qtakesams

[qtakesams]

When Life Goes On, Go with It

Two years ago this month, I moved to Edgewater, Maryland, to complete a summer internship with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. SERC, as we call it, is a branch of the Smithsonian Institution that specializes in climate, coastal, terrestrial, and various other types of sciences. Their campus is an hour east of Washington, D.C. They own hundreds of acres of land, on which they house their laboratories and fields.

It was just after my sophomore year of college ended. As with many underclassmen years, mine was turbulent. I endured a drastic shift in my social circle which had, even if temporarily, left me feeling stranded on a campus I was still learning about. I’d had a rough spring semester, finding a lack of motivation to complete any assignment.

Most undergrads face that year: the one where nothing feels right, and each path feels like a dead-end. I had applied for a SERC internship on a bit of a whim. Entering college, I’d seen myself as a fiction writer and editor, planning to end up in a corporate publishing house. Sophomore had shown me I desired other things, and I applied for SERC’s science writing internship completely unsure if I’d actually like the work. What if I didn’t? What if it felt worse than the previous semester? What would I do if I couldn’t bounce back?

All of this, I decided, would be worth the risk. When I got an email from the internship’s advisor in March, offering me the position, I accepted it. The rest, as some might say, is history.

SERC is a hard place to find until you’ve visited a few times. The brown sign is easily skipped by the eyes. Coming from the west, you approach SERC on the left side of the road. Immediately, you forget that you’re technically in the suburbs, less than thirty miles from the epicenter of political heat in America. After a few turns, you arrive at the gate. When SERC is publicly open, you drive on through. When you’re an intern coming back from the bar at night, you have to swipe your ID card. You drive a few more turns, watching closely for deer, before that final right turn that drops you into the parking lot of the intern dorms and the labs.

I fell in love with SERC within days of my arrival. There were the intimidating factors of the place: fellow interns at Ivy Leagues and respected colleges, scientific labs into which the government itself funded millions, no meal plan, and the stick shift vehicle I would drive all summer. I was terrified when my mom drove away. I explored the floor of my building, admiring the kitchen, perusing the book selection. By eleven, I was in bed. I was tried from traveling, but more so, I didn’t know what to do. I’d briefly interacted with the other intern already on my floor, but I didn’t know him well enough to go say hi. There were four interns moved in below my floor, but I hadn’t seen any of them yet. I suddenly seemed wildly out of my element, though I had felt comfortable at SERC the moment I drove through the gate.

Of course, I grew happier at SERC. The happiest I’d been in years. Within weeks, I made strong friends, adjusted to my job, and began to close my GPS when driving to the store.

My work felt good. The articles I wrote and the media I created reached thousands of people, many of which gave positive comments. My words were reaching people, and the people were responding.

I was raised by a scientist, but more importantly, by well-educated, empathetic people. Loving my planet was part of the gig when I was growing up. In high school, I began to see where my privilege in this education existed. My friends at school didn’t seem to care about the things I’d be taught to care about. Water consumption, electricity, knowing the landscape on which your house is built. I knew important moments in history, and how they affected me. I had early knowledge of politics, to the point where I knew who George Bush was before his presidency ended (when I was 10). Ignorance and empathy tend to go hand-in-hand, mostly because ignorance leads to apathy. We’ve seen this cause-and-effect equation hold catastrophic, deadly consequences in 2020.

When I arrived at SERC, it didn’t slip by me that I suddenly had access to information that most people only dream about. Many of us are ignorant (I remain ignorant to 99.9% of what happens on this Earth) by circumstance, not by choice. Accessibility is one of our biggest problems of a global society attempting to function in a digital, climate change-riddled world. Sixty percent of the globe now has Internet access, but that leaves 3.08 billion people without the knowledge they need to protect themselves from the setbacks of climate change. Most of those people, as it would turn out, are terribly affected most by war, poverty, hunger, climate, social injustice, etc. These things intertwine and cause one another. Not always, but often.

My position at SERC gifted me access to science occurring in real-time. When the Pandemic would hit a year later, it would be surprising but not shocking. On a planet where politics and science are brothers, and the population is soaring too high to properly maintain, containing a spreadable virus is like trying to hold a cup of water in your bare hands. Sooner or later, it’s going to slip between the cracks and go everywhere. If it slips far enough, you’ll never find a towel strong enough to collect it all.

In March of 2020, when I moved home to isolate, I knew the rest of college was trashed. Not my degree, necessarily, but the experience of college. I would lose that experience in its normalcy, and therefore the skills which develop from that normalcy.

I did soon realize, however, that we are not always fortunate enough to do something about mass-casualties or problems. There’s not always an answer, straightforward or not. When there is one, you should grab it with both hands.

That summer of 2020, I decided I wanted to pursue a master’s degree after college. Higher education is not unknown in my family; we boast high degrees from prestigious universities. I am the opposite of a First-Generation student (one of my great-grandparents also had a master’s degree). Graduate school had already been on my mind when I started college, but I didn’t know what for. An MFA in fiction had felt the most logical to my teenage self in 2017, but by 2018, that felt out the window. What I had realized by the summer of 2020 was that, in the midst of the chaos and absurdity, was that I could in fact do something about what was going on. I can’t solve climate change, or house the homeless, or save every polar bear, or even eradicate a virus, but I can help in my own way. On some level, I can do something about the many crises. This, in itself, is “doing something”.

Science writing is a polarizing subject, of this I have been aware my entire life. Unfortunately, we’ve made science political, though politics are generally opinion (with strong empathy) and science is fact. It’s a tough, competitive field, but so is everything else. If you want to “make it” in this world, you have to willingly shed blood, tears, and probably sweat profusely. As I watched the COVID cases skyrocket simultaneously to the people I knew who cared not to stay home, I could tell something was off. People weren’t listening. If they were, it was usually to the ignorant voices on television.

I could feel my cheeks burning as I watched the Johns Hopkins map. It seemed cruel that we, as a society, could do that to ourselves. That we could allow this virus to spread and kill, but also that we had put ourselves in this position. I had already been envisioning myself as a science writer every day since my time at SERC had begun. Finally reckoning with the knowledge that not everybody is a scientist, nor cares to be one, was the icing on the cake. I couldn’t fix it all, but I could offer my help. So, I would.

When I began this blog two years ago, it was solely for abroad purposes. It was a fabulous way to let anybody who cared know what I was experiencing and how I was handling those experiences. Studying abroad, no matter how or where or how long, is difficult. Studying in general, for any length of time on any subject, is mindboggling tedious. I give kudos to my friends and family who have any advanced, foreign, or nontraditional education.

What I discovered after I began writing blog posts and sharing my thoughts is that there’s always more to the story than the words on the page. That’s why I’ve added to this blog in the year and a half since my abroad semester ended; there is always more to tell.

In a few weeks, I begin my master’s degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. My degree is in journalism, with a specialization in Science and Health reporting. I’m nervous to my core, as I am with any new adventure. I just graduated college last weekend, so my emotions are running wild. Yet, I have a feeling I’m about to finally be where I’ve wanted to be for years. I love words. I love messing with them, shaping them, using them to fit whatever project I want. I also love science. I love knowing what is happening around me, and why and how it is. Combining them already feels like a dream come true, so I’m sure the next year will feel magical.

The classes of 2020 and 2021 are probably the most resilient in history. A Pandemic, racial and social injustice, wildfires, remote learning, wifi issues. We’ve seen it all, and it’s made us stronger every day.

I think I’ve worn this blog out for this phase of life. My thoughts on what I’ve talked about here are valid and important, but they don’t exist alone. For somebody who’s pretty much been writing since she could hold a pencil, I hate journaling. I’ve tried so many times, and never succeeded, with the exception of this blog. That said, it gave me an incredibly strong, consistent manner of getting my thoughts on the page, for which I am endlessly grateful. If you’ve kept reading my thoughts and words, you should know I’m endlessly grateful for you, too.

All of this is saying that, whether you’re ready or not, life keeps going. Life can be cruel, it can be challenging, it can be beautiful. No matter what, it keeps going. As my friend Ferris once said, if you don’t stop and look around from time to time, you could miss it. So much changed so drastically in the last year. I’m still processing it. I might always be processing it. Most importantly, I think, is that I’ve learned to flow with it wherever it goes. It’s harder sometimes than other, but the result is usually worth the grind.

You might read my stuff in the Times once day, or (my personal favorite dream) National Geographic. I don’t know honestly know where I’m going, but I’m okay with that because I do know that I’m on my way. I’m still going. When life continues, you should go, too. You never quite know where the climb will lead, but you do know that the view will be great.

[qtakesams]

Some Tips on Travel Blogging (Hint: it’s all worth it)

I started my adventure abroad in Amsterdam a full year and a week ago now. It feels so crazy to think about, especially this year when traveling at all is nearly impossible. The age of social media memories is inviting me every day to look back on canals, Dutch food, and friends that are now old but used to be new.

           There are two main reasons I started this blog before I left. The most important one was to keep everybody interested in my travels updated on where I was. I communicated religiously with about three people from the States (this doesn’t even include my parents, who got texts a few times a week and a Facetime once roughly every three), and hardly at all with anybody else. This really stems from how little time I spent glued to my phone when I was there. If anything, these social media memories consistently remind us that one lifetime is generally not enough. I won’t spend my life in beautiful places replying to texts and looking down.

           The second one, most important to me and second to others, was that I wanted to prove to myself that I have writer’s discipline. My undergraduate writing program is among the best in the nation. We produce alumni who work in top publishing houses, attend top graduate schools, and publish bestsellers. Every workshop class I’ve ever taken (which is most of my classes) has required me to prove to the professor that I can make myself write even when there’s no grade following it.

