Last semester I studied abroad.
And yes, I am now that annoying person who never lets you forget it.
Every story somehow starts with, “when I was abroad…” and every conversation gives me an excuse to bring up Paris, Rome or Limerick. If someone mentions cheap trips, I suddenly have to share my story about Venice or Monaco. If someone talks about coffee, I have something to say about my afternoon coffee and journaling sessions. If someone remotely mentions Europe, I am already mentally halfway through a story that absolutely did not need to be told.
I know how I sound, and have heard all about the stereotype. But I also understand why people come home from studying abroad and never shut up about it, because I mean every word when I say it was really one of the best experiences of my life. For a few months, my life looked completely different. I was living somewhere unfamiliar, moving every five weeks, figuring things out for myself, meeting people I never would have met otherwise, and constantly going somewhere new. My afternoons could be spent walking around Limerick, Paris or Rome. My weekends could mean waking up in an entirely different country.
There was always something to look forward to.
And then, like all good things, it ended.
I came home.
It wasn’t an immediate shock. I worked all summer, which was familiar enough, but nothing comparable to being in school, taking classes. Now I’m back on my normal campus, sitting in classrooms I already knew, trying to relearn where I would study, how I would dress. I was following a schedule that felt painfully familiar and, dare I say, monotonous. Suddenly, classes were demanding more, more work, more tests, more essays. Work was demanding more, being able to answer my phone 24/7, without a 6-hour buffer to give me peaceful mornings. Instead of wondering where I would travel that weekend, I was wondering how much time I had to finish my assignments. Instead of walking through streets I had never seen before, I was walking the same routes I had walked hundreds of times.
Nothing was necessarily wrong. But that is what made it stranger. My life was still exactly where I had left it. My friends were here. My classes were here. My routines were here. Everything was painfully familiar.
Before studying abroad, I never really thought about what my life could look like somewhere else. Then, for a few months, I got to live a completely different version of it.
I learned how comfortable I could become with being uncomfortable. I learned how quickly a place could stop feeling foreign. I learned that I could get on a plane, land somewhere I had never been and figure things out from there, language barrier and all.
And maybe most dangerously, I learned how big life could feel.
Coming home after that is strange because normal life does not suddenly become bad. It just feels different once you know what else is out there. I miss the version of myself who existed when I was there.
When you study abroad, you leave behind the tiny life you built there.
There are routines you will never follow in quite the same way again. You may never again be in the same room with some people you were close to there. Streets you once walked every day that eventually become places you only see in your camera roll. Your incredible knowledge of the Paris metro may fade.
It feels overly dramatic to mourn something you are lucky enough to have experienced in the first place.
But I think gratitude and sadness can exist together.
I can be unbelievably grateful for those months and still wish I could go back.
And I will go back.
One day, I will find my way to Paris again. I probably will not stay on the same campus, or even in the same arrondissement. Maybe I will be older. My life will definitely look different. The people I’m around will most likely be different.
It will never be exactly how it was.
But I know that eventually I will turn down a street that feels familiar. I will walk into a boulangerie and remember what it felt like to live there rather than simply visit.
For a brief moment, it might even feel like coming home.
And maybe that’s one of the strangest gifts from my time abroad.
You leave, expecting to discover new places.
You come home with more places to miss.
And I would rather spend the rest of my life missing places I was lucky enough to love than to never have loved them at all.