Now, let's talk about "itis"es. We all know the regulars: arthritis, siniusitis, and even senioritis. I-t-i-s is a great ending that changes a word from a simple noun to the title of condition or disease. Thank you English language. Today I diagnosed myself with transitionitis.
At first I thought about calling it "End of Study Abroad-itis", but that isn't the easiest of titles. I toyed with shortening it to "Study Abroad-itis" but that wasn't quite it either. Transitionitis is what I go through when it's time to make a life change.
My Aunt taught me that everyone has a different way of saying goodbye. Some do it in tears, others by detachment, and still more say goodbye in anger. I go through an entire roller coaster of feelings and emotions when I'm making a transition and saying goodbye to one stage of life as I trade it for another. End of the semester, end of the school year, leaving to visit home, returning home...all of those things give me transitionitis and trigger my coping stages.
Right now I'm getting ready to leave France and re-start my life back home, and I've got a serious case of transitionitis. Just eleven more days until I'm in the air on my way back to the states! I'm living in my super-excited, incredibly impatient, cloud9, ready-to-go stage. I had the same thing just before leaving for France. When I'm here, there's nothing I want more than to get to where I'm going. Everything about home sounds heavenly and suddenly the place I'm in right now seems gloomy and depressing. Today I was talking to a classmate about how tired I was of French and how excited I was to go home, and she shocked me by asking:
"Are you really that miserable?"
Miserable? Me? I started to mull over the past three months, trying to decide if I had really been miserable the entire time. It's true that France hasn't been everything I dreamed of. A lot of my posts are self-assurances just as much as they are meant to be assuring to you. I talk a lot about not being upset if you don't feel the way you think you should during your study abroad because I don't feel the way I thought I should. But did that make me miserable? Then she asked:
"Well, was it worth it?"
Yes. I can answer without a shadow of a doubt that this has been one of the most changing, worthwhile experiences of my life. No, I haven't been miserable this entire time. I can look back and see how much I've learned from the moment I landed here. Independence, self confidence, cultural acceptance, street smarts, courage, and of course, language, are all things that this trip has brought to me and I wouldn't trade them for anything.
Of course there were nights where I cried and wanted nothing but to go home. Sometimes I think I have had many more of those nights than some other students. I didn't do as many activities or make as many friends as I had hoped, either, and that was a big disappointment. But for all the things I didn't like I can think of one or more that I did, and I value the lessons this trip has taught me.
So maybe I'm not as in love with France as I was before. I might not come and live here like I thought I wanted to at first. That doesn't mean my journey wasn't worth it, or that I no longer love it at all. In fact I think my love is stronger than it was! Just different. France isn't a perfect dreamworld in my head anymore, it's a real place and I know it's good side and it's bad.
Senior year of high school I starred in our all-school musical as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It might be cheesy but I see a lot of connections to her story and mine. She ran away from her dusty old Kansas farm to find a place where she could live her dreams, but once she made it there it wasn't what she had always hoped for. Her new friends were wonderful and some things were fascinating, but even under all the color and excitement there were challenges and roadblocks. You would think Oz was more exciting than Kansas and Dorothy would want to stay, but she knew something I didn't quite feel back when I played her on stage:
There really is no place like home.
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| Image credit to google search |
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