           Freewriting notebooks, word counts, progress logs, critique letters, etc. Proof that when I graduate, in five or ten years, I’ll still have the motivation to keep writing and edit what I write.

           The summer before I went abroad, it occurred to me that my daily process was terrible. I still don’t set times to write, and I tend to leave things unfinished (quarantine has enabled me to finish or edit twenty-six pieces I’ve started since age 17). I’d already considered creating and maintaining my own travel blog as a method of reflection abroad. I’m a pensive person, and I wanted a platform that would make me slow down and take time to digest my experience. My handwriting is gut-wrenching, so journaling has never been a favorite hobby of mine.

           Travel writing is a dream of mine I may never achieve, but its truthfully always been my top dream job. Using someone else’s money to travel the entire planet and write about it? Yes please.

           My initial goal for this blog was to write a new article once a week. That was back in July of 2019, when I envisioned my semester of doing something jaw-droppingly awesome every day. Of course, I lived in Amsterdam, so pretty much every view or activity in my host city was better than any casual day at home. When I slowly learned how to study abroad like a local and allow myself lazy days, I realized that not every single thing required reflection. Then, I dropped my goal to one article every two weeks. Ultimately, I wrote twenty-six articles, excluding this one and including about five I wrote in reflections phases from the States. Having been abroad for four months and four days, I can pretty much say I hit my quantity goal.

           This blog is the first writing I’ve ever “published” publicly (I have had one of these formally published in a literary magazine) that I re-read often. Writers do not like to re-read their own work. We don’t like to correct ourselves or admit we wrote something beautiful that consequently doesn’t work with our narrative.

           Some of my writing in this blog was written on the fly. Some of it was edited poorly because I did so in a loud café, or on the steps of a museum where my concentration was everywhere but the page. Yet, I highlight some of my greatest moments in these pieces, some of my favorite things and places and people. A year out of a trip that feels like a dream, reading about them is the best.

           So, if you yourself (or somebody you know) has dreams similar to mine, that you want to get paid to write about what you love, I’ve narrowed down some of my best amateur tips. If you to chat in more detail about it (which I’m always down to do), message me!

1.     Do it for yourself, in your own style and pace. This sometimes changes if you end up freelance writing for magazine or getting paid to blog, but you can make it work. My favorite thing about my blog is how raw it is. My abroad experience was not always so fun and fluffy. I spent lots of time feeling scared, nervous, tired, or flat out not feeling well. Be real about it and write about it in the way you want to do so.

2.     Set goals and refine them rather than trash them. If you’re at all like me, you set goals for your writing and then something happens that gets in the way. Sure, you wanted to write 25 pages this week, but then you caught a cold. Instead of choosing to stop writing, refine what you want. Write just 10 pages or write more than that in a different genre. If you can’t write at all, read something inspiring, or watch a movie that follows a similar plot.

3.     Take breaks. This is difficult for any writer, because we tend to practice writing in a way that sets us up for the type of success we want in the future. That is to say, novelists get a book deal and then a deadline by which to write said book. Stephen King, for example, has written thousand-page books in a year. When you’re just beginning, pace yourself and step back when needed. You’re in this for you, so treat yourself with respect.

4.     Speaking of respect, be nice to your words. One of my worst habits as a writer is walking away from something the moment, I draft a sentence I hate. It’s okay to dislike what you wrote on the first try, but that’s what revision is for. Let yourself mess up, and throw a tantrum when needed, always get right back at it.

5.     When you describe an experience, let it be too full of detail. When I started transitioning from fiction to nonfiction, this was the most frequent critique I received because I was so used to writing lengthy sentences. When you write about scientific experiments, for example, you have to write clearly and concisely so your audience can actually understand you. Writing about a travel experience is different. Log the sights, smells, who cracked the joke and who else laughed, what the situation was, where you were, what you were wearing, the outside temperature, the restaurant name, etc. If you just can’t maintain it all, it’s okay. The more you record, however, the warmer the memory will be when you uncover it months or years later.

6.     Not everything has to be recorded. This is the one thing I dislike about being paid to blog, because you’re often doing so to help a company maintain their branding and thus more likely to record what feels “Instagram” worthy and little else. I wrote about some of my fondest memories, but I have loads of others that have stayed between me and my friends. Late nights, awkward moments, fun times I just didn’t want to make public. It’s your adventure. You get to choose how you relive it.

Trust me, you’ll want to, again and again.

[qtakesams]

I Studied Abroad in Fall 2019. Here’s How the Pandemic Changed My Perspective.

It’s funny how time changes things, and how we change time. Some years drag, some fly by. For example, my 2019 was easily the best of my life. Even when I had breakdowns, felt lost, or the path ahead was unclear, it was still exhilarating. I learned much more about myself than I ever previously had and proved to myself I can make friends anywhere I go. When I landed in the Philadelphia airport on December 21st, hugging my parents for the first time in four months, I felt like I was on fire. A fire that could only be put out the more I shoved my passport through immigration.

           Fast forward to August 2020. I’m a few weeks shy of the year anniversary of my getting on my first international flight, feeling scared shitless as the States disappeared out from under me and Europe came into view. It feels like a lifetime ago, and also a few moments. The friends I made that semester only exist in my phone for the time being. I can pull up world cams of the best touristy spots I visited and see them vacant. It’s a weird feeling, and it makes my abroad semester feel even more like a dream that I think it would have. Knowing the States found about the Coronavirus in China the same weekend I flew home makes me feel like my life is dangling by a thread that once nearly snapped.

           It feels impossible to plan my life ahead, which is really not good, since my life is supposed to just be “beginning” next year. Grad School? A real job? A fellowship? Taking the GRE? Will I ever successfully move out of my parents’ house? They’re questions I almost can���t answer right now. As a spontaneous person who likes to feel comfortable, I feel more like I’m hammocking off a cliff.

           A good friend of mine is graduating a semester early so he can take a gap semester before law school. We went abroad the same semester, so we both feel a bit like we unintentionally trashed two years of college. Of course, my abroad semester was the best of college thus far and I wouldn’t change anything about it. Yet, part of me wonders where I’d be if I’d gone for a shorter time, or when my friends went. I’d still be heartbroken about something these days, but for different reasons. If I’d known my sophomore year, before I could drink legally or really settled into my major, that it would be my last full, normal one of my undergrad years, I would’ve soaked it up more. The late-night conversations with friends, parties, rush of syllabus day, getting to the café before it closes. Small things that build the thread of college until you have a quilt. My quilt feels a little incomplete. Learning to appreciate and sew the quilt until it keeps you warm is a hard lesson to learn. One that has left me a bit chilly.

           I can’t look at this pandemic and say it really has negatively affected me. Of course, I struggle a bit. I feel sad and heavy and stuck, watching people become sick or lose their jobs or struggle in ways I have not. As for myself, I’m still being fed. I have a house to live in, where I have my own space. My parents didn’t lose their jobs. Nobody I know has actually become sick or died of COVID (which I find remarkable and am grateful for). I am healthy, strong, and happy when I choose to be. Happiness is a choice, but I know that decision is easier for me than others. Because of this, it feels almost selfish to let myself grieve what I’m missing, or what I know I’ll miss futuristically. Of course, they’re small things: concerts, breakfast dates, travel, parties, movie theaters, lectures, museums, etc. Small things that make up the bulk of our lives.

           Yes, I miss these things deeply. The sensations they bring, from flying through security at big festivals to hearing the music behind my favorite production company’s logo when the theater lights go down, are treasures I find hard to replace. Yet, there’s something fantastic about having to recreate life for yourself, by yourself. If only for a moment.

           Prior to March, I hadn’t lived at home for a lengthy time period since the summer after my freshman year. I realize this was only two years, but so much happened in those two years. Life changed so quickly in so many ways.

           During January and February, when the Coronavirus still felt like it was on the other side of the planet and subsequently somebody else’s problem, I spent an hour a day rifling through the Internet. LinkedIn, New Pages, anywhere offering ideas on what I could do for the summer to avoid going home.

           The previous year, in 2019, I’d spent a total of about 4 ½ weeks living at home. This total is a combination of popping in and out of my house at various moments to move belongings, catch rides to the airport, etc. It was awesome. If anything, it was a taste of what it might feel like to be a travel writer or a journalist in the future. Always on the go, somewhere to go, the rush of a big adventure never far beyond the horizon.

           That is largely what I’d hoped for 2020. Spending as little time at home as possible, bouncing through life for my last year of undergrad until post-diploma opportunities arrived. I don’t say this to mean that I dislike being home. I feel fortunate and grateful that my home environment is one to be more desired rather than avoided. That said, I have few friends in my hometown, there’s almost nothing to do that actually interests me, and I can’t really imagine any twentysomething wanting to return home after they’ve spent years traveling or living elsewhere.

           When the Pandemic became serious and universities sent their students home (for what we now know, if we know anything, is an indefinite time period), I held back tears as we cleaned my room out two months early. March became April, and May, June, July followed seamlessly. The curve fell, rose, fell, straightened, rose. A vicious cycle of uncertainty, heartbreak, agitation. With each minute, plans changed. Tickets refunded, trips cancelled, universities announcing and then refining their strategies as students angerly stand by.

           By May, the year felt trashed. Woe is me, I’m never going anywhere again, life sucks. Over Memorial Day weekend, my sister and her boyfriend came to visit us. At this point, I’d felt pretty sluggish for weeks. I live with two parents who are both professors within academia, so I have both the audience view of how universities handle the Pandemic, and the backstage information. By that weekend, I was more than tired of my inability to escape the educational problems around COVID.

