The New Normal

The visa appointment was one of the most stress-inducing twenty-four hours of my life. First, I missed the first two trains to DC I was going to take because of traffic, and leaving Union Station, the road I needed to get to was blocked from an accident. Then, at the consulate the next day, the man taking the forms didn’t seem to have had his coffee that morning (he was mean, to say the least).

But, alas, I did it. I dropped off all the forms, paid the fee, gave France a scan of my fingerprints, and left them with my passport. They’ve returned it to me with a little sticker that allows me to enter their country, and all of the sudden, everything is becoming much more real. My departure is getting closer and closer, so much so that I can actually visualize it now. Thirty days are all that remains, and life feels like a dream, like I’m in limbo between two concrete ideas: school and study abroad. Whatever I’m in now doesn’t feel real anymore.

I know I’m going into the philosophical deep end here, but I can’t stop thinking about the passing of time. I was talking about this with a longtime friend at dinner a few weeks ago. We were discussing how strange it was that different eras of our lives were over. I essentially ranted to her about how bizarre it was to me that we lived through all these experiences and that we couldn’t go back to them. But that’s just a fact of life. I have to get over that part. And I’m not averse to change: I welcome newness. It’s the ‘oldness’ that I have a difficult time letting go of. It’s these norms that I can’t let escape me, the things we get used to that construct our daily lives. They are the things we trust will happen every day, and we often take them for granted because we become so used to them.

Growing up together, my friend and I happened to go to the same school for most of our lives. When she and I became friends in middle school, the norm was seeing each other every day, eating lunch together and hanging out at recess. Then we went to high school, the same one, but we ran in different circles. The norm had changed. Now, living in separate cities and attending different schools, our norm has become coffee dates (maybe, if our breaks overlap and we’re both home) and FaceTime calls and Snapchat streaks. Maybe that’s how things will go for the rest of our lives. Maybe this is our new normal.

Fast forward to now, and I’m a college student with more semesters behind me than I have left to go. Until now, I’ve relied on the fact that I’ll have classes and side work to take up my life, and that I will live in a dorm surrounded by my friends and see my family around once a month. I’ve learned how to maximize my time here, to be as efficient as possible academically and socially (they say college is a triangle of school, social, and sleep and that you can only pick two, but I’ve tried my best to “have it all” like the true Millennial woman I am)- and how to talk about the future. “Yes, I’m going abroad in the spring. Yeah, I’m going to Paris. I know! It’s so exciting. I’m so excited.” I’ve been an adult in training for so long that it’s become second nature. This is my New Normal. This is my life. There is routine, and in that routine, there is safety. But there is no routine in Paris. At least, there won’t be any right away. I will have to learn how to be a real adult (and I’ll have to do it all in French), and part of me still wants to crawl under the covers at the idea of becoming A Real Adult. There will be a new normal in Paris, too, a prospect that excites me as much as it frightens me- as much as I felt comfortable talking about the future (“I’m studying abroad in Paris! I can’t wait!”), I always saw studying in Paris as the furthest thing in the future that I could plan for. It shocks me every day that I’m this close to something I’ve been talking about for so many years, and it shocks me in equal amounts that it will actually end, too.

And now I feel like life will be divided into two new parts: life before Paris and life after Paris. I know that it seems like I’m putting such high expectations on these five months (ask any of my friends- I am the queen of high expectations), but my expectations aren’t for anyone but myself. I want to learn from my surroundings, and I want my environment to change how I understand the world because everything I learn about France will also be something I learn about America and how I was raised. It happened to me on a domestic level when I started college (I learned how much growing up in the conservative South impacted how I interact with society), and it’s only going to happen more.

So, life will be divided into another category, another era- the “Post-Study Abroad,” also referred to as the “Where You’re Really Annoying Because You Can’t Stop Complaining About How Much You Miss France And How America Is Nothing Compared To The Culture You Experienced Across The Ocean” era.

I will have to learn how to come back to America and pick up the norms I’m leaving behind, carrying more knowledge and a new way of understanding the world I live in. And, honestly- because we’re always honest here on the abroad blog- I’m kind of frustrated by that. I feel like I’m having a second coming-of-age (as if the first round wasn’t difficult enough) where I’m learning what it means to live outside the home I grew up in, to live apart from my family and transition into adulthood. And as soon as the ‘college life’ started to feel normal and I was starting to get a hang of things, I’m moving myself across the world and starting the ‘goodbye home’ process all over again. And when I return, I’ll be full of new experiences and knowledge and expect everything to be the same, but my life will essentially have been on hold for six months while everyone else moved on.

There will always be a New Normal. This will be what I have to get used to. And, hopefully, it will be much less anxiety-inducing than whatever hellish norm I’m in now. Isn’t that the good thing about new norms? You can let the bad things fall aside. Some things aren’t meant to travel with you forever.

#before #predeparture