a Glimpse into my Brain
(FOUR MONTHS AND THEN SOME POST-BELFAST)
I am trying my best to write a reflective piece that is all-encompassing of my experience abroad. I’m struggling to find the words, though, because my emotions and thoughts about my time in Belfast are constantly changing, morphing and warping as days go by. Sometimes something will remind me of an instance abroad. Sometimes I’ll look back at moments I should have cherished more in sadness. Other times, I reminisce and am filled with a nostalgic happiness. Regardless of the emotion paired with my thoughts on any given day, I am never not yearning to return to that Northern Irish city that became home.
It’s been four months and two weeks since I cried as the wheels of the airplane lifted off of the runway at George Best Belfast City Airport. It’s been four months and twelve days since I reunited with my mom and dad and returned to life in small town Illinois. Going into my time abroad, I anticipated that I would end up a changed person. However, I never expected how much I would struggle with my new identity. I most certainly never anticipated that I would feel like a stranger in my hometown, a stranger on the campus I had come to love so much.
Coming back has been a struggle. Like a lot of my experiences and feelings abroad, it’s hard to explain just exactly how I feel and make others understand and empathize. Just the other day, I had someone say to me, “I bet you hate it here now. It seems like every person that goes abroad and comes back hates being back at IC.” I don’t think that I hate IC, necessarily, which I tried to explain to her. Having grown up in a town of 2,200 people in the Midwest, I didn’t know what life could be like in a city, let alone on a different continent. Coming to IC was a step up, population-wise, but the experiences I have had here are still comparable to that of my hometown. Belfast, in and of itself, was an experience completely different from what I have ever known. While abroad, I had the chance to live in a city that was explorable by foot, a city that always rained. I had the chance to have in-depth conversations with students from different countries about each other’s’ cultures all while embracing the Irish culture. I had the chance to travel to cities I’ve dreamt of visiting since I was young. Being in Belfast gave me a taste of what else is out there on this vast planet humanity calls home. Being back on campus has left a bitter taste in the back of my throat, almost like when you eat the same meal day after day. You grow tired and sick of something that you once loved. That isn’t to say that I no longer love my alma mater. I just see this campus and the community it has in a different light than before. The allure is gone.
In saying that the allure of IC is gone, I am in no way claiming that my time studying at Queen’s University Belfast was a flawless time. In fact, there were oftentimes that I was not happy with the place I was whatsoever. People always gloss over the difficult times they had abroad and put emphasis on the great things they did. I don’t believe that is honest to the experience or yourself, though. In saying that I had the time of my life one-hundred percent of the time I was in Belfast, I would be lying to myself. Being thousands of miles away from home was hard. I struggled with homesickness in bouts that seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn’t properly handle and work through my emotions. In class once, I remember being told that studying abroad is like an emotional rollercoaster. Your highs are incredibly high, and your lows seem unbearably low.
The lowest low I experienced abroad was on a night out with my friends. I had only been there less than a month. I’m not certain on the specific dates, since three months all seem to blur into one, but it was certainly early in the semester.
A little backstory before I can fully explain this story: the international students at Queen’s all moved in for the orientation program the university put on about a week before the freshmen showed up. For the most part, the international students all lived in underclassmen dorms called Elms Village. My first full day in Belfast, I went on an organized trip to Tesco, a grocery chain in the U.K., and met a handful of other international students. That night, as I attempted to cook dinner for myself, the R.A. walked into the kitchen and said, “You know there’s pizza at the Treehouse right?” The Treehouse being a building located in Elms Village as the main hub of social activity. The Treehouse had a small convenience store called Mace, laundry facilities, study areas, and a lounge area where people could play everything from video games to pool.
I had, in fact, known that there was pizza in the Treehouse earlier in the day. In the fluster of unpacking and settling in, though, I completely forgot about the free pizza. I went to the Treehouse anyways, nervous to meet new people and have to socialize. Once I got there, there was a large group of people sitting on couches surrounding a coffee table with half-empty pizza boxes. I scanned the Treehouse in hopes of seeing someone I recognized. I managed to catch the gaze of one of the people I sat by on the shuttle to Tesco earlier that day, and he invited me to join them. The rest of the night, I spent time playing drinking games and getting to know the people in front of me. The night ended with plans of meeting at reception the following morning to walk to orientation together.
The next morning, a handful of people from the night before met and walked to campus together. We sat down in the already crowded Whitla Hall and waited for the program to start. My friends having been from Norway and Sweden, respectively, both started to speak in their native tongues and could understand one another fairly easily. I, on the other hand, had no idea how to bridge the gap and converse with them. I stayed silent instead and spoke briefly with the Dutch woman sitting on my right. In those moments, I thought, “I’m not going to stay friends with these people. By the end of the semester, they won’t matter. I’ll have a different group of friends.”
I was wrong, and while I feel close with my friends from abroad and grateful for the relationships I developed with those people I met in the Treehouse on that first night, the friendships did not develop smoothly; there were bumps in the road, which brings me back to that lowest low I mentioned earlier. Fast forward a few weeks, a group of us have gone out to a lovely pub called Filthy McNasty’s. It’s nicer and less dirty than what you’re thinking. We were all drinking and having a good time, then went back to one of my friends’ flats. Sitting there, I was hit with a wave of sadness. I had been frustrated earlier in the night, and now I just wanted to go to bed. As I was surrounded by friends, I realized how little they actually knew about me. They all just assumed that I was drunk, when, in reality, I was on the verge of bursting into tears. They were supposed to be my stand-in support system while my actual support system was an ocean and then some away, but they really didn’t know me at all.
Looking back, I hadn’t dealt with my emotions well at all at this point, which isn’t something any class or any number of conversations can prepare you for. I pushed down the negative feelings of being overwhelmed, homesick, you name it, as I rapidly attempted to adjust to the new lifestyle in front of me. I was meant to be having fun, not dwelling on the not-so-fun feelings that come with uprooting your entire life. It was hard, but is definitely an aspect that made my study abroad experience such an important experience.
My three months in Belfast was full of rainy days, but only rarely did I have these rainy moods. Sometimes I felt homesick, yearning for the familiarity of being back in Illinois, but without actually wanting to be there. For the most part, being abroad was an adventure. It was fun. It was new. It was exciting. I loved being able to explore the city and broaden my mind. It was, in no way, what I expected it to be. Looking back, I crave something now that I hadn’t experienced before my stint in Belfast – anonymity.
I never recognized how refreshing it would be to know practically no one in the place you’re living, let alone the continent. Being in Belfast was a fresh start in a lot of ways. Sure, I was still furthering my undergraduate studies. I was still the person I had been before. This time, though, no one knew who I was before. All preconceived notions were gone. I could mold and shape my personality, the person I wanted to be, into whatever I wanted and no one could argue because they didn’t know the “before me.” That’s been the hardest part about being back on campus. While in Belfast, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted and be whoever I wanted to be. Now, the majority of the people that surround me are people that knew me before this experience. They know me as a certain version of myself, a version that I like to think I’ve outgrown and I’m struggling to figure out just how to break away from her and continue growing without causing an uproar.
Moving forward, I hope to rediscover the spark that has dimmed in the past four months and two weeks since I have left the only city I’ve ever called home. I hope to find conversation that stimulates my mind and inspires me to learn more about the world around me, as many of the conversations I had with my friends from different backgrounds did. More than anything, I hope to continue traveling to new places and broadening my mind and, maybe someday, return to the “Emerald Isle” and pick up where we left off.
