There Will Be Tears
*Disclaimer* The first few posts on this blog are going live retroactively. It took a while for me to get this blog together and my life still isn’t together so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
9.26
You know it’s going to be a rough day when you wake up with a stye in your eye. Not only was this my first time ever dealing with a stye, I happened to wake up with one on probably one of the most important days of my life. My flight to Paris was at 6:59pm EST on Monday, September 26th and here I was, at around 6:59am that same day searching the Internet for ways to get rid of my stye as soon as possible instead of preparing for my journey. After learning I couldn’t wear makeup (read: mascara) for a week or so while I waited for the infection to go away, I realized I’d soon be as naked in public as I’d ever been: a Black expat in a foreign country with barely any language skills, no armor (i.e. makeup) to protect me from the judgment of being an American in any place in the world other than America, and no contacts of my own to help me navigate the new country I’d call home for almost the next year of my life. For extreme clarity, I can face the world with a fresh face, but sometimes it’s a little bit easier knowing that your best features are on display when you desperately need people to like and accept you. The cherry on top was the pain that accompanied the swelling near my right eye in addition to the pain in my uterus. This trip was surely going to be a lot of fun.
I woke up early to finish packing my bags, a feat more annoying than I’d originally thought, thanks to airline charges for overweight bags and my type A personality planning for every fashion emergency possible. I swear I tried to pack in advance but for some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I ran as many errands as possible when I could, stocking up on hair products, toiletries, and even some makeup (really, I just used this trip as an excuse to spend my feelings at Sephora), setting travel notices at my banks, picking up important documents I needed to validate my visa once in France, but these things never made it into my bags until the weekend before my departure. Each day, I looked at the immense amount of clothes I needed to stuff into my suitcases and routinely put the task off until the next day. To add insult to injury, I was constantly bombarded with questions such as “Did you pack already?!” and “Are you excited?!” the week before my trip by anyone and everyone I talked to. I felt bad that I hadn't packed a month ago like everyone claimed they would've been doing if they were in my position. Honestly, it pained me the most to answer if I was excited or not. I pride myself on being honest, even if it hurts, but I’m truly sorry if you asked me that question and are now reading this because I lied to you, straight up. Despite what I told you, I was not excited. Not in the slightest.
The magnitude of what I was about to do didn’t really hit me until the night before I left. Prior to this point, it just felt like I was getting ready to go to college again. It did take me all summer to adjust to calling myself a graduate and even now I still shudder at the thought of that part of my life being over, so it’s not out of the ordinary that it took me a while to deal with this reality. But the truth is, there were so many things left up in the air prior to my departure that I couldn’t bring myself to be excited about my trip, no matter how hard I tried. I hadn’t a permanent place to stay (MUCH more on this topic later), hadn’t heard back from the schools I was assigned to despite sending emails to them over a month ago, and wasn’t receiving responses from my program’s US contact despite asking very important questions regarding my stay in France. Luckily I wasn’t traveling alone as my dad planned to stay with me for a week while I adjusted to my new life. Maybe I was in denial or maybe this initial cushion of having a parent with me softened the blow of finally stepping foot into the world of adults, but once I realized exactly what it was that I was about to do, all I could say to myself was, “Oh, shit.” and proceed to doubt anything and everything regarding what I was about to undertake.
If you’re wondering, “Why did you lie about being excited?” Well, how the heck could I tell people that I wasn’t excited about this amazing opportunity without seeming like an ungrateful brat? I don’t think I wasn’t necessarily excited—I think I realized that for the first time in a long time I was taking a risk. I like to challenge myself and I know that I’m capable of accomplishing a lot, but when I truly reflect on the most recent “risks” I’ve taken, they’ve all been within reason. So what, I went away to university? My school was in my home state just eight hours away, I had family an hour away from my school in Rochester, and a flight home would only take me three hours, door-to-door. So what, I ran for one of the highest leadership positions in a club dedicated to a culture other than mine? Being VP of the Filipino American Student Association wasn’t that much of a stretch in my mind, anyway, because people of color are alike in more ways that we’d like to realize sometimes and leading a large organization requires much more than being of a certain heritage. But going to be a real adult in another country where I knew literally *no one* and personally knew of *no one* that had ever done something similar to what I was about to do? Now that, to me, took some balls.
I’d like to blame it on my period, which was absolutely a factor, and I’d like to blame it on not being able to see my mom cry without becoming incredibly emotional myself, but at some point during the car ride to the airport for whatever reason, I broke down. This is monumental because not only am I a thuggy-thug originally from Bed-Stuy, I rarely cry. To give you some context, during my freshman year of college I randomly watched a tearjerker from the ‘80s (Terms of Endearment) because I thought to myself, “Hm, I haven’t cried in a while, I think I should.” At the time, I didn’t want to go to Paris, but I knew I had to. If this risk weren’t worth it, I wouldn’t have felt so much apprehension towards it. Someone wise once said if your dreams don’t scare you, you’re not dreaming big enough. And here I was, a 22-year-old graduate pursuing one of my dreams of living in another country and (hopefully) becoming fluent in another language, and I was scared shitless.
Waterworks were a plenty, as I couldn’t stop myself from crying even while in the terminal of JFK. I didn’t try to hide it much either, which is how you know I didn’t give a FUDGE about other people seeing tears roll down my eyes, something a younger me once feared would show weakness. Finally, I have an idea of what it means for immigrants to leave behind everything they knew in the familiar, for a greater opportunity in the unfamiliar. If I stayed in NYC, I would’ve become my worst fear: stagnant; unhappy with the way the city was changing, unable to effect change on as grand of a scale as I wish, and unsure of how to go about achieving my goals in a town where the most deserving and talented people don’t always make it to the top, as best demonstrated by the amazing performers in subway stations. It felt like someone took a boulder and threw it in the pond that is my world, disrupting everything and shaking me up. This is as great of a wakeup call as I could ever ask for and I can already tell that this experience will change my life in ways I can’t yet imagine. Currently, I’m just preparing myself so that I’m mentally, physically, and emotionally ready for when it’s time to truly bask in the fruits of my labor.
I hope you enjoy this wild ride with me :)