           At one point that Saturday afternoon, I said something pessimistically, and my sister blatantly asked if I’d been this depressing to be around all quarantine. My parents agreed without hesitation.

           Most people I know would agree that I’m a pretty positive, chill person. It takes a lot to make me angry or frustrated, let alone depressed. Watching my entire family agree that I was noticeably off, to the point where it radiated off my person, was striking. If I didn’t start dwelling on something that wasn’t COVID-related, I was going to literally go crazy.

           There’s far more to life than increasing the speed at which it goes by. For years of my life, from academics to dating, I felt like I was constantly racing to catch up with somebody. Sometimes it was my sister, or my best friend, or even the timelines of my family’s lives. I spent middle school waiting for high school, and then waiting for college, and then waiting for life to get interesting. Then life got interesting. The sucky about this then becomes when we begin to fall in love with life, we just want more of it. We try to chase life until there is none left. Some of us succeed, but more frequently, we decide we can’t slow down or be happy until we get to the next best thing. I think this is primarily what robs us of being happy, and feeling like we can, in fact, slow down and find joy.

           After that long May weekend, I decided I needed to slow down. I needed to start digesting my abroad trip, my 2019 internship, and ultimately focus more on my daily life than letting myself scratch until more adventure soothed the itch.

           I’ve been walking my family’s new puppy through our small town every night, but instead of looking at my phone while I do it, I pay attention to my surroundings. I watch the sky, observing which direction the clouds move and how quickly. I listen to the birds and let myself feel the weight of my body on the pavement rather than running across town just to get home.

           I’ve gone back and re-read books I flew through in college or high school for the sake of assignments, and instead highlight what is interesting. I’ve gone over the “misc.” folder on my laptop, which is full of stories and poems and blog pieces I started once and fell out of touch with. I’ve finished some, edited others, logged my progress.

           I’ve flicked through the various streaming services to which I have access. Months ago, I decided that I’d use Friday and Saturday nights to watch classic movies I think I should watch before I turn thirty. Jaws, Animal House, The Birds, Blazing Saddles. The movies my parents quote constantly, that made huge cultural impacts. I watch them with a beer in hand, or popcorn, without holding my phone. The way movies are supposed to be enjoyed. I’m about to sound very “Gen Z”, but the movie experience is much better when you put your mind to the screen.

           I’ve worked on my abroad journal, reminiscing on a semester well spent and trying to piece together how much has happened and where it’ll lead. I’ve managed to catch up with old friends and do some things I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

           When we start seeking adventure, going out of our way to find it like life depends on it, we begin convincing ourselves that we can never slow down. You can’t go back to get something if you have little daylight to get where you need to go.

           When we slow down, we see clearer than we do when we run.

           I’m an inspiration, adrenaline seeker. I love when my heart is racing. I love when I see artwork or have an in-person conversation with friends over dinner and the conversation strikes me.

           What I’ve realized, months into quarantine, is that I don’t exactly need to be traveling, or even experiencing significant things, to feel inspired. Perhaps we as humans are naturally curious because finding or hearing adrenaline-inducing things is the best, easiest gateway to inspiration. But we don’t need to continuously be searching for it. It comes when it wants.

           I’ve grown to really love when something goes wrong during planned itinerary. Caught in rain without a jacket, running for a flight you’ll barely catch, eating cheese and crackers because you’re out of propane to grill dinner. I’ve done them all. In the moment, they’re not fun. They’re intimidating, uncomfortable, even a little mind-numbing. But they happen. And when you’ve caught the flight, dry out your clothes, or finally eat a well-balanced meal, the worry you once had feels like taboo.

           Thus, it’s occurred to me that, yes, COVID sucks. Quarantine is a drag. Death is misery. Changed plans are brutal. Frustration is misery.

           But it happens. One day, I’ll hug my friends again. I’ll catch a flight, buy concert tickets, celebrate a graduation with a real ceremony, and go get ice cream without a mask. And when I do that, it’ll feel real damn good.

           A Pandemic doesn’t mean life isn’t good. It’s a difficult roadblock to move. It is scary and upsetting. It teaches us to dig deeper for the good and not let that good go. It shows us where we need to improve. It tells us we can do better, and we will. Life is still good. Travel and adventure are epic, but so are lazy days and calendars.

           We will care for each other. We will slow down. We will appreciate and work together. Then, one day, when we are together again, it will be sweet like nectar.

[qtakesams]

Back Home, Now What?

It’s stupidly hard for me to comprehend that a month ago, I was wandering the streets of Lisbon, and today I’m sitting at the kitchen counter with my parents. It’s especially been weird to see posts from my friends still in Europe or the national friends I made abroad. The people I was seeing daily for over four months, who now only exist on my cell phone screen.

           The above paragraph is in italics because it was the original introduction I wrote to this post back in January. I meant to post it then, but life got in the way and then college got back in the way. I’ve been back to campus now for longer than I was home for break. So, bear with me as I take you on a journey through a post that spans the course of nearly two months and includes some of the most growth I’ve ever had in my life. Beginning with day one of life in the United States…

           Mainly, the suckiest thing I’ve discovered about going abroad in the fall is the timing of your arrival home.

           Most institutions of higher education in the States end their fall semester in early to mid-December and don’t return to campus until almost the end of January. Winter break is roughly 4-6 weeks long, depending on where you go and when your finals end. Generally, this break is needed. No matter how much you love college, it’s always nice to get a breather from cafeteria dinners, early classes, and the loud students in your dormitory. I suppose I should say, however: it’s nice for two weeks and then you cannot wait to get the hell out of your house.

           My abroad program didn’t end officially until the day I flew home, December 21st. That meant, of course, I was getting home the week of Christmas.

           Fortunately, I wasn’t nearly as jetlagged coming back home as I was when I arrived in Amsterdam. Between sleep deprivation and jetlag, it took a good week for me to adjust to my surroundings and my sleep schedule. On top of that, I admittedly spent a huge portion of my time in the first week partying harder than I really ever had before and was home just before dawn for four nights in a row. The air felt different, the food was new, and I had never walked into a restaurant and been spoken to in Dutch before. It was a lot of adjusting to make in a week, and when I was at my house, I was napping or watching something American on Netflix to remind myself just what the hell I was doing.

           Coming home was thankfully far less exhausting, but it had its moments. My flight home was a connection flight; I flew out of Amsterdam at roughly nine in the morning Dutch time, endured a three-hour connection in Ireland, and flew out of Dublin in the early afternoon.

           I left Amsterdam at six in the morning and didn’t go to bed in the States until it was nearly 5 am my personal time. The next day.

           Almost instantaneously, I was thrust into a week of family-oriented activities. On some level, this was a bit of a blessing. Time planned (not by even by me personally) to see everyone who would want to see me in one week. Unfortunately, I might say, it did mean that I was on autopilot, completely unaware of what day it was or having an idea of how I was supposed to return to my “old life”. I know four months seems like it’s barely a thing, but a huge amount of stuff happened in those four months. I had had just enough time to build a new life in a new place with new people, which was very much needed. By the time I came home, I felt like I’d been living in Amsterdam for my entire life. It was hard to come back to my old one, where everything had been moving forward without me.

           Admittedly, I am not a fan of going home, and I haven’t been since I started college. It’s not quite that I don’t like my hometown; I love my house, the area I grew up in, and my close friends. I have, however, grown a lot since I lived in my town full time. Returning home feels like running into that kid—high school Quinn. I don’t like that kid.

           This winter break felt different. For starters, I was only home about three weeks. One of which was the craze of the holiday season. Truthfully, I only felt like I had two weeks to hang out and do nothing.

           I don’t have many close friends from my area anymore, about three to four. My general friend group is much bigger than that but consists of mostly peers further on the east coast, European friends, and internship friends scattered around the country. Being home is a nice period of relaxing and not feeling like I have to being going out daily to be living my college experience to the fullest. This break almost didn’t feel like enough time to hermit.

           Perhaps the biggest reason the break felt strange was because, in my heart, I knew it was the last time I’d spend time with my dog.

           My parents had told me about my dog’s cancer diagnosis when I was a little under my halfway point of abroad. I spent a lot of the remaining time in Amsterdam lying awake in anxiety that I wouldn’t see my dog again. I didn’t feel like I had sufficiently said goodbye to her. I didn’t like that I had potentially taken her on a final hike without knowing it.

           Thus, my winter break was buoyed by squeezing time with friends in, hiking as often with my dog as I could, and prepping my resume for another semester of applying to internships.

           I didn’t feel much culture shock in the time I was home. But when I returned to campus, reverse culture shock hit me harder than the puberty train. For those who know me now but did not know me when I was ten, the puberty train smacked me hard.

           I had to be back at school for residence life training, so I was back on campus before a lot of my friends. As my parents moved me back, made my bed, and took me to Walmart, I had the feeling in the pit of my stomach that that drop-off would be the last time I would see my dog.

           The three days of training were exhausting. I came back to my room every night post-dinner and stared at my blank ceiling for an hour just to regain consciousness. I wish I was being overly dramatic.

           Less than a full week after my parents moved me in, they called me late one night after I had gotten back from the gym to tell me they had put our dog down that day. I momentarily became emotional over the phone, but then stopped myself. We chatted for another few minutes, and then the moment I hung up the phone, I sobbed.

           The rest of the week became an ultimate blur of new classes, what felt like a new campus, and the occasionally waterworks over the loss of my fluffy best friend.

           Later that same week, I attended an MLK teach-in regarding tips and advice on student activism. The lecture was awesome and given by one of my favorite professors in my department. Something, though, was off about it.

