Back to Life

I just got back from two weeks back home in Arizona, and it's going to be a real adjustment to life again here. It was strange being back in my old life, or the place of my old life. I was asked billions of questions, but mainly the one "How is it over there?" And I really have no idea how to answer that. So here goes a little bit of an attempt to answer, or maybe an attempt to answer why I can't answer it.

One day during a long car ride, a friend and I were talking about personal statements for graduate school applications. I started thinking, how does Peace Corps really fit into my life story? I don't really know, because I feel like all of the things I can say about it right now sound too cliché, but even if they are cliché, they are true. During my studies in Russia, I took the time each day to write down everything I did in a travel journal, and so I brought one with me here, but it remains blank except for the first few pages. I stopped writing in it because I had way too many thoughts and observations and it was taking too much time to write them all down in a way that meant something. But maybe that is how I would describe this experience, something that I can't write down because I don't really understand it right now, I need some perspective in order to do that. Right now, it is miserable and lonely, humbling and inspiring, and also a lot of fun. But even those aren’t the right words to describe it.

As the days wound down to when I had to go back, I was getting really anxious and was definitely not ready to leave. But then one morning while standing in line at a store, I was amazed that everyone was stopped where they were, talking on their phones and exchanging information about something. It was the shooting in Tucson, one that not only affected my community, but a few of my friends themselves. It was shocking, but it was also really moving to see Tucson come together like it has. And suddenly leaving didn't feel so bad. There was some more perspective - that any bad day I have in Georgia is not going to compare to how bad of a day other people are having. It is important to keep that perspective in mind, so that when I get even more and can look back on this experience, maybe I would have learned something from all my bad days as well as my good ones. And maybe then I can find some better words to explain just “how it is” over here.