The most traumatic thing that happened to me while abroad was my treacherous hike up Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, Scotland. I wanted to go “the easy way,” while my two friends went “the hard way.” Of course—unsurprisingly, if you know me—I got crazy lost while trying to follow the path up the mountain. I was alone, and it was raining a lot, and the existential dread of travel and loneliness didn’t help either. I spent the better part of an hour both crying and trudging uphill in an attempt to find my way both to the top and back to my friends. Neither happened and I eventually gave up, instead hiking back up the Royal Mile to our hostel. I bought myself a cupcake on the way as consolation for my weary soul.
Pictorial selfie evidence. Can you see the fear in my eyes?
In retrospect, I laugh, but in the moment it really was traumatic—getting lost in a foreign country while doing athletic things is kind of a double whammy of terror for me. Trauma means different things to different people. Which brings me to the point of this article: last week’s “When the Davidson Bubble Bursts,” the second iteration of a monologue-style event about trials and tribulations while abroad.
I went to last year’s “Bubble” event too and was blown away by how powerful and relevant each monologue was. This year was no different. Perry Dubow inaugurated this event last year after an experience with sexual assault while she was abroad, and this year she gave a stirring speech near the beginning of the event, called “Why Are We Here?.” Her answer: to give voice to the unvoiced experiences of abroad. So often abroad is hailed as an infinitely fun and carefree romp across the globe, when in actuality sometimes it can be even harder than Davidson.
Each monologue was quite different, ranging from prose to poetry, some read by the writers themselves and some performed by others. They also ranged in intensity and topic, featuring issues such as anxiety, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and depression. The crowd favorites, to my ear, were the ones that sprinkled in some much-appreciated humor, like Morgan McGrath’s “An Open Letter to All the Men Who Touched My Ass in Italy,” who began her speech by saying, “I’ve always found open letters really confusing and weird… so I wrote one.” Another favorite of mine was Dylan Goodman’s “My Angel”—Dylan, in a move I’ll probably remember forever, opened by asking, “Where are all my straight people in the room?!” and then saying, bluntly, “This is not for you.”
One of the most striking, for me, was “Unrecognizable” by Mary Dorine Roehre, a fifth-year senior, who ruminated on her anxiety and depression while abroad in France. The powerful way she presented her monologue just proved to me how wildly important it is to talk about these experiences. Not because hearing someone else’s story means it won’t happen to you, but because it reminds us, inevitably and vitally, that even when we are struggling, we are not alone—and, in fact, we never were.
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