An American Grad in London

I had two plans for tonight; one with a dear and life-long friend who I’ve not seen in months (and before that, years), the other whom I see almost daily. Both of them cancelled. With no one to say goodnight to and a deep hankering for chocolate, I hit the streets.

There is something about venturing out at night in your home city after returning from abroad that weighs on you a bit. It’s a nostalgia, a slight pang of sadness, small regret and a recognition that both you and it have changed, and the distance is irreparable. Beneath this, it’s the subtle acknowledgement that you will still always have your history and the marks left by it.

Roaming around the city through streets lit up by a Saturday night crowd, I found everything one would expect. I found an old friend just as she left to join a cab with her friends. I found a couple of new night clubs and bars scattered down a street that was once full of industrial warehouses. I found a mural off the main strip that was adorned with poetry about love and humanity. I did not, however, find chocolate.

At some point I lost track of what I was looking for. After a while I found myself staring inside a cafe whose floor was littered with cardboard and paper cups. I was studying the Marzocco on the counter and rummaging through memories of London and latte art when it suddenly dawned on me; I was searching for life, for movement, for authenticity.

This is what living on another continent does to you. It breeds within you a lust for authenticity, and for a deeper sort of connection to the world around you. It’s like stretching your stomach when you eat too much; it stretches an already insatiable hunger for real human experience and a veritableness that can only be found in cultures who have known the horror of revolution and the satisfaction of a falling empire. Each time you experience the kind of rich and prolific lifestyle that comes from years of cultural transmission and oral tradition, it’s hard to look at your old life the same. Standing there looking at a fake Italian espresso machine and the plastic placards on the wall, I knew I wouldn’t find my chocolate here.

All of us who have left feel that same combination of sadness, regret and nostalgia that I did in front of that cafe, albeit to varying degrees. It’s a symptom of leaving an unfamiliar you’ve grown used to for the familiar you’ve begun letting go of. The pain of leaving that unfamiliar lies in knowing that the place you’ve left and all who are encompassed by its vibrance will move on without you unaffected. Cities are but giant microcosms, constantly developing, changing, relentlessly moving forward with whatever intricate combinations of plans they’ve written. To leave the microcosm is to separate yourself from it.

You’ll find yourself constantly trying to satiate an appetite that will forever return with vengeance when you leave. You’ll Google tickets to Amsterdam at 2am, or TEFL programs in Barcelona, or teaching English in southeast Asia, or work visas in Australia. You’ll circle the drain looking for ways back out of the country until you can’t take it anymore; you’ll finally pick one and stick with it or, you’ll readjust.

If you leave, you’ll commit yourself to working like a dog until you’re packing your suitcase and on your next plane. If you stay, you’ll become part of your old microcosm again, this time with something more. You’ll (somewhat reluctantly) settle back into what you once new, but with a sense of wisdom and self-security that you didn’t have on the mantle before. You’ll share it with those who show an interest, and hope that in some small way you’ve lit the same fire for them and inspired them to do more, if only for themselves.

I left the flat in search of chocolate, and came home understanding what I’d really gone out seeking in the first place. There are no doses of cocoa powder and sugar that can fill the void left behind by a life abroad, but there are infinite wisdoms to be found in the heart of someone with wanderlust. It’s something we all share, with each other, with others, and with ourselves.

Since returning to the States, I’ve had several conversations with my International loved ones about our experiences leaving London, missing London, pining for London, being angry at London for refusing to embrace us permanently, and feeling sad and lost and confused without London.

After one such conversation with a typically light-hearted, more optimistic friend of mine, it became clear to me just how universal this experience is, and how one experience seems to transcend all cultural boundaries: The Transition.

The Transition is scary. The Transition comes after a period of permanency, stability, security. The Transition comes when you think your future is certain, guaranteed, secured. The Transition can come when your arms are open and ready to embrace and ride with it, or can knock you off your high horse when you least expect it to.

So many of us who have left are still reeling from the intensity of the Transition. Not only have we been kicked out of the academic cocoon with no safety net, but we’ve been kicked out of the country, away from our temporary homes and our permanent friendships. But while I have blogged about the U.K.’s direct intention to do so in the past, this blog isn’t about the bureaucratic processes that cause this sometimes unwelcome and difficult-to-prepare-for Transition, but about the emotional process.

