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Sarah with Representative Ralph Norman in
his Washington, DC Office
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There are a lot of things that students consider when they choose a breakaway: places they want to travel, languages they want to learn, cuisine they want to become accustomed to, and cultures they want to immerse in. For me it was a bit different. Since my freshman year I knew that I wanted to apply to the Washington Semester Program with the USC Honors College. It is a program where students work at fulltime government internships during the day and attend classes in the evenings. It was a momentous experience where I was given tremendous opportunity for self-reflection and personal growth. However, I did not always view it that way. Right now, I’m sitting in Starbucks at 3:32 in the afternoon at a small circle table facing a white washed wall with a cement column inlay. It is almost the exact aesthetic of the table I sat at every day in the Capitol Hill Starbucks. Since returning from the Washington Semester Program, I have treated this table as my piece of DC at Lander, and it is the place that I thought would be my contentment until I could return.
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| The Washington Semester Program House in DC |
My biggest flaw is consistently ignoring the here and now, and this remained so while I was in Washington. It was especially provoked by the constant presence of politics in DC that I found to be pretty harsh—even as a bystander. Much of my initial frustrations began with the Kavanaugh hearings early in the semester. I lived in a house with 11 other students, and this issue immediately divided the house in the same way that it divided the country. Walking into the kitchen to use the stove was as much a scene for a political debate as a CNN townhall. For the first time in my life, I attempted to approach the conflict with the goal of resolving issues rather than simply arguing. And even with this constant effort to maintain peace, the house stayed politically toxic. In those moments, I felt like my experience was being tainted. I had countless once in a life time opportunities: meeting Vice President Pence and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, seeing the national symphony, and seeing Betelgeuse right before it hit Broadway, but instead of enjoying those, I dwelled on disagreement, trying to understand why people believed what they did. I sort of just let everything fade to back ground noise, and I continued to rush through the semester because being there felt like a transition, but one that would never end. All that changed during a November trip to visit South Carolina.
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A view of the plane ride from SC
back to DC
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I thought that returning to my normal would give me a sense of contentment and assurance that DC was not where I was supposed to be. Quite the opposite happened; SC than DC. I expected to come back to comfort and some feeling of consistency, and it just did not happen. Most things that I encountered seemed to give me an irrational amount of irritation: everyone was fat, people walked to slow, they had no idea which side of the escalator to stand on and which side to walk on, no one could drive, there were no book stores on street corners, and no one questioned their beliefs. I remember being at dinner with one of my closest friends at a place in Greenwood where I am a regular. CNN news is always playing there, and when I brought it up to start a conversation, it was dismissed because I was talking about CNN and not FOX. I was beyond frustrated at the naivety of dismissing something simply because of the political party that was speaking about it. I was talking about immigration, and I didn’t necessarily take a side—just referenced one. The response I got was, “Southern fried, Church of God, Pentecostal, if it’s not that, it doesn’t matter.” I didn’t really know what to say, but I thought for a minute about the naivety that created this thought, and whether or not I had it.
The next day, I rushed to the airport as soon as I could for my 6:00 am flight back to DC. I’m not one much for flying, but this flight was different. Looking out the window, I thought about how it might be simpler if the plane ride just did not end; maybe then I could be content, because there seemed to be too many things on the ground in SC and DC that were preventing it. More than, I thought about how I was disappointed in myself for not being able to find what I hoped I would. I remember staring out the window thinking—not sure about what—and in that moment I realized that I wasn’t happy in SC because it was exactly how I had left it, and I wasn’t exactly how I was when I first left. My biggest flaw is rushing though things, and right then I realized the cause. Situations can cause discomfort, but they do not cause people to be discontent; it is the things that are happening in the situations that conflict with what a person thinks to be true that causes a real sense of internal discontent. Rushing through such situations leaves everything unresolved, and it is in those abundance of unresolved thoughts that discontentment festers. And in that moment of understanding, I felt peace.
Since returning to SC, I have been trying to confront a lot of the questions that I normally ignore. At first, I attempted to this as quickly and definitively as possible, approaching it with the same amount of certainty that made me unhappy in the first place. So, for a few months, I sat idle. I didn’t know what I wanted; somedays I thought I might be happy here, and other days there. But after a while, this Starbucks table that I am at now, where I sat down in a search for certainty, I began to find just the opposite. What I found is this: it requires a certain amount of self-contentment, to let yourself live in what may be permanent uncertainty. And that is what my breakaway, and ultimately my return, gave me:a step toward being contentment.
I chose to pursue a career-oriented breakaway in the States because I had no desire to “broaden my horizons”. I told myself, and everyone around me, that I knewexactly what I wanted: graduation, law school, work. Everything that came before that goal, I approached with a cavalier attitude. Regretfully, that mindset dictated my thoughts during my breakaway, and I ended up treating some of the most memorable parts of my time in DC as a means to an end. I was uncomfortable with the thought that a single piece of my life plan wasn’t completely copasetic. Ultimately, it caused me to avidly avoid all personal reflection that might derail any aspect of the solidity I had. Now, 4 months since returning from my breakaway, I think that I’ve finally learned to be content with uncertainty and not always having a plan for where I am going next. I believe that is what has let me aspire again.
Sarah is a junior Political Science major with minors in philosophy, criminology, and pre-law. Her internship was in the US Congressional office of Representative Ralph Norman. After graduation, she intends to pursue masters degree in the United Kingdom in something relevant to international relations and philosophy