It’s the time of the year when we’re saying goodbye and ending school. Actually, I’m not really at the stage of saying goodbye yet, but it almost feels like it. I’ve spent almost a year in Belgium and though at times the strain of maintaining ones self-esteem has been a struggle, it’s been a hugely rewarding experience. It’s great to do something really hard, something very difficult that lasts a long time so that you can show, to your self as much as to anyone else, that you can do it.
The key, I think, is achieveable goals and personal goals. There’s no point in reaching for something that other people set you because there’s no real incentive. One you pass a certain age the pressure of other peoples’ expectations begin to count for less and your own aspirations and hopes for yourself count for more. If your goals are so outlandishly enormous in their expectations, your own demoralization at the challenge presented could well stop you achieving them. Essentially, one needs one’s own imputus, desire, and self confidence to propel oneself to succeed.
One of the hardest things about being in a place for only a year is the knowledge that all the great friends and relationships you create are going to be at the very least put on hold and tested to their extreme after a few short months. You know that although these friends are fantastic at the moment, once you leave the country and everyone disperses around Europe the world again, it becomes increasingly hard to continue the intimacy you’ve come to enjoy. That’s a tough thing to acknowledge. I said a kind of goodbye to a friend on Monday, a goodbye that had to be carried out over the phone because our respective exam (mine) and travelling (hers) schedules meant we couldn’t meet up. As we spoke I found myself saying “well, have a great trip…. and if I don’t see you in London like we discussed, then I hope your flight home passes well. And in that case I hope everything at school next year is great and I hope to see you sometime again in my life. I don’t know when I’ll next be in Canada, but I hope, in the next few years!”
This is the one downside of international friends: they can never be with you. The solidarity of a core group of friends who knows about that night in the bar, or that guy who you were flirting with oh, that time, is hard when they all live in different countries. It’s a form of cruel irony that once you pushed through the self doubt, fear, and language barrier, once you do find the friends who you know are amazing people, they go off a leave again. You leave them and they leave you. And you have to go back to being strong and self reliant again. Self reliant isn’t fun, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just kidding themselves. Relying on other people is great because it means you trust them and it means they can trust you back and rely on you when they need to.
Of course having international friends is cool, but it makes the off-the-cuff dinner party a little hard to plan. And planning does not lead to very off-the-cuff events. Obviously being instinctive and random has its limits and having international friends has a multitude of other benefits that you trade for. Like visits from abroad, if you happen to live in a desirable location. If you don’t then you’re screwed and will have to be the schmuck who has to fork out for the plane tickets any time you want to see these friends.
The worst thing, is that these friends you create, these friends I’ve created, I feel like I’m only just getting to know now. You can’t know someone in just ten months, but you can get a really good start. And now that I have that beginning I don’t want to lose it. But I will. We all will.
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