When I think about the person I was this time last year I am absolutely blown away by the person I am today. They’re two distinctly different individuals; if I met last year’s me on the street I don’t think I would recognize her. I feel stronger, more self-aware, better able to handle the crap life feels like throwing at me. It’s reassuring, if anything, the fact that I can change so much for the better in just a year’s time. Rekindles my faith in humanity.
I am so excited for this Wednesday. I can’t wait to be free for the summer, free to work on me, to work out and clean house and hang out with my family and just spend time with myself, getting to know this person that thankfully today I feel more in touch with than ever before. But there’s still so much to learn about myself and I’m thrilled by the thought of being given a chance to discover as much of it as I can.
Most of the time I feel like I have my life pretty well figured out. I know the kind of person I want to be, and the kind of person I want to be with. I know where I want to live. I know what degree I want to eventually earn. I know my strong suits, my weaknesses. But one thing is missing, and it’s a key ingredient: I have no idea what I want to do.
I know, I know. No one said I’m supposed to have that figured out, especially this early in the game. Statistics show that I will most likely go through at least three major career changes in my life, if not five. Nothing is for certain or even permanent, even if I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But that’s not the point. The point is that even though I have a pretty good idea of the things I potentially could do for a career, I have no idea what it is that I want to do. What am I passionate about, enough so to devote my life to doing it? That’s a great question, one I honestly don’t know the answer to, though I feel like I spend every waking moment thinking about it. How does one figure that out, anyways?
Heimweh. The feeling I have when I think of Germany is definitively homesickness, but it’s more than that – it’s a very physical, very real hurt: a pang in my chest, an ache in the pit of my stomach, a sort of swirling swooning in my head as my heart begins to race.
The first semester of my senior year – my first semester back at Denison after my semester in Freiburg – I would wake up sometimes after having spent the whole night dreaming of Germany, of staring out the train window at all those mountains and all those green fields glistening under all that sunshine, of riding the tram to class, of the Dreisam’s lazy gurgle, of speaking that language I love more than my mother tongue, of the feel of the words on my lips, and I would open my eyes and look around and be smacked in the face with the realization that I’m in Ohio and I would actually have to fight back tears.
Leaving Germany behind was like a break-up, but the worst kind of break-up, the kind you never really seem to get over, the kind you replay over and over again in your head until it ends up being all you think about. Though as a senior German and English double-major I spent half of my life speaking and writing and thinking in German, I learned how to detach my homework from the memories. I avoided pictures and buried myself in my education. I learned to swallow my homesickness and instead keep working towards the goal of somehow returning.
My biggest weakness is relationships. Whether familial, friendly, or romantic, the relationships I have with others are and always have been a major priority in my life. I tend to hold them higher than all other responsibilities, and I often allow them to overshadow the other aspects of my life. I don’t necessarily believe this is unhealthy; I’m a people-person, and though I know I’m a strong individual in my own right, I am happiest when I’m around others and my interactions with them bring out the best in me. So though sometimes I feel as though I will die if I don’t make it back to Germany someday, when I think about my family, my friends, my boyfriend, I immediately fear the hole they would leave behind in my life, one approximately the size Germany left behind, and I feel like I have to choose. I let that fear get the best of me once before, but I’ve learned my lesson and I will never let myself make that mistake again.
I feel like I am consistently putting other people first, but this is something I have to do for me, because I will forever regret it if I don’t, and that is something I cannot ignore. The people who really matter will still be here when I come back, and I cannot wait to go back to the place that has felt more like home to me than any other in the world.
From my Freiburg journal: “I just know that I can’t live here like this, learn the language, feel so at home here – only to leave and never come back.”
