Brief musings from week three in the U.K.:
It’s been three weeks in the U.K. so far. A bit hard to believe, if you ask me.
When I applied to go on this semester-long adventure two years ago, I never anticipated the growth and change I would undergo in the time leading up to it. I had just turned twenty years old, and I thought my whole life started and ended in the Lee University stratosphere. It was really quite difficult to imagine myself living an ocean away, especially when I discovered the trip wouldn’t be happening for two years from my initial application due to COVID travel restrictions.
It was so easy, however, to build an image of Cambridge in my mind during the two years of waiting—how it would be, what it would look like, who I would meet, where I would get my coffee in the mornings and have my tea in the afternoons and buy my books. I even went through phases of apathy toward the experience, wondering if I would even still want to go when January 2022 finally arrived (thankfully, I did). Other opportunities arose that incited more anticipation, like YWAM this coming September. I dated two wonderful guys during that in-between period as well, and part of the reason they ended was that I knew, someday, that I would find myself here in Cambridge.
Not to be melodramatic, but I don’t believe I’ve fully let myself sit in this experience. Leaving one’s home for college is one thing, especially when that home is only an hour and a half away. But leaving one‘s home for three months right before college graduation to live in a foreign country where wifi is a landline and one’s entire life can be compacted into a suitcase? It’s scary. Even for someone who’s been itching to travel like this since middle school, even for someone who doesn’t consider herself a homebody, even for someone who‘s had one foot out of Tennessee since she applied for this trip.
I’ve never been somewhere for longer than a week where everyone in a given room doesn’t speak English and I pick up conversations in three different languages. You grow up in a place like I did, which isn’t a bad place but rather a homogenous one, and you don’t even realize how big the world is because you’re just living in your corner of it. Traveling, though, exposes you to multiple corners of the world, and you see just how massive the wardrobe actually is.
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