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Age of Nostalgia

December 12, 2008

After experiencing the warmth of a family in Belgium, I felt particularly keenly the absence of my own family, a feeling intensified by the approaching holidays and the fact that this year I passed my first-ever Thanksgiving away from home. Nieves is a wonderful host, but she alone can’t replace the deep, complex relationships within a family unit: the shared experiences, the struggles, the triumphs, the tensions, and the powerful bond that transcends all the rest. Gloom settled over me: I felt ready to go home, and my remaining weeks in Spain seemed like an eternity.

It was a difficult period, filled with confused and conflicted emotions. I knew that if I’d stayed at Rollins for this semester I would have been restless and discontented with the small scope of my world; after all, that exact feeling had compelled me to study abroad in the first place. At the same time, the end of term carries certain traditions of which the Rollins e-mail system kept me well-informed, only sharpening my awareness of what I was missing by being overseas. News of the TJ’s All-Nighter, something I’d been a part of three of my first four semesters at Rollins, hit home particularly hard.

Then there was Spain. I was glad I had come; I wouldn’t trade the experiences of the past four months for anything. And part of me wanted to stay, if only to keep improving my Spanish. Yet I also missed the United States—natural, considering that before this semester I’d only ever been out of the country ten days. On the whole I feel I’ve held up very well, but in the midst of my bleak nostalgia I questioned how I would handle a career in the Foreign Service, living outside the US for years at a time. All my powers of rationalization couldn’t calm my vague self-doubt.

And part of me wanted to move on to the next adventure. The same thirst for the new and different that drove me to study abroad and attracted me to the Foreign Service had woken and was clamoring to be noticed. I felt I’d accomplished what I’d come to Spain to do—namely, to attain a high level of communicative competence in Spanish—and was ready take on something new.

When I expressed these myriad sentiments to my father, he assured me that what I was feeling was normal. I’m going to take his word for it. He also gave me a very sage piece of advice: Think of the thing I like most about being in Spain that I can’t do in the states and be sure to do lots of it before leaving. I have to confess that I have been remiss in following this advice—deterred first by a cold and then by bad weather—but I have every intention of making the most of my remaining days in Spain. That’s the essential message of the advice, after all.

One may well wonder why I find it necessary to put all of this in an R-Journal. There are two main reasons. First, for me writing is cathartic, and putting my thoughts down in words helps me to reflect on and interpret my feelings. Second—and more important in my role as an R-Journalist—I want to stress to students that study abroad is neither one giant vacation nor a semester of bliss. Parts of it can be difficult, and I prefer to give students an honest assessment of the difficulties rather than glossing over them. Yet the difficulties should not be a deterrent; they’re part of what give study abroad its value. Moreover, they’re normal, and students overseas shouldn’t feel discouraged if they go through several phases of adjustment. Just be patient with yourself, because in the end it’s all worth it.

Photo 1: The Rollins campus, in my thought a lot lately
Photo 2: Oviedo's cathedral, symbol of the city I'm about the leave behind

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