Regarding: Before November 5th, 2016
Hello hello and welcome (finally) to the official Bach’s Uganda Adventure Series. I feel like this blog has been a long time coming, and I have basically 3 months of updates to deliver. So let’s get to it!
For those who don’t know, I spent my summer before the Peace Corps studying for the LSAT, which I then took at the end of September. (It went well, thanks for asking.) After I finished the test, literally as soon as I finished the test, I was driven to the airport by my amazing mother to stay with my sister at college for the month before I departed. During that time I had the opportunity to spend time with her and my friends from Cornell.
Although sharing a room with your sister after you’ve both moved out can present its challenges, I will always remember that month as such a happy time in my life. It was a gift to have an entire month to visit Cornell/New York City, see the mock trial team, and spend time with all of the people that made the last 4 (or 23…) years of my life so wonderful. Following my time in the Northeast, I returned home for a hectic week of packing and saying goodbye to the friends and family who make Dallas home.
Which brings me to the first blog topic (drumroll please…): Saying goodbye!
Wooo!!!!
Ok here we go.
The day before I left Cornell, I was sitting at Starbucks alone, and I wrote the following in my journal:
“This will, possibly actually, be one of my few, fleeting "quiet" moments before the storm crashes. It's been coming up for so long now, and I'm about to actually take the plunge. I feel like I'm at the cliffs or about to get a shot, and even though I know it's going to be super exciting or for the best, the moments right beforehand are terrifying.”
Looking back almost a month later, I feel like that was a very apt description of what was about to happen. I had looked forward to Peace Corps almost my entire life: the adventure of living in a new country, meeting new people, being ‘on my own’ for such an extensive period of time. But I never factored in the emotional weight of the goodbyes that would precede that journey: goodbyes to friends, family, but also to a period of my life that was ending in order to make way for the next one to begin.
That final realization came to light during a drive I took with Lizzie during my month-long visit. Lizzie and I were driving to meet a friend, and I began to really notice the scenery around us. The leaves were changing colors and the trees looked brilliant against a wet, kind of grey horizon. I remember thinking that, when I first came, Ithaca was this completely alien place. I thought the trees and hills that surrounded everything were beautiful, but startling and made me feel claustrophobic. I was terrified of "the City". I missed my friends from AmeriCorps and my family in Dallas. I felt alone, across the country from everyone I knew.
And on this drive, I reflected how much now I was going to miss what had become my second home. I would miss the proximity to “the City”; the trees and the seasons and the cold, grey winters (though I could do without the snow). I would miss living with my sister, and all of the friends I had made. This had all become my new normal. And whereas saying goodbye to my friends and family was hard, in some ways it wasn’t as bad because I knew I would be back in two years to rekindle those relationships. But this time in my life -college and Cornell- it is something to which I'll never truly return. I'll never call Ithaca my home again. I'll never be an undergraduate again. I reflected on how wonderful these past four years had been, and how sad I was to leave them. As you might imagine, the drive was pretty silent.
That drive was my first introduction to what I would experience in the week leading up to Peace Corps: an intense, painful, in some ways irreversible separation from my old life and everything I loved. I can never go back to that time “before Peace Corps”.
The first goodbye happened a few days before I left Ithaca. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a mock trial practice, and mock trial had been my life as an undergraduate, so it was sentimental to be present at one last practice. I had such a good time getting to ‘re-live' the mock experience for an hour or so. At the end of the practice, my best friend from college and my former mock trial co-captain, the two current team captains (our former teammates), and I stayed behind in the Cornell law school talking about their team.
During those final moments, I saw, on the one hand, (part of) my old team. That made me happy in a nostalgic way, but it was more heartwarming to recognize that I was being given an opportunity to see two talented teammates-turned-captains take over and, for this batch of new members, become what I had tried to be for them. For me, there was something so meaningful about seeing that transition, and watching the tradition continue. After we were finished talking, I hugged both of them, and realized I was saying goodbye to Cornell mock trial.