When I left London in December, I left so much behind me. I left a place that had begun to settle over the course of 15 months. I’d established a family of sorts, comprised of close friends, flatmates, a cat who climbed in my room at 4am each night and cuddled between me and my partners’ knees, a collection of grocery stores aisles and cafe couches who had begun to provide small comforts to me in my home away from home. In fact, my home away from home had become the home that I would soon be going away from.

Four months after adjusting to The Transition, I’ve only just found a part-time job pouring coffees and cleaning counters. Not a glorious move for someone with a Master’s, and that’s been a sobering reality for me. I’ve caught myself thinking in negative loops, wondering how I’ll ever make it to see London or my partner again, how I’ll afford to pay rent and save for tickets, at the same time. I’d sit on Skype and cry, panicked that I’d never see the life I love so much again, panicked that it had somehow ceased to exist without my consent.

But one day, while chuckling at work in San Jose with an Egyptian coworker about her British beau, I began to feel less disconnected from my life in London. Suddenly, in the brief absence of panic, it dawned on my for the umpteenth time in my life; the heavy-weighted sadness, the anxiety elephant sitting on my chest, and the unpredictable, erratic trails of thought – this is all The Transition.

As anyone who has ever lived, studied, worked, or otherwise moved abroad will tell you, it teaches us so much about who we are, what we’re capable of enduring or achieving (or both) in ways that you could never imagine or anticipate without experiencing it. And as I’ve said before, returning to the homeland is an experience that we are equally unprepared for. But the lessons we can take from it can apply to so many different parts of our life.

While I was listening to my sweet friend share her anxieties about graduating and trying to negotiate her wanderlust wither her desire to be home with the pressure of suddenly making more serious life choices, I was thinking of my return from Dublin to California. It occurred to me that my transitions now (London to San Jose) were not all that different from my transitions then (Dublin to Santa Cruz). While I had realized this a thousand times over already, suddenly I was struck with the profundity and power of realizing that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do in a transition is recognize that in the grand scheme of things, what we’re grappling with can simply be reduced to a temporary Transition.

Because The Transition comes, always. Whether we’re aware or not. Whether we’re prepared or not. Whether we want it to or not. The Transition comes with death, when we have to readjust to life with the absence of someone we love. The Transition comes with life, when we have to readjust to life with the presence of a new (and sometimes exhausting, and sometimes incredibly rewarding) being to care for. The Transition comes when an opportunity arises that we’ve always wanted but feel not ready for, the fear of regret if we don’t take it and the fear of regret if we do. The Transition comes with failure, when we land face-first on the pavement in broad daylight in the middle of Times Square and have to stand up with millions of onlookers. The Transition comes with success, when we’re standing completely alone at the top of Mt. Everest and we have no where else to climb but back down the mountain and no one their to spot us while we do.

Why does this matter? Because it’s perspective. Knowing this elevates you out of where you are. Transitions like this often mean that we can’t see what’s ahead of us, which is precisely what makes it so difficult. Whether we are goal-oriented people or not, often times our “light at the end of the tunnel” comes from fixing our gaze on something that’s ahead of us and using that as a marker, so as to propel ourselves forward from where we are. But when you’re in a transition with no security in sight, moving aimlessly into an abyss can feel overwhelming. Understanding The Transition is important because it’s that understanding that allows us to let go of our fixed gaze and just rise above the overwhelm. We learn how to trust to process, have faith that we’re moving towards something, anything better than the insecurity and instability, and most importantly, to stop our anxieties from paralyzing us so much that we feel we can’t move in any direction.

I think what’s the most powerful about understanding this is learning the ability to let go of the future, experience the now and trust that you will be somewhere amazing again eventually. Whether this means literally in a Parisian flat kiddie-corner from the Louvre, or it means riding the emotional life-highs that come with reaping the rewards of long-term commitments, or taking some new risk (i.e. starting your own business, applying for a PhD, taking a new job that’s challenging you out of your comfort zone, or learning how to windsurf, insert-your-form-of-risk-here), you will experience some form of metaphysical bliss that is comparable to the bliss you felt living abroad. It will just take time and some adjusting to where you are now, because that’s how life works.

Yes, The Transition comes when you don’t expect it to, or maybe even when you don’t want it to. But sometimes, the things that come when we least expect them end up being the most rewarding periods of our life if we just open ourselves to the experience and give it a chance.