           By nature, I am a very introverted human. If you take me to a dance, sporting event, family gathering, or virtually any event where I have to be social and chatty for longer than a few hours, you’ll notice how tired I become. When I am overly exhausted from socializing, I call it being in “overdrive”; I get restless, sometimes slur my words, or simply shut down. It’s a little like being drunk, but not in the good way. When I was really little, I would noticeably, yet often subconsciously, flap my arms in public if I was too exhausted from socializing.

           This all said, I have never been a socially anxious person. I’ve been all forms of anxious, but never socially.

           Return to this lecture. They held their teach-in schedule in Stretansky Hall, the auditorium in the music building where music majors roam. I walked there from the library, after a solid 2-3 hours of sitting in a study room alone. I ventured outside, walked over to Cunningham, and entered the building.

           Almost as soon as I was inside, where I saw people I knew and received greetings, I felt like I was beginning to panic. I nearly ran through the hallways to get to the auditorium, where I had to stand outside with a small crowd before the doors opened. When we walked in, I found a middle seat and sat alone. I have no issue with sitting alone. In fact, sometimes I prefer it over sitting next to another person who will talk to me.

           I sat in my seat, silently panicking.

           I have a few other “ticks” I do when I’m socially beat: grind my teeth, tap my foot, pick at my cuticles, bit my lower lip, sometimes slightly rock back and forth. I was sitting in this chair, in an auditorium that wasn’t even full, doing almost every tick at once.

           Perhaps the weirdest part, was that I didn’t really know why I was that nervous. My heart wasn’t racing, I wasn’t telling myself to be nervous. I just was.

           It made me nervous to be nervous. I’ve only had, of my own recollection, one panic attack in my entire life. It was sometime, I think, in early high school, when nobody my age had their driver’s license. We were on the bus in the afternoon when our area was issued a tornado warning. As a preteen, I had a life-altering problem with storm anxiety.

           I remember sitting on the bus, maybe five minutes from my house, hyperventilating. I didn’t get particularly showy about how much I was panicking, but I knew I was having a panic attack.

           I didn’t have an actual panic attack sitting in the audience of this lecture, but I knew if I didn’t relax, one was probably coming.

           After a few minutes, I did calm down. The presentation started, the room went quiet, and I chilled out.

           A few hours later, I texted a few of my close friends about this. I hadn’t had any other serious anxiety issues that week, but I had had difficulty entering the café when it was busy or being comfortable with sitting by myself in a crowded room.

           The friends I told are all very good friends of mine; two attend my school but are abroad this semester, three live far away at other universities, and one lives in Europe. For the most part, none of them know one another. They know of each other’s existence in my life, but they’ve never met. Their commonality is that they all love me dearly.

           I told them about this incident, how it almost felt like an out-of-body experience. They all, independently of one another, agreed that social anxiety was unlike me. They know I am introverted, but they all agree it’s really not like me to feel anxious in crowds. I like lectures, concerts, cities, public transportation, and running at the gym. To walk into a place where there’s other people and be nervous for that reason alone, is nothing like me.

           The following weekend, one of these humans, amongst my favorite of all time, came up to visit me. We got food, went ice skating, got drunk, and laughed really hard. After she left, later that day, we joked about our moms asking about our friends. She asked if I was still feeling anxious and if I was going to the counseling center. I told her maybe, and she Venmoed me $20 so I could go buy a stress-relieving candle.

           Another of my friends, who lives far away and whom I haven’t seen for several months, asked if I was going to therapy that week. When I gave him the same “maybe”, he reminded me that the previous week, I said I would. I told him I’d go Thursday if I wasn’t feeling any better, and he said he was not only holding me to it but would drive to my school and take me there himself if I refused. My friends from abroad sent me hearts over text and told me I could call them if I needed some help.

           One, this pretty much proved to me that after two decades of struggling to find them, I’ve finally got the good friends I’ve always wanted. Second, part of me naively assumed when I returned from being abroad, I wouldn’t have any issues doing so.

           I’m described, both by others and by me, as a very chill human being. It takes a lot to stress me out, and even more to make myself tell people how I feel. Feeling an emotion so closely that I had to tell people about it in order to make the guilt go away was rare. Really rare, and really undesirable.

           Attention-seeking and gaining sympathy is not why I want to write a post that connects so deeply to my inner core. I write this post because reverse culture shock and readjustment are things that happen to most college students, and we need to do more for said students than just throw them back on campus and put syllabi in front of them.

           At the beginning of week 5 of this semester, I feel a lot more like my old self. I’ve reached out to my friends, left my room for several hours at a time, and gotten back to my usual college routine.

           I talked and thought about this a lot when I was physically abroad, but I find it even more concerning now that I’m home. Studying abroad is hard. Really, really hard.

           My university’s study abroad requirement is amazing. It’s incredible to attend such a small university in the middle of Pennsylvania and produce hundreds of graduates a year who had some sort of eye-opening abroad experience at some point in their education. I was against studying abroad in high school but doing it in college made me seriously regret my prior decision.

           A lot of the post-abroad process you endure when you return to campus deals with marketing yourself. You learned valuable skills in between side trips and partying three times a week, right? Why don’t you come up with a way to turn that into something employable on your resume?

           There’s nothing wrong with a program that focuses on that particular part of post-abroad. The job market is more global now than it was when I was a toddler or even in high school. Nothing is wrong with letting an employer know that you have the skillset to deal with foreign affairs or communicate cross-culturally.

           What I do critique about the program, and a lot of other students do, is the overlooking of students who return to campus and just don’t feel right. If I don’t feel like myself or I don’t like returning to my old life, I won’t want to market that to anybody. Including myself.

           My transition back to school was pretty quick but also pretty painful. Taking everything I’ve learned about myself in a different country and bringing it back to campus with me was a heavier load than I imagined.

           Normalizing your lifestyle again and convincing yourself that you’re okay is one thing. Accepting your struggle and refusing to let it slow you down is another. Sometimes, I feel like I have rocks tied to my shoes. But, if you walk far enough, eventually those rocks erode down to pebbles, and you get to start running.

[qtakesams]

Happy 4 Months, Amsterdam

How’sthisfor a post I cannot believe I’m actually writing already? As I sit at a desk at the UvA campus for probably the final time, writing my final paper, it’s occurring to me I have three (3) days left in Amsterdam. It feels like the semester flew by, but also that it took forever.

Obviously, this is not meant to be negative. Some parts of abroad are more fun than others. It’s a fact. For whatever reason, I spent a fair amount of October being homesick. As much as culture shock and abroad homesickness come in waves, it’s hard to really know why you feel the way you do when you’re not happy abroad. I wasn’t necessarily “unhappy” with being abroad in October, but it was the first month I felt like I missed a lot. My best friend turned 21 in the first week of October, my mom had a birthday in the last week, and I missed both. Events on my home campus started happening frequently and all I could do was watch the livestream of the event on Facebook. As proud as I am of myself for surviving and making my own way in a foreign city every day for four whole months and a few days, some of me is a little ready to go home.

With that Amsterdam, I think we should see other people. Of course, I don’t want to divorce since I’ll definitely being coming back to you soon, but we should take a break.

I know it’s kind of shitty to dump somebody on your anniversary, even though I’ve never actually done that, but some things just work out that way.

You’re really beautiful, honestly you are. When it gets dark outside and the lights in the canal houses come on and bounce off the water, you take my breath away. When I am biking in the wrong place and I get the bell from a fellow biker, you’re still delightful.

When I was in Lisbon last week, I had a long conversation with my travel buddy about how privileged we are. How we got to travel an entire continent for a semester and fly home to you every Sunday night. I get to live in the city center with a canal outside my window. I went from being barely average in my high school class to studying abroad at one of the most prestigious universities in Europe. You’ve given me a lot to be grateful for, Amsterdam, a lot I’m never going to forget.

The next three days will be, admittedly, a little rough. Four months seems like no time at all, but it was enough to make a new life and adjust to it, too. I have a number of places and people who need goodbyes from me.

On some level, it’s really depressing knowing that I have to leave this new life I’ve been living. As much as I want to come back later, I know it won’t be the same as it is now.

On another level, a better level, it fills my heart to the brim that something so good has been created, so good I don’t want to leave it behind. It’s the third time this year I’ve built a new life so good I didn’t want to leave. This is reason is specifically the one why I’m considering 2019 the best year of the decade, and potentially even my life.

I have no idea if I’ve really changed that much, I’ll let my family decide that when I see them this weekend.

Even if I haven’t, though, I couldn’t be more grateful to have had an experience so good I don’t want to leave.

Break-ups are tough, Amsterdam, but they don’t have to be permanent. There’s one more sappy blog post coming this weekend, but thank you for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve given me. I cannot fathom how our time together went by so quickly, but I enjoyed every moment thoroughly.

I’ll have my stuff moved out this Saturday morning.

[qtakesams]

Perspectives: How the Harvey Weinstein Investigation Changed Us (Trigger Warning: Mention of Sexual Abuse)

Part One: November 8th, 2019

           On October 5th, 2017, I woke up around 8 am to get ready for class and stop at the café in the library for a tea beforehand. Three hours away, in the office of reporting for The New York Times in Manhattan, two women hit the “publish” button on an article explaining the investigation behind dozens of women’s’ sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein.

           At the time, I was just over half a month into my undergraduate career. I was a bright-eyed freshman learning the ropes of the campus cafeteria and asking my professors for help on assignments I didn’t understand. I was 19 years old.

           I have very clear recollection of arriving to class, receiving a mobile CNN notification of the publishing of an article accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault against various women, and ignoring the alert. Two years later, I regret that ignorance with a passion.

