I know all you Les Mis fans are waiting for me to say "I'm Jean Valjean!" but I wasn't going to. Close, but no cigar.
I am terrible at this whole "Blog while you're abroad" thing. So here I am, half way through my semester in England. I could cry at how fast it's going. It's slipping through my grasps, but the lessons I am learning while I'm here are sticking. That's a good thing, right?
I really love my class "Writing from the Self". I originally thought it was going to be how to write fiction through our own experiences. Flip that. It's writing about your own experiences through fictions. Sounds like the same thing, but it's not. I'm learning how to impact a reader through my own life. One exercise we had to do this past week was to write about a cultural moment in our past. I picked the song "Yeah" by Usher because it immediately brought me back to 6th grade. Ah, that lovely year of grade school. I had a purple CD player that always had either "The Best of John Williams" or the soundtrack to "The Phantom of the Opera" inside. The counselor I frequently saw told me that I was "much more mature" than the rest of my class. I was harassed like crazy. My entire class was made up of the 'cool kids', and I was the token weirdo. And I will admit, I was really weird. I mean, what 12 year old listens to movie music, loves playing a French Horn (not the cool instrument of a flute or trumpet) and carries around Colonel Robert Gould Shaw's letters? That book didn't leave my side. It was dirty, beaten up and perfect. It was my escape.
I put all these things together with a now-comical-at-the-time-it-wasn't- moment when a young boy was walking in front of me in line singing "Another One Bites the Dust". He turned around and sang it in my face. "Do you know what that means Emma? That means you killed our hamsters."
These two hamsters had gotten loose some how, and everyone blamed me because I was the last one by the cage. Who knows if I shut the cage door all the way. But I felt so angry and hurt that I vowed I would make these kids remember who I was in a GOOD way. They would 'like me' someday. I was that weird kid who loved the Civil War. I was going to prove to them that it was important. History was important. And in a way, I did. Now studying at Gettysburg College, I wouldn't have become who I am today without those kids. I wouldn't have grown up into the Civil War historian, nor a lover of soundtracks. I held tightly to my weirdness, which I'm very thankful for. There are people who try to change who they are just so they can fit in, yet they lose vital pieces of themselves in the process. I fought to the nail against that, and it took me to travel across the world to realize that these little tidbits of my life can become comical relief yet a release of my past to my readers.
However, not all self-discovery is pleasant. After being here for a little bit over a month, my boyfriend's best friend passed away back home. I have never seen him so devastated. The pain of losing someone so close to you changes who you are, but also watching this pain unfold invites reflection. Listening to his regrets and the natural guilt of friends drifting apart made me realize the saying "Live life to the fullest" isn't just a cheesy saying we put on folders or hang in our households. Fear holds us back from so much, yet why are we afraid? We must live to our fullest potential. I know, after this all came out, I reached out to a drifted-apart-friend. I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say when you haven't spoken in months? There was a feeling of loss; loss of words, loss of time. Yet I didn't want to regret anything, so I went for it. I made contact. I expressed the truth. Was it hard? Yes. But I knew that's what I wanted to do.
Since my love is returning home for the service, I ask for everyone to keep him in your prayers. To the his family, I only send my deepest sympathies.
So who am I? I am a woman shaped by my past, by my friendships and my life experiences. I am strong, yet I know I have my weaknesses. With the rest of my semester here in England staring me in the face, I want to push myself. Go visit other countries. Try more food. I have finally gotten addicted to tea, which is new! Cherish the people I have here, but also the people I left back home. Hold my love as he braces the changing future.
I am who I am.
