Milestone

It’s been a month and eight days since I left.

The leaflet from the study abroad office said the best way to cope with being back was to write about it, so maybe this is the push I need to finally get back to documenting everything on here and share my photos and experiences with whoever wants to sit through and read them since so far no one has even seen a tenth of the pictures I’ve taken or heard a millionth of the stories I have to tell, and I have to share them somewhere otherwise I feel like I might explode.

The flight back was exhausting, more so mentally than physically: I didn’t want to go back. Eventually, the 25 hours of travelling and worrying and feeling EVERYTHING caught up with me. The first thing I said to my parents was “Mommy” and then immediately started crying and blowing snot everywhere. Classy as.

At first, it was so good to be home and hug my family and see my friends and stay up until 3 catching up with my best friends. Then it was good to be back in Austin, then the new schoolyear euphoria. That’s worn off now.

The first wave of “homesickness” hit a couple of weeks ago, when I was sitting in a friend’s car listening to music and suddenly everything was wrong and I didn’t want to be here anymore and I almost started crying. In a car in the middle of the day on the way to the grocery store. Pathetic.

It’s been creeping up gradually: I notice New Zealand in the news more often, I’ve met a couple Otago people around campus, Dunedin friends are posting pictures of the RWC on Facebook, I’ve been craving fish and chips, I haven’t unsubscribed from mailing lists so I still get the student newsletters, my credits still aren’t processed, there’s a scholarship for postgrad study in fisheries supported by MFish and NIWA that I can’t apply for but a guy from their office is trying to help me find a way to maybe find funding to come back for a PhD or a postdoc or something. I Want To Go Back.

The past week, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with how things work here. They don’t work like they do in New Zealand, people don’t do things the same way, things are complicated, too inefficient, too expensive, it’s too hot, it’s too dry, it’s too this and not enough that. The final straw was not being able to find such a simple thing as berry yoghurt so I could make ambrosia for my birthday party.

Tonight, it’s just everything coming together. I feel miserable and I want to go back. I love my life and my friends here and I love my life and my friends there. I’m stressed out because I need to decide where and how to spend the next 5 to 7 years of my life in the next two or three months. I’m in reverse culture shock and sometimes I feel so alienated even from my best friends because I keep on saying “In New Zealand this” and “When I was at Otago that” and sometimes they just don’t get it even though I’m sure they try their hardest because they love me and they’re my friends. I miss my flatmates, I miss flatting life, I miss neighbours and classes and the lab and the sea and being able to walk everywhere, and because I’m human and completely pathetic, above all I miss the boy who made New Zealand even more wonderful than it already was.