14 December, 2013

The End (but... not really)

So, without much warning, or perhaps more than enough warning but none taken heed of, the semester has ended. I am back in the good ole USofA... except for the fact that even though old is fitting, good may not be. Reverse culture shock has hit me a bit harder than culture shock did... okay, I admit, much harder. You would think that I would feel more shock going to a culture that I did not grow up in, and feel welcome and comfortable coming back to the one I have lived my whole life in. That seems logical, but sometimes logic needs to be thrown out the window temporarily to open and gain a little perspective... and that's exactly what I plan to do and in fact am doing.

I find myself a little lost, not sure how to navigate, both physically and socially. I spent four months in a culture that felt more like home to me than home does. It is hard to capture the full extent and reach of the ramifications of the effects of this paradox... Perhaps part of it is that I am not truly in my own physical home yet, nor am I with my family(my emotional home), but there is the chance that this, even, is wishful thinking. Everything about this life just seems so foreign to me, yet I can't seem to pin point any major differences, none other than one. The people... I feel like the smiles are gone... the happiness. It's not that I have come back to a bleak, emotionless or depressed society, but that in comparison, Americans are less outwardly happy and relational than Ghanaians. It's throwing me off.

Perhaps it is also that in Ghana, I felt a new life stirring up within me. It felt like I was being torn down and reborn, but coming back, it was like being snatched out of that new me that was forming and thrown back into my old life, my old self. It feels like life in the US was just on pause, and everyone and everything expects me to just pick up where it left off, even if nothing actually is imposing that expectation on me in reality, it is hard to shake the feeling. It feels like life has lost the zest and the appeal of the unknown, a foreshadowed adventure. I look outside at the snow blowing through the air and see beauty as I once did, but also a suffocating emptiness, a vacuum; the snow isn't gently blanketing the world... it's smothering it, suppressing it.

This is starting to make me wonder whether or not America is a good fit for me and my future. I feel an overbearing pressure and looming cloud of complacency that squeezes in and chokes me when I think of my future and all I hear are thoughts about planning for grad school and getting a secure job and finding a way to fulfill my passions while still building up a life for myself... and it all sounds nice and grand. But also tiring, over-complicated, non-committal, and stagnant. It all sounds so selfish, it all sounds so complacent, it all sounds so "two-and-a-half children, a one-story ranch style house, with a white-picket-fence", it sounds so terribly normal, and no offence to someone who wants all that, but for me, there is some part of me that dreads that. It's not that I don't want to have roots or be tied down or be committed to my friends and family here, but that there is so much more in the world to understand and to discover, even if it's been discovered a thousand times before, each time one of these discoveries is made, something miraculous happens, a perspective is shaped and will from hence forth be so shaped and changed.

Ghana changed me... and I'll never be the same... and I don't want to be. I don't know what this means for me, but I do know that it means this blog is not over, this story has continued and is continuing past this semester, and perhaps will continue past this period of re-entrance. For now this is all I will write. I hope to post shorter posts now that I am back, and post more frequently as well. I will continue to explore my homecoming, the good and the bad of coming back, the little things, as well as some ex-post-facto observations and thoughts about different experiences I had in Ghana, of which, some I've shared already and some were lost in periods of diminished blogging.

Any semester program or, to broaden the scope, extended period of stay in another country and culture(and continent in this case), not only affects one's life while abroad, but continues to do so, deeply and measurably for a period afterwards, and will continue to do so to a lesser extent for the rest of one's life. I will continue this blog in order to accurately capture the impact of my semester abroad in Ghana on my life, the way I think, and who I am as a person. I firmly believe that my time in Ghana changed my life immeasurably, I'm curious as to what my time back holds in store for me.

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