           In hindsight, this article wasn’t something that should have caught my eye and stopped me in my tracks. After all, just two years previously, a Stanford swimmer only three years my senior had made international news after raping a young woman behind a dumpster on the university campus. Brock Turner had received, in the large scheme of things, almost no true consequences. Text posts had spread like butter across social media that claimed there were people who had milk in their fridge longer than Turner had been in jail. They were right.

           Shows like Sex and the City, which show women finally in prominent positions at the office, discussing sex freely, and challenging men had hit the air within my own lifetime.

           Middle-aged men of power and money abusing women and receiving no punishment was normal to me, my mother, her mother, and her mother. I wasn’t fazed by news that a man of power had sexually assaulted other women because it wasn’t “news”. It was daily life.

           I vaguely knew who Harvey Weinstein was at that point. I knew he was a major film producer and been behind many of my favorites. I knew he was an extraordinarily wealthy man somewhere in his sixties. Other than that, I knew next to nothing about him. I especially didn’t know he had a serious--and seriously long—history of abusing the women with whom he worked. Although in all fairness, I was aware that a number of famous women had had major kickstarts to their careers directly from him. I was young, but in my heart, I knew that when a person, a man, in Hollywood had a reputation for boosting women’s careers, it was generally through sexual implications of some kind.

           A few days after the initial article was published, I realized just how many other places were reporting about this article. It was no longer just CNN; it was also NPR, the BBC, local papers, and a multitude of other news outlets I frequented. It was discussed on Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live, and Trevor Noah, all shows and comedians to which I gave a lot of my attention. After a little bit, I could only imagine how a regular Timesarticle reporting yet more sexual assault allegations could be onto something major.

           I finally went online, pulled the now week-old article from the website, and read it. I read it once, twice, then three times. Each time a little slower. Each time, trying to grasp what I was reading.

           There were quotes from celebrities I knew well, beautiful sentences explaining the horrible actions of a man who had produced a number of great films. Over the course of the next few weeks, more and more women admitted to the press that they had also experienced sexual harassment or assault by Weinstein or others. This was followed by my own friends and family texting me, calling me, informing me that they’d had similar experiences as teenagers or adults. I saw “#metoo” updated on social media statuses.

           I found this new movement extremely interesting. I had never before quite seen something like it happen, where something as simple as a newspaper article had caused national uproar. I loved it. I appreciated it. I felt it.

           All I wanted to know, then, was who the women behind those powerful words were.

           My opportunity for that came almost exactly two years later, as a stronger, more intelligent student studying abroad in Amsterdam.

Part Two: December 3rd, 2019

           Yesterday, I spent my evening surrounded by strong women. Immediately after my last Dutch class of the semester, I journeyed into Amsterdam West, the “touristy” and seemingly better part of the city. I met with two other friends at one of their apartments, where we completed an assignment for a class.

           The class was Screen Cultures, one in which I’ve spent the semester analyzing films and how they affect us. The assignment was to make a podcast during which you freely discuss a show or film of your choice and relate it back to the class.

           The three of us, all young women, chose a specific episode of Netflix original The Good Place. This show, starring Kristin Bell, revolves around a fictional version of Heaven, and sees characters having to rebuild their lives after death. The episode we focused on was positioned on the character of Brent, a stereotypical white man whose main character trait is his inability to notice that he is the show’s patriarchy.

           As we sat around a table and made ourselves talk about the episode for 30 minutes, we all delved into other films and shows we’ve seen this semester, and almost every single time we related it back to the main male characters. The ones built to save the female, create the female, or take power from the female. How the films portray women as objects, intentionally putting them in red dresses with slits down the side or zooming in on their bodies.

           From there, the three of us got dinner and then went to the main event of the night: She Said, an Evening with Megan Twohey.

           We’d been informed of this event back in October, when the activities director had announced they had secured ten tickets to a lecture given by Megan Twohey, one of the women who wrote the Harvey Weinstein article in 2017.

           I was immediately interested, so intrigued that when I got the invite on my phone while buying contact solution, I momentarily left the store to gain signal for a reply.

           The lecture started with the director of the institute giving an introduction to Twohey and her work. This was followed by a moderation I actually felt was a little weak, with Twohey explaining how they did the investigation and reacted to the public’s reaction.

           They did a Q & A, during which some of the students with which I attended the talk asked questions about how to survive this period as a twenty-something. Later, I stumbled through a small “thank-you” as Twohey signed my book.

           Twohey talked about what happened when Weinstein himself barged into the New York Times office in 2017, yielding three female lawyers and carrying folders full of testimony that women who had come forward were lying. Twohey explained that she had corralled them into a glass-wall conference room in the center of the office and never broke eye contact with Weinstein as he called her a liar and a pig and unqualified to do her job.

           Within the next week, she saw him fired from his own company, his wife file for divorce, and millions of women call her personal cell phone to tell their own sexual assault story.

           A year later, she interviewed Christine Blasey Ford, a Palo Alto University professor, who had just testified against Brett Kavanaugh for a past of sexual abuse.

           Twohey had even, a few years prior to 2017, broken the first stories of Donald Trump’s history of sexual abuse to women. A few months later, she broke the first stories of his presidential win.

           In the audience of this woman’s lecture, whom we should consider a hero, a young woman of color stood up to ask a question at the microphone. She said she had to be careful with her wording as the filmed event meant she was on record. The woman explained that she was in the process of obtaining a doctorate degree, but that her work on a previous degree had been hindered when she came forward admitting her own sexual assault from a man in the department. Her question was how to move the “me, too” movement ahead to include non-white, lower socio-economic status women.

           Words couldn’t describe the evening it was, nor what it felt like to be in the presence of a woman who altered the course of history.

           As the 2010s come to an end, I think consciously about how this decade will be remembered. It seems when we consider the decade as a whole, we only think about memes, technology, and politics. We never think of how bizarre the 2010s section of history will turn out to be.

           When Twohey took the stage, she started out by talking about the person in her life to whom she’s closest, who doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment or Harvey Weinstein. She was referencing her daughter, who was ten months old when the 2017 article. She herself questioned how this moment in history will be taught in ten, twenty, or fifty years. I couldn’t tell if she was considering that this was history made by her.

           When I had my book signed, I told her she was badass ad I wanted to do what she did. She smiled, looked at me, and told me I was also badass. We wished each other luck.

[qtakesams]

It’s December, Charlie Brown!

It’s funny to write this sitting in the library at UvA eating lunch, because I know it’s the last time, I’ll ever do this on a Monday routine.

           This is a habit I started during my senior year of high school: the act of saying “last” to absolutely everything, from my cross country meets to the final time I hit the snooze button on my morning alarm. It’s kind of a fun thing to do when you’re almost done with something you didn’t like from the start (another example would be my summer 2017 deli job).

           This habit is now, sitting here in central Amsterdam, something which I’m trying desperately to rid myself.

           Yesterday was the first day of December, otherwise known as the month, I have to do the horrid thing and leave Amsterdam. It was a nice Sunday, my host family celebrated Sinterklaas a few days early so it could be done on a weekend with their family.

           My host mom’s parents, brother, and my “host cousins” came over for a few hours for presents and dinner. It was a very heartwarming experience, especially given the number of presents I got from “Sinterklaas”. It was also to spend time around a family event, since last week was Thanksgiving and it ended up being a really difficult holiday without my family around.

           Suddenly, I’m down to less than 20 days left in Amsterdam, which REALLY does not feel real. Twenty days left of canals, Europe, and a few other things I’ll leave out but those who know me well could guess.

           T-20 days means that I’m in the awkward part of being abroad, where I can’t wait to be home and finally re-acknowledge that I am in fact American, but I simultaneously hold onto a love for my host city.

           I don’t think this will be the last time I meet Amsterdam. It’s an expensive city and far away, but now I know how to navigate my way around. I know where I could live, work, and go permanently. It’s a crazy thought, but I could see myself in Amsterdam long term in the next few years.

           Yet, even with knowledge of returning to Amsterdam in the distant future, I know I’d still be ridiculously sad about leaving. If I returned in the future, my host family might not live in the same house. The friends I’ve made here, who are half the reason I’ll miss the city so much, might not be here. If I ever came back, nothing but the city itself would be the same. There’s something to be said for missing a place so badly because you know the events will never happen the same way again. You’ll never again be the person you were when you first lived through something.

           Then again, life moves on and so do you. When I get sad about leaving Amsterdam, which at this point is every ten minutes, I consider how much fun I had this year that I didn’t even expect this time a year ago.

           In December 2018, I didn’t know I was going to Amsterdam yet. I didn’t know I was going to spend my summer in Maryland hanging out with the coolest bunch of nerds I’ve ever met. In hindsight, I didn’t know how cool I was or how much fun I could have if I stepped out of my comfort zone.

           I’m approaching the end of this decade feeling tired, but for good reasons. After eight years living in the shelter of either my hometown or my college life, I stepped outside my zone of comfort for almost nine months and my entire life changed.

           I’m absolutely exhausted, but only because I had that much fun and learned that much about myself and the world.

           When I go home, I know there’s going to be a fair amount of change in my life and some big ones upcoming. Both at home, and at school.

           The next 18 days are going to fly, but they’ll also be busy as hell and too much fun for me to contain.

           If 2019 has taught me anything (which, it’s taught me a lot), it’s that I’m always down for fun and adventure.

           And going home is going to be amongst the best adventures.

[qtakesams]

Happy Thanksgiving from Amsterdam

The moment I decided to study abroad in the fall semester, I started dreading one thing: being absent from home at Thanksgiving. It was heavy on my mind all summer, and as the fall rolled forward, the more anxious about being away I became.

            I’m sure it something that makes every abroad student feel frustrated about during the late fall; you’re so close to finally being home for the holidays and being with your family like you should be, but somehow you also want to enjoy being away while you can. Thanksgiving is difficult on my end for this reason, but also more personal reasons.