One of the hardest parts of being in the States has been accepting the distance between my partner and I. I’m not only missing the comforts of the life I’d built, but I’m missing the familiarity and the happiness I felt in the life I’d built with him. This was impossibly difficult for me to let go of. I’ve had a hard time even willing myself to look for ways to settle here, out of the pure fear that it will mean I will settle so much I never see him again. But after yet another conversation with another dear friend in a similar situation, I began to understand that this fear in itself was creating a pain so intense, it might have been the very destruction of everything we had built. So I let go.

Letting go is key to moving forward. When we tether ourselves to the past, we restrict ourselves to something that no longer exists and holding ourselves back from experience new things. When I let go of our past, our relationship reached another level of honesty, clarity, and effortlessness- and so did my life here. Jobs started falling into place, opportunities started popping up left and right; suddenly, life began forming its own direction around me that made sense only after I’d tread 1/4 mile of it.

I’m sharing this because no matter how many times I think I’ve mastered The Transition, it always comes back to teach me something new. But I only learn what it has to teach me when I’m open to it; when I don’t, I end up exhausting myself and earning wounds in the fight against it. What I’ve learned this time ’round is that actively changing your mindset almost entirely determines the outcome of that process.

So for now, I’ve moved towards taking the positive road and have made The Transition my friend. But how did I manage this? A few tangible changes I’ve made:

• Journaling – Each night, I write a little about my day. I include it all; the hard things, the painful thoughts, and at least one positive gratitude to keep it balanced. Writing seems to always release my inner tensions, and help reorient me to the present by somehow letting it go on that paper.
• Thinking and talking positive – Whilst in my worst phases coming home, I realized that I was turning lemons into stale, rotten ones by emphasizing the negative in my mind and poisoning my friendships with it. One day I got so tired of listening to myself b*tch that I finally just forced myself to turn around and keep it more positive. I don’t regret or feel guilty for the conversations spent in negativity, because trudging through the thick of the pain was part of the process that would have been seriously interrupted had I not shared it, but I am grateful that I managed to turn it around and get back on a good track, and that I did that through my relationships.
• Allowing nostalgia – At some point, like an old relationship, I started letting myself be nostalgic about London and all it entailed without feeling bad about it. I let myself just remember it for the sake of re-experiencing it in some small way, and without the guilt of feeling like I was inappropriately dwelling on something, I started to enjoy my little day-dream trips without them taking me too far away from where I was in the now. This was my less cliché version of “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
• Reading – I think one of the best hobbies I’ve picked up has been getting back into non-fiction. I randomly picked up “A Clock Without Hands” by Guy Burt at the library one day, on no basis other than that it was in the non-fiction section and that it was set in both London and Florence, two places I’d been during my U.K. stay. Reading this book, although it’s completely unrelated to anything I’ve read or done in the past few years, has been a sort of cathartic vacation-of-the-mind for me that reconnects me to my past in a way that kind of expands on it with new stories and adventures in the present.
• Volunteering – This is by far my favorite one. After months of struggling to find jobs anywhere doing anything, I basically said “Hey, f*&% you job market” and started giving my skills free to organizations I deemed worthy; refugee committees, community gardens, local non-profit art galleries, and of course, the Bacon and Beer festival. While this has provided me with some pretty cool opportunities (potential blogging jobs and job opportunities), the best part has really just been networking and creating a full life of activity and productivity that I have more jurisdiction and control over. And it just feels good. No one bosses around a volunteer because shit, you’re working for free!

So there’s my twopence. The Transition is a relentless son of a bitch who always comes round, but if you just don’t allow that to hinder your life experience, there are sage wisdoms to be taken from each The Transition’s many visits. The key is all in how you approach that.

So – what’s your key to dealing with The Transition?

In a recent post on LDRs (long distance relationships), I talked to all ye blog-folk about the ups and downs of being in a long distance relationship and what to ask yourself before committing. With the consent of my loved one, I want to go into more detail about what it means to be in one. I’m airing out my $h1z.

Being in a long distance relationship is one of the most painful forms of love I think one can experience, especially when your communication is limited. I thank the universe on the daily for modern-day technologies like Viber and Skype, because otherwise I think I would collapse entirely.

