Kade Bryant: Intersellar Connections
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| The View from St. Catherine's Hill |
It was past the mid-way point through my study abroad experience when my homesickness decided to kick in. Why it decided then and not during a time like my first day when I had to navigate through London alone with no cell service I will never know. However, one of the many ways I deal with my emotions in the times when I am upset is I will stop what I am doing and just take a walk.
On the 24th of November, a night I will never forget I had had enough of the sitting in my room wishing one of my friends from back home would text or video chat me. So, I had texted my friend Alicia, who was an UK native, and asked her if she wanted to take a walk like we had done so many times before, but sadly she was set up in her room doing her revisions for her final exams. At that point I had to decide if I was going to sit in my room and watch the Big Bang Theory again after already completed all 10 seasons of it during my first two weeks there, or just go off on the adventure myself.
Well it dawned on me that if I just sat there and tried to watch Netflix that I would more than likely go insane, so I chose the adventure. Now I had made my way out of my room across campus and through the notorious graveyard one has to walk through to get to town, and trekked forward to the place all the locals referred to as the viewpoint. The actual name of the area was St. Catherine’s Hill, and when I saw the one tree and park bench, I didn’t think there was anything special about it. However, the real magic is when you sit on that park bench and can see for miles, almost all of Winchester lit up with the night.
I had taken my pictures and sat looking at the city to try and calm down when I noticed something that doesn’t happen very often in England, the clouds were breaking showing off the stars above me. Now as you have probably already figured out the stars make me feel at home, for some reason starring at them brings me peace, but what happened next, I never had expected. I spent the next 30 minutes looking for any constellations that I might have known from home and was on the brink of giving up when I saw the one that made my night so much better.
Right across the horizon line sat the Big Dipper. These seven stars teleported me back across those 4000 miles, and I spent the next hour sitting on my front lawn starring at the stars. After that night I had a realization that I wasn’t quite as far away from home as I felt the weeks leading up to that point.
Now going from that longing feeling of
needing to be home to my last few days was anything but similar. I will admit my
last few days were very lonely because I had to stay on campus after everyone
else had gone home, which as you can imagine led to a lot of eating by myself.
Now being that this is the one event that sends my social anxiety out the roof,
it was a struggle to eat any meal after I had dropped the last of my friends
off at the bus station. Now being that I was in my feelings, and really didn’t care about the fact that it had rained only an hour before, I sat on the bench in the Cathedral’s front yard and ate my subway sandwich reminiscing on the past three months. I will be honest there were quite a few tears that seasoned my sandwich simply due to the fact I was not ready to leave. I wanted to start it all over again and spend so much more time in the place that had become a second home, with the people who had became family.
That is the reason why I have become such an advocate for the study abroad program, because there is not a person in this world who should not get to experience the feeling of starting over and building relationships a new. With that experience though does come a major heartache when it is time to jump back into the real world.
I made friends that often check in on me more than those who are in the same town as I am. Yet after that night I stopped focusing on the fact that I had to leave that next morning and just enjoyed thinking of the people who had made me feel like I was one of their own and had lived there my entire life. It is also important for me to mention that they were the main thing that made leaving so hard.
The relationships I built during my time abroad are ones I made when I was at your best. I say that because at a certain point I realized that there was no one I knew even remotely close to me and I didn’t have to worry about pleasing the people around me. So, the friends I made got to know me when I was my most pure self because there was no filter. Now this true self I developed lasted longer than I thought, and is still in effect today. I will admit I lost a few of the people I thought were friends simply because they moved on with their lives while I was away.
Of course this does hurt for a while because I thought I was super close with a few of my so called friends but I can say with pure honesty that those so called friends were not even half as true as the friends I made in Winchester!
Kade Bryant is a Junior at Lander majoring in Business Administration with an emphasis in finance. He is a first-generation college attendee with a family who rarely travels out of South Carolina, so when study abroad became an option he jumped. He has always had a strong desire to see the world and little did he know just how much he would get to see.