           Next year is my last holiday season in college. It’s my last one being as close to a “kid” during the holidays as I ever will be. And this holiday season is the last one of this decade; ten years that were happy when they were happy and brutal when they were brutal.

           On the day before Thanksgiving in 2008, the grandfather with whom I’d been living for most of my life died. The first few years after, Thanksgiving felt like hell. It took me years to get over the grief and PTSD that night gave me. Although I’ve been “back to normal” for a good 4-5 years now, Thanksgiving feels like it’s the one consistent reminder of what I had to undergo as a young teenager to move on with my life.

           Usually, I’m surrounded by my family on Thanksgiving, who went through the same post-2008 issues as I did and had my back through it all. This year, of course by my own choice, I don’t have them on this holiday. For the first time in eleven years, I’m on my own to get through this holiday.

           To get through it in the smoothest way possible, I’ve decided that this year, for the first time in a decade, I’m not going to spend the day dreading life. Instead, I’m actually going to be thankful, and be excited for a new decade in a few weeks.

So here’s what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving:

My parents. This is kind of a cliché, of course, but there’s a reason for that. Thank you to my parents for raising me right and giving me the option to have as big of a year of adventure as I have this 2019. Money is one thing, but letting your kid (your favorite one, for that matter), out of your sight for a full four months probably wasn’t easy. But, you did it anyway, and I’m eternally grateful for that. Thanks for having my back!

The rest of my family with a specific aim at my grandmother and sister. Thanks for showing me how to be tough, enduring, and cook way more than needed. Very important skills!

All the friends in my life. Naturally, a lot of people have left my life in the last few years, but awesome ones have entered. Especially the past year. Thanks for keeping my quirky self around, and also having my back. There’s too many of you to name, but you definitely know who you are <3.

Freddie Mercury. A weird one, but Freddie taught me how to be myself and Queen is my all-time favorite band. He deserves a shout-out.

Susky, SERC, Amsterdam, and the Badlands. All the places I call home, and at which I feel the most comfortable. I’m so happy they exist, and that I get to live there or visit frequently.

My sappy post is now completed. Wishing everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving from Amsterdam.

[qtakesams]

Perspectives: When the Refugee is Your Friend

A few weeks ago, I visited Luxembourg for an overnight trip. As mentioned in a previous post, it was a place I’ve been wanting to visit for a few years now, and I made another group of really good friends while I was there.

           Generally, I’ve adjusted to the way I introduce myself to new people who come from different countries: state your name, at which university in Amsterdam you’re on exchange, and country from which you hail. If the person has been to the States, you say your state, and if they know the coast, you can say the closest major city.

           When you say you’re from the United States, it’s like a curtain of tension closes on the conversation.

           Most of the students I’ve met here are in their early twenties like me. Some are a little older and some a little younger, but we mostly fall under 19-24 years old. In general, we’ve all been coming of age and entering “the real world” while America has been under the guidance of Donald Trump. I know I get political on this blog often, but it’s almost unavoidable to view your country from a new perspective after you leave for a long time.

           I’ve met numbers of people from all over the world. Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and Australia. I think the only continent I don’t have a friend on now is Antarctica.

           These friends of mine hail from too many backgrounds to appropriately describe. They are the children of doctors, teachers, factory workers, and homemakers. They have lived through wars, poverty, and extreme wealth. They are black, Asian, Muslim, LGBTQ+, school shooting and cancer survivors, and victims of sexual assaults. Yes, the dozens of friends I’ve met and made are college students and have endured all of this. Never wonder why people as young as Greta Thunberg are already fed up with their governments and elders.

           They’re young people; they are people the president of the United States has openly insulted and damaged. Admitting to these friends that I am from the country which elected Donald Trump as President doesn’t come off well.

           On this specific Luxembourg trip, I meet a girl who will remain unnamed. She’s a member of the group of people I befriend and has a sleek Bohemian style I envy. When we introduce ourselves to one another, I ask her where she’s from and she says the name of a Middle Eastern country so fast I almost don’t hear what she said.

           “But,” she continues with a hint of emotion I can’t pinpoint, “I live and study in Germany”.

           I just nod, commenting I’d like to visit Berlin one day.

           She asks where I’m from. I say the United States and add “unfortunately” to the end of my sentence like muscle memory. In my head, I except her to react the way everybody else does when you insult the United States: nervous laughter and agreement because we both know why.

           She gives me a funny look at the word “unfortunately”. Not anger or sadness or annoyance. Pure confusion.

           “Why do you say that is unfortunate? I’m a refugee”.

           The comment isn’t rude, nor is it frustrated or anything similar. I stop in my tracks, because I don’t know what to say that will improve what I’ve just said. I gently say something about gun control, she nods her head in agreement, and the conversation moves on.

           Running for presidential office in the United States is a man named Pete Buttigieg. He’s gay, a war veteran, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s 37 years old. He was born 16 years before me. He’s of the older collection of the generation of millennials. In the late spring, when I found out Buttigieg was running for President, I had no idea who he was. What was immediately interesting to me, however, was that unlike every other candidate, he wasn’t old enough to be my grandparent. In June, when I watched the first Democratic debates, I was watching a stage full of women for the first time. Alongside that, I was watching Pete Buttigieg, a person actually young enough to understand my generation on a personal level.

           There’s one particular thing that continuously drives me nuts regarding the current state of politics around the world: generally, governments are ruled by people who really are too old to be in charge of the lives of so many young people. I can say the same thing about the current presidential candidates. There are ones I like enough, ones for whom I’m rooting, and ones I really don’t like. All of them, except for Pete Buttigieg, are old enough to be my grandparents.

           I bring age and Pete Buttigieg into this, because it’s high time we acknowledge that there are children living through the issues our leaders leave in the dust. New rising issues which older politicians cannot handle because they cannot relate to them.

           It’s a long road ahead, but I’ve met enough young people defeating their world struggles this semester that I have a little more faith in my culture.

[qtakesams]

Happy Three Months, Amsterdam!

I was traveling to Paris the day of our two-month anniversary, and I was in Prague on our third. Sorry if you feel cheated on Amsterdam, I still love you!

           Now that I have apologized for my inappropriate behavior to the city, I must admit: this semester flew more than I thought it would. Four months is kind of a long time depending on how you spend it, and it turns out that spending it exploring another continent makes time soar.

           Deep down, I’ve had a lot of conflicting feelings about the semester being over. Thankfully, through conversation, I know some of my other friends feel the same way. Four months is for sure long enough to really feel like the city to which you have moved is actually your permanent home. I know my way around Amsterdam without a map, I hate tourists who stand in the bike path, and I love bitterballen. After just over three months, with four weeks left, I feel Dutch. To top it off, I have both a host family and a huge range of good friends I see multiple times a week (sometimes a day). Amsterdam fits like a glove with a hand warmer inside.

           Despite all of this goodness, and the people with whom I get to share it abroad, I’m excited to go home. I dream pretty consistently about meeting my parents in the airport, squeezing my animals, and recovering from jetlag on the couch while I watch Elf more times than is actually healthy. It’s a horrid cycle, one that makes you feel pretty guilty.

           A slew of new international friends (and for me, a literal family and host brothers who feel like my real siblings) means that, in a month, I’ll suddenly be on the other side of the planet from some of my favorite people. I have made friends who are also from the States, but the tragedy of both being from the States is that the country is half the size of Europe itself. You can both live in America and still be a six-hour plane ride away. Still, that’s nothing compared to my best friends in Denmark, Sweden, England, or Germany. I have a feeling I’ll see many of these friends again, but reunions will definitely take years. The knowledge of waiting until I’m in my later twenties or early thirties to see these guys again is heart-wrenching.

           This semester has been the longest time I’ve ever spent away from home. Even this summer, when I moved south for an internship, I saw my parents for a weekend and then moved home briefly again before I went abroad. I’ve never gone longer than about seven weeks without seeing my family, and now I’m on the other side of the world, six hours ahead of them, watching their lives from a distance over social media. As much as I hate on my generation for our technology addiction, I couldn’t imagine studying abroad ten or twenty years ago and not even being able to call my parents for five minutes, let alone FaceTime.

           It becomes difficult to balance the time you spend missing home and the time loving where you live. There’s a strong feeling of guilt that arises when you find yourself missing people and places, you’ll be returning home to soon when you should instead be absorbed in your current environment and loving the people in the room with you. Especially when it may be years until you see these places and people again.

           This post ended up having more angst than I thought it would when I created the outline. Yet, “abroad angst” is something about which students should talk. Like it or not, a lot happens to you and your perspective when you’re abroad so long. You have to deal with this eventually.

           With just over thirty days left, I don’t actually feel like I’m leaving soon. It feels as though I’ve been here forever and that I’m never going back home. Abroad students all tend to have the same panic with just a few weeks left in their semester. They haven’t done everything they wanted to do, their days walking the same route to class are almost done, or they didn’t keep the travel/class/adventure balance they’d hoped they would.

           Truly, I think the disbelief of going home is what causes this sudden ending anxiety. It’s the same anxiety I had back in mid-July, when I knew my days in Edgewater were numbered. Of course, they were always numbered, but knowing the numbers on what I can only call “the best summer ever” were disappearing broke my heart a little more every day.

           I have thirty-one days left to hug my friends, study in cute cafes, stare at canals until it’s dark outside (at, you know, 2 P.M.), and see the world. It’ll fly by, and soon I’ll be writing my “Goodbye, Amsterdam” post while I’m sitting in a shiny hunk of aluminum over the Atlantic and wandering Philadelphia International looking for my parental units.

           Still, it’s about to be a fun, busy, sensational thirty-one days. I’m excited.

