A year in perspective

Today I did my end of the year Rotary presentation, so I figured what better a day to post this when 1/4 of my closing remarks have been made.

Here goes:

I've now been in Denmark for nearly a year.

It blows my mind to think that it was already ten months ago that I was sitting on my aisle seat to Amsterdam, sitting back in my airplane seat cuddled with my black blanket, thinking "you still have a whole year! You have so much time, it's just beginning!" 

I am ready to come home to my family, and to see some of my greatest friends again. This year has helped me better realize who my greatest friends are, just by those I kept in touch with. In a couple weeks I will walk out of customs in SeaTac airport, and will see my parents undoubtedly greeting me with open arms, and one can only hope for a box of cheez-itz. 

I will try to surprise some of my friends when greeting them, although one has already told me she'll switch it up on me, surprise me sometime in the morning. *Cough, Makayla, Cough.* First times will feel refreshing, and there will be plenty of meet and greets. There will assuredly come the excitement of reacquainting myself with surroundings that were all so familiar only eleven short months ago.

I will be able to go into my own kitchen and open a bag of goldfish crackers without feeling slightly uncomfortable taking food from another family's cupboard. I will be able to sing, no matter how crappy my voice may be, to my music on high blast. I'll even be able to use my own bathroom, and I will no longer need to give in or stand up to peer pressure regarding partying, drinking, or clubbing.

In reality though, I cannot only think of the firsts, of the meet and greets, and surrealism of being home again, because it doesn't even feel as though I left in the first place. I have thought beyond the firsts. The "normality" is what will be the hardest part of readjustment. There is always a nice dose of happiness in the excitement that lies within returning. Excitement will eventually die down, however, and in the following weeks it will be replaced with a sense of realization. The adventure that drove me for nearly two years, and formed essentially a new life for me, is over. Something that had always had a future and present tense to it will now be simply over, and it will only have a past tense. 

I will go back to school come September, and it will come with the realization that while I've been gone for the past year, my classmates haven't. Life has continued for them just as it has for me. I do not know wha they've done, and they do not know what I've done. It's likely not even something they can imagine, as my experience is likely as foreign to them as the place I lived. Some may not realize I left, and some may think I've left for good. Some may not recognize me, and some may not care I'm back. I can't expect them to know what this experience was like for me though, and I can't expect them to remember the details of my exchange. They shouldn't remember I went to Denmark, or what language Denmark speaks. I simply cannot hold them responsible for remembering the details of my exchange.

Just as the year seemed to stand still in still such an ironically fast-paced way to me, the year back home to the others probably felt the same way. The only difference is that even though our years moved in the same time, we were living in different worlds. While it feels like nothing changed for me, and nothing changed for them, I will undoubtedly go home and see that everything changed, in the same sense of it having stayed the same. I'll pass by the same streets, I'll walk into the same house as if it was just yesterday that I walked out of it. Yesterday was nearly a year ago, though, and whether I realize it or not, I will be different than the person I was August 9th when I ate half my eggs, shoved oreo's in my bag, and packed up my life for a year. It's hard to notice change while you're living it, but it's easy to notice it when you return to it or return from it. I have come to terms with that (I say before I've given myself the chance to experience rebound life).

Unlike when I quit gymnastics in my freshman year though, I refuse to let myself think of this as an end. When I quit gymnastics my freshman year, I let myself fall, and took a year to watch as my self esteem and self confidence plummeted from 100 to 0 for a couple months.  I figured that as long as I could no longer do what made me happiest, then I would have a hard time finding anything else.

My year of prep for exchange is over, and it has been long over. That was a hard goodbye. The time I wished away, and all of its impact on my newfound self esteem and confidence, hit me hard when it was over. I never expected it to end, and I viewed that year as endless in a sort of breathtakingly fast way. As the days neared the ending, it still didn't feel real. So when all was said and done those last couple days in June, it was a serious reality check, one that when I come to think of it, I hadn't ever had before. I gave myself a couple days, and that was all I could give myself, because I had to re-find my excitement for my exchange year that I somehow misplaced after my first goodbye. I reminded myself to listen happy music and to leave the house once in a while. Eventually, it worked. The memories still came and went, but it never prevented me from having a good time.

