Readjusting after coming home from exchange

Graphiv by Kash Patel

In a lot of ways, I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite as out-of place as I do now.

A few short months ago, I was spending my weekends gallivanting around Britain to various stage plays and museums, mostly for free through my work with University of Birmingham’s student newspaper, Redbrick.

Now I spend my weekends in Waterloo, desperately attempting to catch up on some much-needed sleep and finding a moment to visit my parents.

I often find myself daydreaming of the simplest things that I experienced when I was abroad. The treks to and from the Guild of Students — their version of the Students’ Union — to meetings several times a week seemed a hassle at the time, but has now become the centre of my everyday wants.

Even the struggles I had with my mental health when I was abroad seem to be sugarcoated now that I’m back to my regular life in Waterloo.

Though I would certainly recommend exchange to anyone who is considering studying abroad, it’s bittersweet coming home.

My heart, my brain, my life is torn between the two countries and I no longer feel like I belong fully in either of them.

I fell in love with Birmingham, the United Kingdom and the culture there at large. I fell in love with the freedom and the more relaxed schooling system, despite the high quality learning from a world-class institution.

Everything seems so mundane now, and seeing the photos from my exchange friends — some still in Birmingham, others graduated and off across new countries of their own, like Germany and Italy — only makes my life seem even more boring in comparison.

I feel like I’m at the part of my story where Frodo returns to the shire or when Harry Potter is standing at the platform 19 years later.

It’s the return home that’s supposed to resolve all of the conflict from the journey, but instead, it’s impossible to imagine them simply making coffee or going to work. Because they’ve experienced so much, it’s impossible to imagine them how they were before.

I hope for each of us that we all never reach our peak and we all keep climbing. I hope that those things we cling to will stay fondly with us as we seek out new adventures we couldn’t even dream of right now.

In short, I’m afraid that I’ve peaked. I’m afraid that my semester abroad was the most exciting thing that I will ever do in my life, and I will continue to look back on those six months as the most important and adventurous I will ever have.

That scares me a lot. I always want to believe that the best parts of my life are still ahead of me, but that’s hard to believe when it seems everything that I want is in the past. On top of that, peaking because of a semester abroad seems to come only second to peaking in high school in terms of the “basic” scale.

Straddling the end of our years here at Laurier, for a lot of us the future is completely uncertain. Like our sports editor, Pranav, wrote in his editorial last week, our university years are the best of our lives that we know of so far.

It’s also hard to see the future from where we stand right now, and with so much uncertainty, I think it’s easy for all of us to latch onto something familiar that we love. Whether that’s a club, a publication, or an exchange experience.

I hope for each of us that we all never reach our peak and we all keep climbing. I hope that those things we cling to will stay fondly with us as we seek out new adventures we couldn’t even dream of right now.

I don’t have any of the answers right now, but I’m sure they’ll come as I look back on this chapter on my life.

If you too feel like you’re in the epilogue of your life, I implore you to keep reading. University — your club, your publication, your study abroad experience — is an amazing chapter, but we all have so much ahead of us, even if we don’t know what that is.

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