[qtakesams]

A Journal Sneak Peak

While crazy to think about, it’s now been over two years since I graduated from high school. By the time I’m back on my home campus, it’ll be nearly three years.

           One of the best graduation gifts I got were two leather-back journals courtesy of my Uncle Johnny and Auntie Kim (who love me like I’m their biological niece). Initially, I carted them to and from college, unable to decide what to write or how to begin with them. Just under three months ago, when I briefly moved back to Pennsylvania to repack my suitcases for an abroad adventure, I tucked them into my backpack.

           It turns out that when you study abroad, you accumulate a number of small things you want to take with you. From receipts to tickets to itinerary to business cards, you shove small pieces of paper and packaging slips in your wallet for later, attempting to track the places you’ve been. Thus, these end up everywhere, from your desk to your backpack to your passport holder. In an effort to contain my life (and ensure I can fit it all in my suitcase when I head out in a month), I decided recently that I would use my journals as a scrapbook of sorts for these odds and ends.

           Below, I’ve pasted pictures of the first few, half-done pages of my journal. Affectionately called my Adventure Book (I’m looking at you, Pixar’s UP), it’s my personal way of keeping this semester tucked close to me for a long time to come.

           More pictures will be uploaded when this looks less like a fifth grader taped their science project together at the last minute.

[qtakesams]

Foliage like New York, Rivers like Amsterdam

The city of Luxembourg has interested me for a few years now. As much as every European city has extreme beauty you really can’t grasp through photos, something about pictures of Lux drew me in long before I knew I was going to live in Europe.

           It’s a privileged statement, but many study-abroad students agree after about their third or fourth side trip: European cities look the same. In this age, a lot of cities are constantly under construction in a race to save centuries-old architecture and road from collapse. Underneath the scaffolding is generally marble or stone siding, and cobbled sidewalks line streets of cafes and stores. Last week, I took a video of a park as I rode through on my bike and sent it to a few people so they could see what it’s like to bike in Amsterdam. What I realized, kind of amusingly, once I watched it for myself, was that you could barely tell it was in Amsterdam. Without the other bikes and the low whisper of Dutch sirens in the background, it could’ve been a video of any other city. Streetlights, small cars squished into smaller neighborhoods, and dirt. Of course, there’s so much beauty to every city, but after you’ve seen 5-6 of them, you can’t help but crave some mountains or a village tucked into the side of a grassy cliff.

           I arrived in Amsterdam knowing Luxembourg was a country I really wanted to visit, but I also knew it’s an expensive city and would be probably twice the cost of a side trip like London or Prague. Yet, it still called to me and the feeling to go there wasn’t going to fade. In early October, after I had already done some traveling and my wanderlust was even more extreme, the ISN announced a trip to Luxembourg in early November. The price of accommodation, travel by bus, and some other tours, was less than 100 euros. That price would’ve undoubtedly been four times that much if I’d gone by myself.

           My closest friends I’d been traveling and adventuring with so far had other plans or little interest in Luxembourg, so I chose to go “solo”.

           What I ended up discovering is that Luxembourg is a city, but it doesn’t look any other city in Europe. It’s got fall foliage like upstate New York, rivers like Amsterdam, and castles like France. Sandwiched between France, Germany, and Brussels, it has what could only be described as its own language, Luxembourgish. A blend of cultures and diversity, it’s simply beautiful to be somewhere lacking with English-speakers, where you never feel bad that somebody has learned an entirely new language because they have to do so. Because of you.

           I didn’t know until this trip how much I missed walking uphill. Two of four places I call home, Pittsburgh and Selinsgrove, are situated in places similar to mountainous regions. I’m used to walking up big hills to get to class and driving up them to get to other towns. For as much as I walk in Amsterdam, my four home, it’s entirely flat. Unless you go up a bridge, the low sea-level keeps one on a flat plane.

           I knew I missed fall in the countryside. I haven’t been able to hike for months at this juncture, and my city is beautiful and clean but lacks the crisp atmosphere I get in Pennsylvania in the fall months. It rained in Luxembourg some of the time I was there, and was only sunny the first morning, but a pure gray, thin fog was nestled into the tree canopy in the valley. It was a pleasant reminder of what I miss at school, when I have early classes and get to walk uphill to the Writers Institute and the fog on the river makes me feel as though I’m at high altitude.

           Luxembourg was the first city I’ve visited here where nobody really spoke English. The “tourist” part of Lux is magnificently small, so much of the time you must interact with hosts and guides who give you funny looks and lose you after you say “hello”. For the first time in Europe, I really felt like I was receiving the communication part of cultural immersion. These days, most everybody speaks English in Europe and will freely switch between it and their native tongue when they realize you speak broken Dutch (or whichever other language). It’s a bit of a horrid feeling, knowing they have the ability to suit your needs when you cannot even fathom to suit theirs. Life in Luxembourg, if only momentarily, was a delightful time of having the same inability as one another.

           As usual, I was still happy to return home after a rainy weekend away. Truthfully, with 6 (dear lord) weeks left in Amsterdam, I don’t expect to ever grow sick of the winding canals and leaning houses with candles in their windows.

           That said, the beauty of Luxembourg, a city that was built around the land instead of ripping the land apart, captured me intensely. It was difficult to leave, to get myself back on the bus. If I cared at all about TripAdvisor, and you could rate countries on the app (can you?), there wouldn’t be enough stars for me to give Lux.

[qtakesams]

American Politics Abroad

For those of you wondering: yes, it is pretty strange to watch American politics unfold when you are not in America. One of those reasons is how much effort it takes to keep an eye on politics or culture in a country where you are not. I check NPR and the Times just about daily to ensure I haven’t missed anything monumental. While I do in fact do this daily at home, too, there’s something odd about having to dig out your countries political climate when so much is happening at once. In the States, news is everywhere. Everybody is always talking about the news, and everybody knows about the news. When you aren’t surrounded by people who are only talking about your nation’s politics, especially when something like a presidential election is approaching, it’s kind of weird.

           For example, this morning I was fishing around on NPR before class and I saw a tab reporting something related to Trump and the death of an ISIS founder. I clicked on it and discovered that, under Trump’s watch, a leading world terrorist had been killed by U.S. officials. I finally thought I had a chance to congratulate the president of my country, to thank him for what he’d done. Trust me, people who dislike Trump do not want to dislike Trump (after all, he is literally in charge of our country).

           I proceeded to watch some of the video of Trump announcing the killing of Baghdadi. I say, “some of”, because I got two minutes in and realized it was nearly an hour-long video. Later, I caught myself up on Stephen Colbert, who discussed the differences between Obama reporting the death of Osama bin Laden versus Trump reporting the death of Baghdadi. This is where I couldn’t help but once more be disappointed in the President.

           I have clear recollection of when bin Laden was killed in 2011. Although I had only recently come to terms with who bin Laden was and why we hated him (I was a young lad when the War on Terror became official), I knew how important it was to eradicate him. My parents were happy, my teachers were happy, and some of my friends who were more political than me were happy. Barack Obama made his announcement to the world that bin Laden was dead. He thanked those who risked their lives to get the task done, and then probably went to bed.

           That’s not what Trump did. Trump talked about himself, his book, and his own opinion for the duration of his announcement. And I, a 21-year-old across the ocean, hung my head in shame and closed my laptop.

           Everybody who knows me, knows I’m pretty political. I don’t necessarily consider myself political on a stance, but I like to be informed. I pay attention to all sorts of media and I check the facts. Not knowing what is happening to some aspect of the country or even the world feels weird to me. I love talking about politics and culture and how it affects us.

           That said, I can’t really say I was political at all until probably seventh grade, and I definitely didn’t pay a great deal of attention to it until around 2012 or 2013. But the topic of politics is an important one. Acknowledging politics, and being informed, is part of the duty of being a citizen in one’s respectful country.

           My university class in Amsterdam is a seminar that analyses war and violence through gender. We talk about Rwanda, the Congo, Syria, the Cold War, the World Wars, and the power balances in gender within this violence. We end up talking about the genders of politics, too, and how world leaders engage with gender. Of course, we talk about America, where much of the political heat revolves around white men.

           It’s difficult to sit in a class like this and acknowledge the foundational gender issues within my own country, which is supposed to be the most powerful on Earth.

           So, while abroad I’m not only having to race to keep up with politics myself, but I’m also taking and entirely new approach to American politics and our ties to other countries.

           It’s fun for me, but it’s also painful. And I sincerely hope that next week, in my absence, everybody who can make an informed vote on election day does so.

[qtakesams]

Happy Two Months, Amsterdam

I don’t know what feels crazier to me: that I’m currently sitting on a Paris-bound train, or that today marks two months I’ve been in Amsterdam. I guess it’s kind of ironic to be traveling on our anniversary, but I still had classes today, so I was in the city for a prolonged period of time.

           Some parts of me still feel like I’ve been here forever. There’s other parts that feel like I’ve been here ten minutes, but when I think of my first few weeks here, they absolutely feel like they happened in another lifetime.

           Yesterday, I visited the Anne Frank Huis. Buying my ticket was one of the first things I did when I arrived in Amsterdam and discovered the layout of my schedule. The longer I waited, the more likely I wouldn’t get the chance to go. So, I’ve waiting for October 16thsince mid-August.

           Anne Frank did not disappoint. It was actually much bigger in size than I thought it would be, but there is the case that none of the furniture remains.

           It’s a powerful museum, beginning with the very original purpose of the building and the Frank family themselves. You further escalate into the history of the war, and the general craziness behind who the Nazi’s were and how they functioned. You walk through the entirety of the house, which is narrow and dimly lit.