On August 9th, 2014, I got my passport stamped for the first time, and the man at security did a quick up and down and said "Amsterdam, huh?" I explained that I was studying abroad in high school doing a year abroad in Denmark. I continued onto security, went through the procedures, and the next thing I knew I was on the other side of the security gate. No going back, I looked up, and saw my parents standing across the airport waving goodbye to me. I waved back, we exchanged our last remarks, and then I turned around. I looked back one more time, and the next thing I know I was standing on the opposite side of a glass wall. I followed the signs, alone, that took me to my flight gate. I was off for a year. Although the year of prep was over, the year of exchange and experience still stretched on in front of me.

That year is now three weeks from finished, despite me telling myself practically three minutes ago (or at least thats what it feels like), "you still have your whole year ahead of you!"

So although now both years are nearly done, I need to remind myself that it was just a beginning.

This year I learned a lot about myself, and what I want to do. It helped me broaden many of my perspectives, and interests. This year I learned a language to fluency. I can, at the risk of sounding vain, say that I am bilingual. I learned as well that I don't want to stop there. I don't feel like English and Danish is enough. I feel oddly limited having grown up speaking such a universal language. I want to try, at least, to finish off the French I started two years ago and paused on this year to learn Danish. In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to start learning a language and just stop. What you could use your skills for after two years, you could use them for so much more after a couple more years of learning.

Dutch looks interesting to me. The whole double vowel system and the j's in seemingly random spots, for some reason, interests me. Nobody ask how I'm going to go about learning all these languages, because I don't think leveling up through duolingo will really get me anywhere. I'm currently an unemployed 17 year old high school junior living off of a currently fleeting bank account that I stopped building nearly a half year before I left for Denmark, gladly accepting donations from the bank of mom and dad as my new source of income. I'm not really, in any shape, ready to do more years abroad to learn all these languages I desire.

Right now, as of three weeks from my departure, my ultimate plans are all over the place. I know what I want to do in my future, however I don't know how long it will take me to get there, or how I will get there. Immediately, I have (I believe) one year left of high school, plus a gap year to tie the ends on my SAT/ACT, college applications, and one final chemistry class. After that I will be off to university (I feel so European calling it university now, not just college), and I'm not sure where after that.

I would like to major in international relations or business, because I would love to travel and work with different languages as a job. Although, for a good five years or so, I was dead-set on being a lawyer. Look at me now! That's not even in the cards.

I (think I) would like to do another year abroad in college. Where I go, I'm not sure. I woke up a couple weeks ago and decided I was going to join the peace corps and ship off to South America (I'm not kidding, I woke up and spontaneously became excited about the prospect for a day), but then realized that saying hola and counting to ten doesn't quite qualify you in Spanish. Which brings me back to French where I'd like to go to Geneva for a year, so I can bring my French back up to par. The only problem is, my French disappeared when my Danish prospered.

I will of course be coming back to Denmark to visit, I intend on keeping, and even growing the relationships I have with my host families and friends here.

I am thinking about keeping a blog to mark my rebound experiences, however I'm not sure yet. If I do, I'll let you know and it'll likely be linked through this blog URL. It will essentially be your own responsibility if you really want to keep up on it though, because I won't be sharing the links on facebook. If you don't see anything by September, you probably won't see anything at all.

I have one more blog post, and it's going out on a really positive and uplifting note (I say very sarcastically), so I hope you look forward to that.

But for now, it's nearly a wrap. Tuesday marked ten months here in Denmark, and in three weeks I'll be back where I began, just a week shy of eleven months in the third happiest country in the world.