Like I’ve said before, one of the hardest parts of being in a long distance relationship is communication. Suddenly, your love languages and pet peeves are no longer your biggest concern; now it’s making time for each other, accounting for the time differences, making sure not to miss that Skype date, trying not to take it personal when you don’t hear from your extra-significant other for 5 hours, adjusting and bridging the gaps between it all with trust.

When my partner first left the States after our Christmas vacation, I fell apart. We took turns crying and comforting each other and promising we’d overcome the distance. I also promised him I wouldn’t watch him leave the airport, but then I hid crouched on the top of an escalator while 20 or so airport patrons eyed me suspiciously so I could watch him weave through security; I couldn’t handle the thought that I might a regret a single second I didn’t spend memorizing his face before he left. He wasn’t moving to New York for a temporary stint, or to Boston for graduate school, or abroad for a 2-year development contract; he was boarding a plane back to Europe indefinitely. Our pockets were empty and nothing was coming through the financial pipelines. We had no idea when, or if, we would ever see each other again.

Since that day, nothing has changed. Neither of us have jobs, we’re both struggling to put food on our tables and pay for a bed to sleep in. We’re literally a world apart, but yet we fight to figure out how to survive without letting go of the future we painted together in our head over the past year.

I feel like most of the blogs I read about long distance tend to gloss over the hard parts and convince you it’s going to be fine. No one talks about the fact that you’ll cry yourself to sleep (and sometimes, awake) for the next three months. No one tells you that you’ll pick a fight because your partner didn’t sign onto Skype exactly when you agreed to. No one tells you that every day will be its own test, or that every bump in the road will make you deeply question whether you’re both going to make it. You’ll remember how the hours spent physically together felt like minutes, but in your partner’s absence each day will suddenly feel like a year.

Going out feels like walking through jello with weights strapped to my feet. I try to tell myself that the only thing I can do is move forward until we move together, but every breath feels like a betrayal, and every step feels like it’s taking me further away from him and from our life together. Focusing on anything that doesn’t directly relate to going back feels impossible. Laughing with friends feels like one big fat lie. But despite all of this, giving up and moving on is absolutely inconceivable.

Sometimes it feels like a marathon race; each day we get through is a mile run with blistering, bleeding feet. My closest friends are my hydration stations, my best books are my gel blocks. When I try to read blogs and relate to an LDR community that tells me it will be okay, all I see are stories of people who knew when the distance would end and I’m reminded exactly how uncertain our future is. I try teasing apart the problems and walking myself through them one by one, but like a bad 80’s hairdo it’s just too much of a mess. Questions about when we’ll be together are tied to questions about my career choices (or lack thereof). The nostalgic ache I feel for his bad jokes and Greek recipes is the same nostalgic ache I feel for the River Thames and long rides on the Tube. You can’t separate the pain when it’s blended together in one long memory.

My typical Zen(ish) approach to problems doesn’t apply here, because “just be”ing doesn’t get me a job or a bank account stacked enough to buy my vacation back to London. There’s no guidebook for navigating endless long distance relationships, and there’s definitely no “Dude, I know exactly what you’re going through right now” when you’re returning from a year-long stint abroad to a city where almost nothing and no one has changed.

Now, while I recognize this subject diverges from my typical “international student life” theme, I can’t help but use this to give future students a fair warning of what falling in love with a European does to your soul when there’s an expiration date on your Visa. And selfishly, I can’t help but write this simply to ask for empathy from the people around me who don’t understand why I keep trailing off at the end of my sentences and/or staring out the window with a blank expression as lost as I am in my thoughts and/or breaking in to sudden and inexplicable sobs whilst junking on New Girl episodes or watching kittens on Facebook. Or at least just explain that last bit a little..

And thus, I close with a semi-appropriate quote written by someone I know absolutely nothing about outside of Wikipedia:

And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
-Khalil Gibran

Arguably one of the most difficult parts of picking up my life and moving 5,000+ miles across the Atlantic was leaving behind my network of “critical friends” and jumping into a less critical, more traditional world. I’m not going to lie, before leaving my comfortably leftist cocoon that is the Bay Area, I was afraid that somehow leaving behind my community would mean leaving behind my values, too. The experience begged the ever-unanswered question, how does one resist negotiating her hard-and-fast values without isolating the world around her? Ultimately I think the answer is going to look different for each of us, because it largely depends on what (or whether) you’re willing to compromise, what you’re hoping to gain from your experiences, and most of all why you’re on the move.

