Blogging – Take 2

I’m trying my hand at blogging. Again.

Originally I started this blog to catalog and share my travels and experiences living abroad. I had so many plans and exciting ideas. I was really looking forward to my year and a half grad school adventure. Well, as we all now know, in 2020 shit hit the fan.

Even before that, though, I had encountered a few setbacks. After moving to England, I was so caught up in my new life and school that I didn’t really make time to write outside of academic essays. My first term was amazing (I’ll be sharing my experiences in later posts), but I found that I was doing a lot. Which isn’t a bad thing. I had group projects, essays, rehearsals, performances, nights out with friends, weekends exploring the countryside, etc. I was living my life to the fullest and was too caught up to even think about blogging. I don’t see that as a negative. I wasn’t used to trying to capture everything in pictures or remembering to write things down. So I decided to try again.

I made one of my 2020 New Year Resolutions to dedicate myself to blogging, especially about travel. I found the perfect opportunity soon after that. At the beginning of February, a few friends from my program and I planned a trip around Europe. We were going to go to France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands during our month-long break… In April. 

I think you see where this is going.

Come early March, we were hesitant. We watched the news, deciding whether or not to keep planning our trip. We had found two of the places where we were going to stay and put down a deposit on one of them. We kept watching the news. Two weeks before the end of term, and what would have been the beginning of our trip, our in-person classes were now online. The university assured us that this was temporary and by the time the next term commenced in May, things should be back to normal. At this point, we made the decision to cancel the trip. We hadn’t purchased train tickets and thankfully got our deposit back, so no loss there.

The next few months went by in a blur. COVID hit England pretty hard, but thankfully living in the countryside protected me from the worst of it. I spent my days either writing essays and working on my dissertation or binge watching Netflix. My blog was forgotten.

I thought about writing about my life in quarantine, but I was just so tired. Tired of looking at my computer all day (except for my allotted one hour of outside exercise), tired of stressing about my health and the world and politics and my friends and family. I was 3,647 miles away from my family, and even though I had amazing friends living near me that I eventually got to see, I felt really alone. I felt like I didn’t have anything to contribute through my blog. I would just be screaming into the void and getting nothing back.

As much as I didn’t want to admit, my depression got really bad. My productivity didn’t dip (I wrote three essays, edited a play, and researched and wrote a 15,000 word dissertation) and I still made myself interact with friends, online and socially distanced in person. I turned to past destructive patterns for comfort and hid how I was feeling from everyone. Even as I’m writing this, I’m only just coming to terms with everything. In many ways, I was lucky during 2020. I had a roof over my head, I could afford to eat, I never got sick. I kept telling myself that because of those things, because I had privileges that sadly many people around the world didn’t have, I should just get my shit together and move on.

I did just that for the rest of the year. I finished my MA in Shakespeare and Creativity with a merit (for those not in the UK, I did pretty well!), moved into a new flat for the last five months I was in England, and eventually moved continents by myself without complaint. My anxiety and stress levels, as well as my depression, were at an all time high, but hey I was alive.

After coming back home, and moving back in with my parents, I finally let myself relax a little. I got a part time job as a substitute teacher, saw friends and family I hadn’t seen in almost two years, got vaccinated (yay!!), and thought about my next move. As much as I love my hometown (shout out Norfolk, VA), I knew I didn’t want to be stuck there.

I worked on a few writing projects I had set aside while in grad school, and started a new one (not something I want to reveal yet), and bided my time until I could move. I’ve always wanted to live in New York City and started to make plans. I talked to friends who were still up there, looked at job openings, apartments, neighborhoods, etc. I kept putting off moving though. At first I wanted to go before my birthday in April. Then it was after a family trip in June. Then I got a summer job, so I had to wait till at least the end of August. Now I’m moving up in September, officially, and I’m not letting myself go back on that.

I’ve decided that now is as good a time as any to restart my blog. It’s gonna be different than I originally planned, but I’m actually really excited. I’m going to share some of my experiences living abroad, stories from past trips, my new life in NYC, etc. Before I was trying to make it into something I thought people would want to see, but now I’m just going to do it for myself. 

And I’m pretty excited about that.