Coping With Post-Study Abroad Blues
What do you do after your flight back home?
by Ashley Duong
Preparing for study abroad felt as vivid as living abroad: all the vlogs on my YouTube recommended, the Pinterest boards I made to funnel my excitement, and my endless to-do lists in various notebooks. The anticipation was electric, its own special part of the study abroad process.
Yet, with all this preparation, I never prepared for the hardest part: the moment it ended. I was lucky enough to study abroad in London for four months and postpone the inevitable end by visiting family on the outskirts of Paris. Of course, that week ended, along with my boundless freedom and European escapades. After an eight-hour flight, I was sitting in my father’s truck with my newly dyed red hair and filling him in on my adventures, subconsciously finding some way to relive my life merely two weeks ago.
I rode this high of keeping the memories fresh through translation for a week or so, seemingly splitting my mind into two universes: the present day in Connecticut and my past in London. And for a while, it worked.
Yet, delaying the inevitable means the fallout becomes gut-wrenchingly worse, sneaking up on me on a fateful day when all my desires to relive the past four months coerced a pit in my stomach, my heart beating to the realization that there is no going back. Even if you visit your study abroad home again, you’ll never be 20 years old, walking through the streets of London, wondering if life could get any better. I ached to be that version of myself again. I yearned for all the spots I fell in love—with myself and with life.
The mundane of suburban Connecticut felt painfully suffocating and boring. I wasn’t prepared for my ceiling of life experiences to be broken and left confused about how to fix it.
The difficulty with moving forward is it adds to the physical and emotional distance between you and your home away from home. The time passed makes it feel more and more like a dream, like this temporary blip in time that you wish you could hold in your hands. You want to stop time so it doesn’t become even more distant. But, there is a privilege in knowing that something will end, becoming forcefully gratuitous for moments that haven’t happened yet. And you slowly realize that living abroad was special due to its temporary nature, that because the feelings were fleeting, you held onto every moment until your knuckles turned white.
When the feelings of missing abroad resurface, I let myself sit in them. I flip through my study abroad journal, running my fingers over the words I feel permanently inked into my heart, and look through my photos, smiling at each memory seared into my mind. While I can’t go back, there is beauty in memory, that a place affected you to such an extent that you could explain the layout of the nearest tube station in your sleep, or remember exactly how it felt sitting by the Thames as the sunset. Your study abroad experience will always stay with you, no matter how much time has passed, and I find it to be, paradoxically, the best way to cope with study abroad ending: knowing that it will never end if you don’t let it.
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