In order to give a full picture of Peace Corps (and to really begin to portray the extreme emotions I’ve felt since joining Peace Corps), I want to explain how hard it was to say that first goodbye. That evening, I had my first grappling with the fear of leaving America. Fear of saying goodbye to a program in which I had invested myself for 4 years. Fear of what I would miss while I was gone: tournaments, graduations, alumni events. I thought regrettably that I would miss getting to know the new members and that, by the time I returned, everyone I already knew in the program would be scattered across America.
It made me sad realizing this kind of separation wouldn’t be gradual. That, that evening, I was in Ithaca and this organization was still a part of my reality, and when I came back, the mock team, for so long my team, the one activity that I really enjoyed and dedicated 4 years of my life to, would be irreversibly in my past. Of course, I could still donate and participate as an alumna. I could reconnect with those that had graduated. But, especially with my abrupt, extended exit, I would never have the same level of intimacy with the program that I had enjoyed for the past 4 years. As a recent graduate not quite at peace with being out of college, I found myself struggling with this finality.
But, as I soon learned, there was a finite amount of time to dwell on this first farewell… because I had a lot to get through.
I never anticipated that the onslaught of goodbyes would be a big deal. I was coming back in two years after all, and two years isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things. But, to my surprise, each goodbye seemed just as difficult and heart wrenching as the last until it became hard to remember why I was doing this to myself at all. It was during the goodbyes that it finally hit me of what I was giving up to be in Uganda. I was missing weddings of those I loved. I was putting a 9-hour time difference between myself and my entire support system -- making it almost impossible to have consistent communication for the next two years. I was going to come back to my closest friends after being estranged halfway across the world for two years. That reality set in as I hugged, for the last time, my sister. My friends from New York City. From Cornell. From Dallas. My dogs that would be put down before I returned home. My park family. My grandmother. My mom and dad.
And I wrote:
“Why am I doing this to myself? Is this experience really going to be worth all of this? I already did AmeriCorps, isn't that enough? I could be at law school in 7 months for crying out loud, why am I going to Africa?”
A valid point. One on which I often questioned myself as the week went on and the culmination of goodbyes made leaving harder and harder.
But, one of my final entries, a few days before I was scheduled to fly out to D.C. for staging (the first step in Peace Corps training), read roughly as follows:
“I know that every time I've gone to a new, scary location, it's always the leaving that's the hardest part. I know Peace Corps is going to totally suck at times. There are going to be times when I'm unbearably lonely and isolated. There will be times when I break down and cry or consider ETing (early termination).
And yeah. This week is just going to be a sad, nostalgic, emotional week. And I've come to terms with that. I think it would be stupid to just be excited about Peace Corps without acknowledging all of the other emotions that come with leaving the States for 2 years. I think it would be a mistake not to acknowledge that it's a transition and, as excited as I am about what's to come, I'm also sad about what I'm leaving.
But, as scary as it is, and as many bad things as I anticipate dealing with, I'm just hoping that there are going to be a ton of good things to make up for it. And I'm sure there will be.
Because I know, once I'm on the plane, the adventure is going to start.
And I'm going to be ready.”
My parting thoughts on this topic: saying goodbye showed me how much I love and how much I am loved. It made me stop to acknowledge and appreciate each relationship that makes my life as vibrant and meaningful as it is. It gave me an excuse to tell people how I feel about them and let them know that they are important to me.
But saying goodbye was hard. And when I talk to people from home, I’m reminded of just how much I’m missing.
On an uplifting note, you can all rest assured that Peace Corps was worth that miserable week and the moments of homesickness here. I’m already dreading the goodbyes to my Peace Corps family, and I can’t imagine my life without the relationships I’ve found here.
A quote to consider in closing:
“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard”
- Winnie the Pooh/A. A. Milne
Thank you, to each of you, that made saying goodbye so hard.
How lucky am I.
