Still a Truthseeker
So, I've been home just shy of seven months.
It's very strange. I feel like last semester didn't actually happen. This semester (which is more than halfway over), has flown by. My weeks are split up among Kent, Willoughby, and Mentor. I quit my job at The UPS Store in Stow and got a better gig at The UPS Store in Aurora. I had a real job for three days until I realized I had worked thirty hours and wouldn't see a paycheck for about five months. My roommates and I don't always see eye-to-eye and the drama of human interaction is wearing me thin.
Besides all these kind of cripey things, my life has been amazing since I got back and got back into the swing of what I want my life to be.
I still have my amazing (hippie but like good, cool, smart hippie) parents (whom I could write about for days), my sister, grandmother and aunts and uncles. I have a car that runs and a warm apartment with a comfortable bed and washing machine. I have close friends and a great job. I found someone who, daily, makes fun of me for thinking Tim Meadows and Don Cheadle are the same person. He's the one who kisses me goodnight and puts up with my puns, draws me pictures, and tells me dirty jokes until I smile when nothing else is going right.
I get to graduate in a year and then move onto whatever I want to do.
My life is pretty sweet. Sometimes it's hard, but I think that's because I'm upset with myself for falling behind my ambition. But that's depressing. Whoops.
I really don't remember what my life was like before SAS. I know I went to Kent, worked, and slept a lot, but I don't remember truly being real about anything. Everything has some sort of haze around it, like I was watching it all happen but not really living it. I was angry and sad all the time with brief episodes of happiness.
When I went camping with my close friends the weekend before I left for SAS, I had no clue I was going to come back as a different person. I spent the summer being reckless and teaching myself what was important. I came to the realization that I need to do what is best for me. Now, that statement has a lot of thought behind it: there are people in this world I care about more than myself. There are people who will tell me what I need to hear, people I can rely on for literally any and everything I could ever need or want. When I decide something that is "best for me", I am taking into consideration how it will affect those I care about. That's part of what helps me make my decision. I wouldn't want to live my life making decisions that only benefitted me. There's no fun in that!
Before SAS, I always asked someone's opinion before I did anything. I wouldn't always follow their advice, but I had to get some else's input before I made a choice. When I was in the middle of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul or the meat market deep in the stone walls of Fez, I accepted the fact that I can make decisions and choose things for myself, because I am of an age where I need to decide things in my life. I am a strong, capable individual who can mould myself into the person I want to be.
In the past seven months, I think I've started to really become that person.
Near the end of the voyage, all the students were told to expect some weird things when we got back:
1. Back home, only two or three people are actually going to care about this summer. Everyone else will think it's cool, but won't actually want to hear about it. Relish the people who genuinely want to know about your experiences. The others will ask how the bars were or the food, but they don't really care/want to sit and listen to you talk about something they will never get to experience.
1 (a). I dealt with this pretty easily. My parents drove me back from Boston and they may be the people I've told the most to. By the time I got home and saw my sister, the person I consider a better version of everyone, I was already able to condense my stories to a few prompted by easily-accesible pictures that someone had already uploaded on Facebook. It just got easier from that point on. Every time someone asks me about SAS, I am able to simply say "It was truly amazing. It changed my life and I've just been itching to travel again". That typically will suffice. Everyone is satisfied with that. No one wants to hear specifics about the dynamic of living on the ship, Green Sheets, or customs information that became such a daily factor of my life for two months. Even big things, like standing on ancient holy ground of Delphi, snorkeling in the Mediterranean, smoking hookah with locals in Istanbul, cliff diving in Croatia after taking a shot of some liquor that smelled of cotton and citrus, or being lost in Fez, Morocco and being surrounded by menacing Muslim men and the smell of fear of my three friends don't warrant a whole conversation from anyone. And I'm honestly okay with that. I have my pictures, maps, mementos, and memories that are constant reminders of where I've been, what I've seen, and what I've done.
2. You probably won't like your friends when you get home.
2 (a). Nailed it. I went through a period of disliking every single one of my friends. I didn't talk to anyone and just cried all the time because I didn't want to be around the people I was forced to be around. My closest friend had gotten a boyfriend while I was gone and every conversation we had was about him and their relationship, not one question beyond "How was it?" about my summer. By that point, I had severely tailored my little speech to "So great, thanks. Here's the present I got you".
My other friends were excited to see me, as I was them, but that excitement quickly wore off and I was so changed that I didn't know how to act around them and they didn't know how to act around me.
I found solace in my other friend who had spent her spring semester in Spain and Morocco. She and I listened to each other's stories and laughed and empathized when things went sour in our adventures. We speculated on "well, I could have done this…" and showed pictures and tried to find places we had both been to because it was really cool that two girls from Mentor were in Spain and Morocco two months apart. Even though she lives nine hours away, she's still my closest friend and is someone I rely on exponentially to keep me grounded and sane and she's the person I look up to... even though she's a foot shorter than me.
Things have mostly evened out now with my friends. I decided that I had the ability to expunge people from my life if I didn't want them, and I think I have benefited greatly from practicing that newfound capability.
3. You'll be REALLY done with mundane college classes.
3 (a). Well, obviously. Sitting in a class and listening to a gay man with a lisp about hypotheses and conflict management from a PowerPoint doesn't really hold a candle to learning about Medieval philosophy of the Mediterranean while looking forward to traveling to different historical sites and applying myself and having the confidence instilled in me that I really am a smart cookie. Honestly, Kent State University is a joke. Somehow, I have been able to float through these past three years. I really don't do anything. I am not invited to care about what I'm learning. I'm forced to sit and stare and drool and spit out facts and words that some professor or graduate student told me to memorize for an exam. None of it matters. As children and students, we are always begging the question, "When am I EVER going to use this?!" and this summer finally answered that question. What I learned and did this summer is applied to every day of my life. I could not write a two-page paper (hell, even two paragraphs) on what I have learned while under the direction and teachings of Kent State University.
Before I left, my father told me that I was going to see what I was capable of. He told me that I was going to realize how unchallenged and how little I care about boring things like public communication and my required freshman year Great Books class. Now I see what he meant. While I was gone, I didn't see it. Now I do.
I try to remember every moment of Semester at Sea and my amazing, life-changing, expensive, thrilling, challenging, serene, crazy summer. Every single day for the past seven months, something has happened in Real Life that made me jump to a dusty memory from SAS.
For example, today I was scrolling through famous cityscapes and I came across Barcelona and Istanbul. I just kind of stopped and looked at the two pictures for a few lingering moments. The cityscapes were silhouettes and the mosques in the Turkish picture were stunningly beautiful. However, someone who had not seen them in their reality could not even begin to imagine what they truly are like. That may sound a bit conceded, but it is simply true. Everyone has seen something truly beautiful that they cannot hope to share with someone who has never witnessed it. Words, photographs, poems, and drawings can't do it justice. In the sunset, with the crystal blue water under the bow, nothing was wrong. Sure, I missed my folks and friends back home, but I knew they were okay. I knew I was okay. I knew that, as messed up as some things can seem to be, it can all be okay. And that's all we really need, right? To be okay. To be functioning and living for the moments of clarity when we realize how wonderful and amazing we are as humans with the ability to see, taste, hear, smell, and feel all the world has to offer.