Howdy, y'all. This week, I've decided to take a break from my usual semi-coherent political rambling to write some semi-coherent personal rambling, instead. As you may or may not be aware, I've spent the fall studying in Dublin, Ireland at University College-Dublin. This has been an incredible experience, but, at risk of becoming "that guy" who studies abroad, I tried to keep posting about my trip to a minimum.
Directly contradicting all my blabbermouthed tendencies, it feels like I've said hardly anything at all about my little trip. I avoided trying to keep up an abroad blog for the length of my semester, or even writing at length about it, up until this space. There are several reasons for this, I tell myself: Abroad blogs are narcissistic and stupid! I'm doing this for me! I'm different! Because of these questionably justified points, I've somehow managed to avoid processing my time abroad at any length at all. That's an achievement if you ask me.
Even beyond these declarations, I've avoided really sharing very much more because of question marks rather than exclamation points: Hey, who the fuck cares? Can I even write well? Am I doing this thing right? And, the kicker to it all: Am I having a boring abroad experience? In retrospect, these questions are pretty silly, and should have no impact on whether or not I had an incredibly transformative experience abroad. Either way, they still affected how I looked at my experience, whether I like it or not. Getting past the idea that my abroad experience somehow needed to service some wider expectation of achievement was, honestly, a landmark moment for my trip.
Let's not get it twisted: Being in a foreign country for an extended period of time is weird as shit. This feels like the most accurate descriptor I have--living in Dublin has been transformative, illuminating and challenging, but most of all it's been weird as shit.
I've been to weird places, eaten weird foods, seen weird shows, met weird people. I played a weird game with a ball shaped like a testicle and saw two weird lads run a race around an academic building at midnight in dress clothes. Being in Ireland taught me a lot about being in unfamiliar environments, more about myself, and even more about how important weird stuff really is. On top of that, somewhere along the line, I realized that I can't really put a finger on an exact descriptor for my semester, and that's OK—the value of my time overseas isn't correlated to my ability to describe it, not at all.
Before I came to Ireland, everybody told me that going abroad was going to be the greatest experience of my life, one that I would never forget. In a way, they were dead right. Being abroad was revolutionary and crazy and stressful and really, really good. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. It was hard in parts, and confusing in others, and kind of boring in others. But I wouldn't change any part of it, not ever. The hard stuff made the good stuff even better.
So, to sum it all up, how has abroad treated me? Well, it's been weird. It's been really weird. Dublin is grand. Let's grab coffee sometime and talk about it.