In the world of cross-cultural psychology, the consensus among researchers is that one’s culture largely dictates one’s set of values (though how and why culture determines this is still debated). Dr. Shalom H. Schwartz, one of the most revered and established cross-cultural psychologists in the field, has spent his career grafting one of the most widely referenced theory of values. His theory has led to research about how which values are important to each culture, to each gender, how they’re affected by political regimes and social movements. Time and time again, Schwartz’s theory has given us the tools to understand that each culture and/or nations emphasizes a different set of values, and has shed light on how this shapes our personal identities.

By now you might be thinking, what the hell does some Dr. Psych in the Middle East have to do with living abroad? Well, Schwartz’s value research is actually quite significant for those of us claiming to be global citizens because our values are essential pieces of who we are, increasingly so when we travel. While traveling inevitably exposes us to new values, the reasons behind our migration and the length of our stay really determines whether these values will stick.

Whether or not your migration is by choice, or whether or not you’re moving permanently, or whether or not you feel attached to your home culture are all things that affect what cross-cultural researchers call “acculturation” – in other words, adjusting to and “acting like” the new culture. (Mind you, the culture’s openness to accepting you and the level of prejudice you face is a whole ‘nother conversation.) In fact, a lot of research points to the fact that our age is a major determinant to; the younger you are when you (permanently) move, the more likely it is that your values might shift towards those of the new culture’s. All of this to say, for students who move abroad for the short-term (i.e. 1-5 years) it’s unlikely that your core principles are going under the bus on our way into town. Still, you will face some confrontation that can be both harsh and rewarding, and it’s good to be prepared for it.

Growing up, I was never one to passively accept the value systems imposed on me- half because I questioned everything, and half because I was a rebellious little sh*t on a mission (what that mission was, however, changed as often as my outfits.) Needless to say, I ended up falling in with the counterculture and rejecting most conservative mainstream American values. So for me, living abroad presented a bit of a challenge between trying to settle in without harshly negotiating my politicized values. More than this, though, it was a seriously beneficial opportunity because it gave me a chance to test my progressivism in a sea of new perspective and evaluate which held water and which didn’t (so to speak). For my own sanity (and arguably my own comfort), I made a point of it to network and build up my “critical friends” community early, jumping on board with a Feminist reading group and then registered for London’s Feminism Conference in 2013. For the most part, I just wanted to keep that part of my heart n’ soul active, but eventually I realized that despite the many similarities, feminism in Europe has a different face than that of the U.S; this was where the learning truly began.

As a feminist abroad, the arguments I once had about my social structures were stripped completely out of context. Countercultures by their nature often hold beliefs that oppose those of the mainstream, and politicized countercultures (i.e. feminism) often prioritize these beliefs based on the inequalities that their mainstream structures impose. The pathway to inequality is paved by each context’s sociopolitical history, and so the pursuit of social justice is dependent on the complexities of that history. As a West Coast native, I learned quickly the value of humility as a feminist in a new cultural context. Quite frankly, West Coast elitism just didn’t fit into the international equation because suddenly your once-limited world opens up to an almost startling depth of perspective when it comes to how deep the corruption runs in the veins of the earth’s politics, and you’re forced to reconcile your priorities with the priorities of those who now surround you.

In hindsight I wouldn’t say my values changed, but I would say that my experiences as a traveler and as an expat added some international insight to my feminist fanny pack (heh heh, get it Brits?) When you’re a student abroad, I (and several cross-cultural studies) would argue that you aren’t immersed in the new culture nearly long enough to completely alter or reverse the 20-something+ years of indoctrination your homeland has already done. But the experiences do give you perspective and the contrast needed to understand the full context of who, what, when, where, why, and how’s your value system came to be, which is critical for any human being’s personal development if you don’t want to walk through life an ignoramus.

So in sum, your values likely won’t change but might be altered slightly, but only in the sense that they improve based on that you’ve gained tremendously valuable (*pun intended) life experience to back it with. If you’re coming from a critical perspective, you don’t suddenly leave all of your beliefs sitting on the shelf back home while you rage like an Ivy League frat boy and reek havoc on your new environment; you take this mindset with you, and view everything from the eyes you always looked through.

For those of you who’ve traveled with a different, less political set of values, what are your experiences? If you’re a student who has moved abroad for a few years, what advice might you bestow upon the next generation of expats?