life maps, world maps

If I were to begin (but I'm not really beginning; it has been ongoing), I'd start with the return. Travel does strange things to you, and I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to work it out. The strange thing is that in all my time abroad, I craved the educational pedagogy of select professors back home, welcoming arms of academia and all, entirely critical of the program's resources on development studies and um, the program in general. Something that I can touch and say "Oh, I get it, theory". And then things happened and now I'm back and it is a big bowl of suck-itude. Perhaps it has to do with the choices in course selections and general apathy of the final year here, but being away has definitely altered the way I relate to other people on an intellectual and even experiential level. Campus activism for instance, is empty. Not realizing how much a loose community has been structured upon that, shutting that part out of one's life is a form of disengagement which comes with equal parts reclusive introspection and decaying social life. You can't talk about compartmentalizing here when everything you care about is melded together with things which you no longer have any attachment to.

But perhaps the question of attachments ties back to earlier personal history, even before going abroad. So maybe it isn't fair to go there. But being home for instance, has been jarring in the most unsurprising way in the sense that it's only exacerbated the loneliness what has become integral to the household and the bodies of people who live in it. Personal histories are always fragmented with movement, from cross-national to local. It is why it has been so easy to move around. I don't have a more specific definition for movement, but that sometimes it is grounded in privilege, and other times, survival.

Perhaps it is a matter of not returning home to a place transformed, but realizing that the place has always been that way all the more clearer. We can think of this in terms of physical space (the home). We can also think about the people who embody our lives (family and friends). How terrifying is it to realize that even after you leave the country you visit, parts of you are still dissolving. Place hasn't changed. It is you.

So "What am I doing here?" is a question I ask myself a lot nowadays. I try to reflect healthily on my experience abroad, but it's hard to deconstruct it when people who shared that experience with me were obviously reading the map differently. We spoke different languages essentially. So being back here has not stopped the feelings of isolation. I don't want to call it post-trauma. Too dramatic. Existential crisis? But even those don't operate like clockwork. This feeling is like a steady drum that squeezes the heart, the heart which is stone, and once in a while, a little oil comes out. I'm not mad anymore about not fighting hard enough to retain parts of myself abroad because dissolve is inevitable. But I don't want to be putty now. I want the satisfactory medium between that and the mechanical mode of function which being back in academia steadily drills into you.