling before I even land. What did I even just say to her? Blesser... blesser... ? Blesser! To injure.

I told that woman to injure herself?

This is going to be a lot harder than I thought... And it was.