I'll Be Home For Christmas

I am so excited to be coming home in less than two weeks! It’s funny, over here, I feel like I’m at Summer Camp (and it doesn’t help that my campus makes it look like we’re at camp!). You know that feeling when you go away to camp as a kid, and the only thing that gets you through it is the thought of returning home? That’s how I feel here. Like at tennis camp; exhausting but strengthening, a love and a dread all at once. But you know, at the end of the few camp weeks, you’ll be back home.

It’s been four months, and it’s not summer camp, it’s grad school. And I’m coming home after a series of character building tests—both written and real.

I started this semester without a place to live. I was going to class with all my belongings! Now I’m living in a five room flat, not a Westerner in sight.

Then there’s that fatal day which all grad students face when they realize that maybe they only got where they are by some stroke of luck and maybe we’re not really as good as we thought we were, and maybe we really shouldn’t even be here! And you start to ask yourself why are you here? Is it some sort of mistake?… but you get through it, by biting your tongue and fighting back tears and saying, “it’s okay, I’ll take it one day at a time…” … “or… I could just quit.”

But you didn’t quit. And four months later, you’ve been in four other countries you never would have been in if you had quit, and you’ve written forty-four blog posts about your adventures abroad and you know what? People read it! Your friends and family and even some of their friends and family even notice when you haven’t posted, which is some sort of sign that, grad school or not, you’ve become a writer!

And as I sit on the plane home I’m sure I’ll reflect. And I’ll smile because I’ll know that I handed in a draft of a feature-length screenplay—that somehow, in the last four months, a girl who’s never written a word of a screenplay has all of a sudden written a movie. And I can smile because, the debut of my ten-minute play went without a hitch, and they laughed, the audience laughed, a lot. They laughed with me at, (in the words of my good friend Stuart), “the play they couldn’t kill.”

Sure, I will continue to struggle with being halfway around the world; away from my family, my friends, my comfort zones. I’ll grapple over this demanding, rigorous, program, but in the end I’ll know, that, grad school or not, I am a writer.
And with grad school, I can become a better writer, a more disciplined writer, a more informed writer, and a writer with my own unique experiences to bring alive.

In two weeks, the hardest part of grad school will be over: the first semester. And baby, I’m comin’ home!