Temporary
My musings on what it means to leave a life behind in a foreign country.
This blog was originally written in June 2016, just three weeks before I would leave Santiago, Chile after almost 13 months studying abroad. I am slowly making my way through old blog posts to rescue memories and stories that feel important and bring them back into my canon. Reading through my university blog, which captures memories of my time in Chile and working with Operation Wallacea in Fiji, I am struck by two things:
- I was thinking about many of the same things then as I am today. I have found a few blogs that are almost copies of articles I’ve written on here but did not consult between the two before writing.
- I felt — and still feel — uncomfortable with my own vulnerability online. My words on my younger blog are much more personal than I feel I share on here, but at the same time, I constantly undermine myself, talking about how unimportant, or annoying, or irrelevant my thoughts are. It strikes a pang into my heart to see my younger self beat herself up unnecessarily. As I share these stories, I will be editing them slightly to remove the self-bashing, for the sake of improved flow, growing up, and a pact with myself to stop the self-censorship.
I have found that I relish in reading my old blogs. I have always kept a journal while traveling until I started blogging, so opening this familiar site feels like peeling open my notebook with the smells of the place I visited still trapped inside. I can viscerally remember the emotions of exploring these new places, places that are now familiar to me. After three years of living in Chile — which young Sophia never knew she would do in this blog — I realized I had forgotten what had once been strange to me when I moved there.
Reading my old blogs has reminded me not to blunt my curiosity as a way of protecting myself from culture shock and pain. As I am starting to travel again post-Covid, I wanted to remind myself of that, so I am sharing one of my favorite pieces of prose from the blog to start.
I’ve finally gotten to the point where my time in Chile feels temporary. If you’ve ever heard the song “Breathe” by Anna Nalick (a song that emotional and angsty middle school Sophia used to sing karaoke-style at sleepovers with tears in her eyes), you will get my reference when I say I feel like “life’s like an hourglass glued to the table.” I am watching the life I worked so hard to make real and full turn into a memory. I’m trying hard not to do it. Like everyone else, I’ve gone through my fair share of transitions and changes, leaving behind cities, friends, and stages of my life.
Some tell me to get used to it since the only constant in life is change. But I know that the first part of the change is painful, that the edge is raw, that the last weeks before the shift are tinged with thoughts of never again or just one last time. The first few weeks or months after — be it in a familiar place or a new one — are stained with moments that I wish I could share with someone from a different panel of my life, someone far away. Eventually, this feeling fades; the people that are physically closest pull themselves into my life, and the ones far away go from a daily chat, to a weekly hello, to a yearly happy birthday. Still, there remain a few odd wonderful humans that stick around, no matter the distance or time, that can be counted on for the deepest secrets, that are willing to Skype at any hour, and that will always have a couch available when I am able to visit next.
I like to think of my understanding of this process as sadness mixed with experience. I know what is coming, and though the fading process is actually rather painless, it is painful to think about. I went through this process to a lesser degree when I moved to Chile more than 11 months ago. I knew I would be back at university someday, but that day was far off in the distance compared to the immediacy of what I would be living in Chile.
It still took a long time before the first people I reached to when I was sad would be Chilean friends. Though I had a Chilean boyfriend, whom I obviously reached to in tough moments, I frequently found my ties dragging me back to the United States, where I looked for comfort in people that knew me well or even my American companions here in Chile.
Perhaps naïvely, I came to Chile with the idea that I would isolate myself from Americans and throw myself into a mosh pit of Chileans who would obviously immediately love me and make me feel at home. Instead, I was embarrassed when I went back to the US and couldn’t rattle off the names of all my amazingly close Chilean friends after my first five months in Chile. It had been my plan to try to meet Chileans, and still, I had ended up nestled close to Americans because it was comfortable. My hiking buddies, travel partners, and party companions were mostly from my home country, no matter how hard I tried to push my way into Chilean social circles. In retrospect, friendship can’t be forced and the second half of my study abroad proved that Chileans were there and ready to be friends as soon as I stopped trying so hard.
As a result, the next five months have been different. I feel like I dove under the surface and kept swimming down and down not worrying about my tank running out, or about getting the bends when I came back up. I spent five months like Dory, blindly swimming downward because that was the only option. And here I am looking up at the sparkling surface high above and wondering how I am supposed to gently float back up without causing myself pain.
Today, I feel at home in Chile. I made myself comfortable in the deep water, even if I’m always going to stick out. I still get laughed at when I say conchesumadre and probably always will. But the point is that Chile hasn’t felt all that temporary until recently, when I saw that I had two weeks plus a little 6 day goodbye period left in Santiago. I will be traveling and working for almost all of July, so even though August still sounds far away, it’s not.
The point of this blog is that once again I’m scared. I’m scared to leave the people that are now the first ones I call when something has gone right or wrong. I’m scared of heading back to “real life” in the United States, and I’m scared of thinking that this wasn’t or isn’t real life. My life here is a happy one so it is logical that I’m afraid to uproot myself.
A few of my Chilean friends ask me if I am sad leaving people behind every time I change places. Of course I am! I’m an emotional person and I get deeply attached to people and places, more than I care to admit. Even as I try to remain positive, I am heartbroken to be leaving. Every day here now means floating one foot closer to the surface, looking up at the sky and knowing I can’t stay down here forever, but feeling the agony of leaving behind a place I have made comfortable as my body inches ever further away.
I asked for this. If it didn’t hurt to think about leaving Chile, then I would think I hadn’t done it right. I’m not done here yet, but I finally see that I am on my way out. I am so grateful to the people I have met here for showing me what it is to live a happy, balanced life, in a way that I feel I have never been able to in the US, for whatever reason. I hope I’ll be back.