           At the end is a documentary filled with quotes and perspectives on Anne. The last things you’re able to do are visit the museum shop and the café, but then you return your audio tour and exit the house.

           I stopped in the shop and bought a few postcards and a physically copy of the diary (since I’ve been silently crying to only the Kindle copy since roughly sixth grade). And naturally, I bought a brownie and sat in the café facing the canal for a good hour. It turns out, if I didn’t desperately want a million more people to take up tickets for the remainder of the semester, I would absolutely go back just for the café views a dozen more times before leaving.

           I shocked myself during this visit, and never cried. My eyes stung a little, but I didn’t cry like I’d always expected I would if I got to visit. It could’ve been because I’d been pretty emotional the previous night about something else, but I felt a type of sorrow I couldn’t just express through my eyes being wet.

           In the time I’ve been in Europe, I’ve been traveling around the continent and going to class and seeing friends and willing letting my jaw drop at the beauty I see around me. Even though learning more about the Second World War is primarily what I came to Amsterdam to do, I often find myself forgetting that not long ago, literally within my grandparents’ lifetime, it was a city plagued by gun powder and bloodshed. The Anne Frank Huis was my first reminder in a few weeks, of really where I am and what I can experience here.

           It’s incredibly weird to know that I when I return from Paris and the start the second half of the semester, calendar-wise I’ll have less than eight weeks left. I dislike the sound of that tremendously, but I’m pretty sure by Christmas I might be a little more excited to return home.

           It’s very weird, but nice, to be out of the States as an election is ramping up. Of course, because I’m me and I have to be informed, I’ve been keeping up with American news and politics. It feels really good, however, to not have to acknowledge that my country is in shambles.

           After two months, I really still can’t believe Amsterdam is a real place, let alone the fact that it’s now been all mine for such a long time, and it’ll be mine until Christmas. There’s a lot left to do and a lot more to see.

           Right now, I’m on a train to Brussels, where I’ll switch over to one bound for Paris. Paris will likely end up being one of my biggest side trips (five nights). Thankfully, I have a good friend in Paris who is letting me utilize his couch for that time so I can travel alone to get there but not stay in a hostel by myself. One day, I’d really like to plan an entirely solo trip. Solo travel is incredibly liberating, but pretty damn dangerous for a twenty-something female.

           I guess the point of all of this is, is that my time is slipping away. Time is slipping away, and I really hope it cools off enough for me to walk across a frozen canal before I leave.

           It’s time for a train nap.

[qtakesams]

The cost of not following your heart is spending the rest of your life wishing you had.

(via purplebuddhaquotes)

[qtakesams]

Things I’ve Learned About Myself (Abroad Version)

The winter of my freshman year of college, I came home from my first 14 weeks as a college student. My first 14 weeks living almost entirely away from my childhood sanctuary for the first time in ever. I packed my backpack and some bins of things I didn’t need any more and went home with my mom.

           My first night, I all but collapsed on my bed, grateful to have a few weeks away from a student dorm and all the drama that survived within the residents. A few nights that break, I laid down on my floor with my iPod playing, as I’d done numerous times throughout the first nineteen years of my life. It was almost stress-relieving, staring at my ceiling and thinking.

           I remember looking around my pink room at my posters, pictures, the memorabilia of my teenaged years I’d left behind to enter college. I remember being mad at myself. I was mad because in 14 weeks of college, I didn’t feel like I’d matured. I felt no different.

           I’d pulled yet another semester of average grades. I’d made a bunch of new friends, but I already knew which ones I didn’t want to keep anymore with no way out of them. I hadn’t found “the one”, or even attracted anybody romantically (hold your breath there, young Q, it still hasn’t happened). Basically, I had barely achieved any of the goals I’d set. That August, I had moved into college with a mental list of goals and things I had to do in order to feel successful at the end of the semester. I was mad at myself for falling so short.

           After I laid on the floor and mentally wrestled myself for an hour, I decided to try something new. I went to my desk, ripped a sheet of paper from a notebook, and wrote down a list of as many things as I could that I had learned about myself. The good, the bad, the ugly, the disgusting, the wonderful. Anything I could think of that I hadn’t known about myself before I left home. The list grew to about 33 bullet points, and then I stopped. I re-read the list, and I became prouder of myself.

           I had a long way to go and more things to achieve, but I had learned about myself. In itself, that was a huge achievement I’d done little to accomplish before.

           Fast-forward to this fall. Studying abroad, which is arguably the best thing you can do for yourself in college. A few a days ago, it really hit me how quickly the semester is passing. Days feel long, as do weeks, but when you look at a calendar and realize it’s mid-October (Oktober in Dutch), you begin to wonder what more you should do where you are. You realize that if you’re going to reflect, you should do it quicker.

           So, I complied another list of things I’ve learned about myself since I’ve been here. Things that help me realize I’ve done more than go to class and party on Friday night.

1.     I’ve grown even quieter in the last few years. It always seems like being introverted comes with the character trait of quietness, but I’ve been introverted all my life and loud for over half of it. But my friends realize when I’m quieter than normal. When I haven’t said anything for hours. It makes me aware of the fact that I’ve finally (yes, family, finally) conquered the ability to only speak when I have something legitimate to say.

2.     I’m independent. I can go out to dinner on my own and I don’t feel self-conscious or awkward. Even if I get a little nervous ordering a Dutch food off the menu. I can be alone and be okay with it. I don’t know many other people who can.

3.     I’m adaptable. I updated my resume this week for use in applying to more internships soon. It’s a weird, seemingly random display of jobs and choices. But it shows I can move to new cities and perform a job while keeping myself alive and write good fiction and work in a deli.

4.     I’m beautiful. I never like to say this one because I think it sometimes, but I consider myself too humble to say it out loud. Yet, I think this is part of the glory of city life: you’re anonymous. You can really be yourself and you’ll get little judgement. You have room to be beautiful, so this is what you become.

5.     I can be an asshole, but I apologize for it and get back on my feet.I know some people who don’t know how to do the latter part of this phrase.

[qtakesams]

Learning a Language in Your Twenties: Can You Do It?

If there’s one thing that makes me feel more underachieving in this world more than my inability to perform math correctly, it’s the fact that I’ve made it to college without knowing how to speak another language borderline fluently.

           This might seem like a pretty ridiculous thing to desire, but I didn’t realize how common it necessarily is to know more than one language until I arrived here and met dozens of other undergraduates who know more than one or two.

           In high school, I took two years of Spanish; one year, this was taught by a woman who lived in the United States most of her life but had deep Spanish heritage and knew it as a second language, while the next it was taught by a woman who had never been to Spain and just had it as a graduate degree.

           Back then, it seemed lame and unimportant to learn another language. My high school was predominantly white, and only a few students ever travelled or went abroad. I went to my hour-long class daily, learned a few verbs, and proceeded to never say them outside of class. Of course, I spent an hour or so a day studying conjugations and vocabulary, but there was no practicality behind actually knowing the language. By the time I spent two years dealing with two different teachers, neither of whom were very helpful to me, I decided the anxiety I had over the class wasn’t worth the AP exam grade.

           When I started college and took my language placement grade (as I didn’t have the credit from high school) I tested at a 101 Spanish level.

           My college requires two semesters of a language, taken back to back. You cannot combine languages, nor can you take them during different years. The spring of my freshman year, I considered wait-listing Spanish. Then, I remembered how much I had disliked Spanish, and how impractical it still seemed to me. It felt like taking the easy way out, even though Spanish isn’t quite an easy language. I know enough Spanish, I would say, to avoid getting lost in Barcelona without a map, but not enough to hold a lengthy conversation.

           When I was accepted into my study broad program and presented with the classes I could take while gone, Beginning Dutch was among them. By this time, it had been a good four years since I’d attempted a new language. It had been years since I learned new verbs, conjugations, and formal uses of sentences. I also knew how intimidating Dutch would be. It’s a difficult language, and it’s not even spoken throughout a lot Europe. Did I want to spend a semester abroad trying to comprehend this language?

           Ultimately, I chose to take the course (even after I told my mother I would and she and I both inhaled sharply). What I found after classes started, even though it’s a hard course and it scares the shit out of me, is how important it is.

           Traveling to Europe, living there, and only speaking one language is, in the long run, an insane thing to consider. English may be so prevalent that you can speak it to anybody, and they’ll understand, but it feels artificial when you have to speak English to the waiter in a classical Dutch restaurant. Walking into a grocery store and knowing what the label on food that doesn’t look familiar says is a new level of abroad grocery shopping.

           In 2017, my sister’s best friend and my surrogate sister married a Dominican man, who eventually moved to the United States with his son. His son, who was barely seven when he moved to the States, spoke little English. Just enough to communicate with us, even if shy.

           Of course, this happened the same year I started college, so the next time I saw my new nephew wasn’t until the holidays. It had still only been a handful of months, but he already spoke English well enough that if you didn’t know he was born in another country, you wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

           Little kids are known for how quickly they intake information, especially with language. They act like sponges, absorbing anything you could say to them and its meaning.

           Obviously, learning a new language when you’re older isn’t impossible. I have many friends who can speak casual fluently or borderline fluently of another language. I have friends who are learning a new language because their significant other speaks it, too.

           Once I successfully got my Dutch course approved to count as part of my language requirement at my home university, I received the task of finding another intermediate Dutch course to take in the spring to count for the other half. A challenge for when I get home, I’d say.

           Learning a new language is hard. So difficult, that for some it’s impossible. But its liberating.

           It is liberating when you realize you can order a drink to somebody who grew up where you didn’t. It’s liberating to think you can say something formerly gibberish and have it make sense.

           Dutch is weird, and it’s giving me a run for my money, but its thrilling, too.