Life for me is about to implode.
It has for several of my closest friends already.
To summarize, and to leave out my passionate anger: It is now nearly impossible for an american M.A. student, who studied in the UK, to live in the UK once studies are completed. After six employment opportunities came and abandoned me because of the paperwork I am headed back to New York after a year and half of building my life in London.
While this blog is primarily for my writing, there is just one point on all of this that I feel quite strongly about today. One I want write down so once I’m feeling the weight of change back in my parent’s home, I’ll be able to try pull myself back up.
In life there are things we cannot control. Challenges come up and it’s how we choose to face them that matters in the end. Once I was always on the optimistic side. It became harder as my time in London began to show me every angle of life from dealing with stress, handling the sharp edge of depression and love. There were so many things I discovered about myself here from these hard times that when I return home I know I’ll feel like a stranger to the most familiar things in my past.
This has happened to me before, if on a smaller scale.
However – even during the hardest moments, there was a reason to smile. The support of friend and family, or the surprise of a rare sunny day.
In the end everything was worth it.
Today, I realized I’ve lost the smile when handling tough situations. I’ve forgotten that the hard stuff makes everything else matter. Rather, each set back feels like I’m falling into a deeper black pit of unknown. But this isn’t right. Our lives are changing. Everyone’s lives are changing. And for those who choose to explore the world, to live in new countries and cultures, life has no choice but to be unsettled. You may fall in love with a place and with its people, but their governments have control over your right to stay. If you can accept the adventure, you have to find a way to cope with this as well.
I’m not saying I have found a way to cope – I haven’t. But this is the reality of the situation. It’s crucial to comprehend this reality in order to let go. To put this all away in order to see that there will always be another adventure. The end, is never the end. Something I have discovered many times.
Leaving, doesn’t mean you can never go back.
Things change.
Everyday it’s up to us to either wake up with the fight to smile or to ease into a frown. I know it will be hard, but I’m the optimist, (or at least I used to be). This doesn’t mean my heart isn’t hurting. London has become my home and it is (was) filled with people that I have fallen in love with. I am very sad. I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want to get on what will be the hardest flight of my life up to this point. My guilt already exists for the person sitting next to me on that day. And, I want people to know this, so as I begin to start my life again they don’t ask me sympathetically, “How are you coping?” I want to be asked, “So, what’s next?”
Because – I have an answer for that question.
What’s next is I will continue to move forward with a smile. I will be with my family. Family that has spent more time driving to airports than anyone should for a person. Family who understood what it
means for me to be here until the end trying to make this work, but more importantly to have a few more minutes in London to grow. I will be closer to the friends I picked up in middle school, unaware that we would grow into each others rocks. Friends that are taking time and money from their lives to fly to London to bring me home for the last couple weeks in March. I am going to spend the summer in the hot American sun plotting my next move. I’ll spend time skyping friends from all over the world as if we’re sitting in some Kingston pub on the river. I’ll work on my book, read a book, kayak, sleep, sort out my self-inflicted vitamine issues, play with my parent’s new puppy, figure out how to make a lot of money really fast and anything else that comes to mind. Anything that will stop a stupid piece of paper, that dictates where I can live, have anymore control over my happiness.
When I look at my pictures from the last year, I won’t be thinking ‘I miss that.’ Instead, I’m going to force a smile and think, ‘I did that.’
I’m sad. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be optimistic.
xx, Kristin
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