My Final, Rambling Thoughts On My Summer

Contrary to popular belief, you can run away from your problems with few ill effects. Now, whether said problems still linger once you return, that’s a discussion for another day. But I can vouch for the first statement being true – there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting away for a while in order to set your mind right.

That’s exactly what this trip to England was for.

I applied for the International Summer School at Sussex out of desperation for change. Jumping into the application process was one of the most spur-of-the-moment risks I’ve ever taken, a move nowhere in my mind at the start of the year but now one I couldn’t be happier about. I had resigned myself to not studying abroad during my college career. But then…I needed to get away for a bit.

I try not to think back much on the past year – I felt pretty low for most of it – so I feel no need to revisit the myriad issues that piled on me. I’ll leave that where it belongs. But this summer program became my one hope, the thing I turned to when I felt especially down to bolster my spirits. I honestly thought I had no chance of being accepted, that something would go wrong and I’d be stuck in Evanston over the summer. Somehow, it didn’t – I got in, and everything seemed a little brighter.

The wait could be a bit excruciating. Some days, I forgot about the summer completely, too bogged down by the present to really get excited for much. But I got by. I buried myself in work to pass the time (strangely enough, my fondest memories of junior year come from nights spent working in McTrib until 4 or later). And it passed, slowly but surely.

I finally got to England. And…well, there are 88 other entries that should offer some insigt into how my time across the Atlantic has been. If you are too lazy, though, I’ll sum it up; oh-so-great.

I’m leaving England Saturday morning, going into transit once again as I fly back over the ocean (and pray for a better movie, I still can’t get over the wretchedness of 27 Dresses) then spend a few hours in Cleveland’s airport before finally arriving back in California. I don’t really want to leave, as there is so many more cities and sights to observe, but everyone in my dorm goes on and on saying the same thing. It’s like the whole building caught the flu, but we’re puking up melancholy. I’ll get better soon enough.

I didn’t come to England on some grand transformation mission. I’m boarding my Continental flight tomorrow the same person who came to England back in June. No revelations or shake-ups or bodily scars. Just some new CDs and an (hopefully) improved British accent.

I did learn some valuable lessons worthy of at least a mediocre after-school special. England may not differ incredibly from America, but living in even a slightly changed culture (vinegar? on fries? I never!) offers new ways to view the world. Being in Brighton has made me come to appreciate a lot of American fixtures I once ignored (passive seagulls, Taco Bell, bathrooms that don’t cost money to get into) while exposing me to all sorts of customs and actions I’ve never seen before, or even seen parodied on The Simpson’s. Not to mention the even more radical shift in life I witnessed in Paris and Rome.

I even reaped some good lessons from my fellow American students. Being surrounded by engineering students from California offerred an interesting chance to put my student life in a new perspective. Unlike the openly competitive and intense journalism majors I know, most engineers operate in a more sneaky, low-key way to better one another. They don’t gloat about anything, they keep victories a secret. Strange. But, at the same time, they don’t take academic life too seriously. I didn’t hear any murmurs about “internships” or “class selections” or even “the future.” The people here lived calmly in the moment, breezing through classes and fitting in as many booze-filled nights on the town as possible. It was like attending a stereotypical “state school,” not like the Old School approximation of Northwestern. Everyone told me their schools back home were nothing like this, so maybe they also saw England as a fit place to go wild. Regardless, I just appreciated an atmosphere where I wasn’t freaking out every other hour of the day.

I could rattle on-and-on about the summer, about the sights and the people and the rocky beaches. All those sentences, though, reach the same conclusion; I had a blast, and learned a lot about the world around me and the people in it, and how I want to see more of Earth. Why waste the space? And more minutes I could be sleeping?

But, above all else, my time in England offerred one reward greater than all the others. Back in Evanston over the past six months, I doubted myself and revisited every painful incident in my recent memory, dissecting it in an effort to find the reasons they seemed to go wrong. In Brighton, I’ve become calm again, confident in who I am and what I do. Call it time marching on, but I don’t think about the past (and all the miscues litterring it) anymore, and when those thoughts do creep in, I know how to deal with them. Just being somewhere far away from the places that once terrified me has helped me mellow out, and helped me gain control over the things that once irked me out of my mind.

Over the past year, I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve seen more states and cities in the past 12 months than I did in my entire life up to that point. I drove through the Southwest, flew into New York City and explored various pockets of the Midwest. All those times, though, felt like I was searching for something, some sort of On The Road like awakening that would help me make sense of my life. I never found anything. It was only when I stopped looking and got away, though, did I find anything.

If I never write another heavy-handed sentence in here again (which, I assure you, I won’t stop doing), I’d sum up my English summer like this; for the first time in years, I’m genuinely happy to stare down the unknown, and am just genuinely happy all-around.

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With Brighton in the books, this journal enters a sort of transitionary stage. For the next two-and-a-half weeks, I’ll be back in California, in the barren but sorta-charming desert of Acton. During this time, I will attempt to readjust to life in America. This is the calm before the storm that will be my trip to Florida and my first brushes with one of my fiercest foes, a journalistic career.

The journal now gets a redesign for the occassion. Thank you for reading so far.