This past, what, three weeks now— I honestly can’t remember at this point, they have all blurred into one— I have had some of the highest moments and lowest moments. To briefly summarize, my study abroad program in Amman, Jordan was shut down, and I returned home abruptly, being ripped from the close community I had been living in, in the process. To say the least, it sucked. It still does.
Coming home from Jordan would’ve been a post all in itself if the program had gone on like normal. And now, with coming home abruptly and not returning to the same America, but one in a panic over corona virus— well, it’s a different post all together. It’s coming home to a tangled web of sticky thoughts, and the more I try to sift through them, the more twisted I get, until I am a thoughtless fly, unable to comprehend how to remove itself from the spider’s trap. And that is a dangerous place to be, because at that point, the struggling becomes exhausting and it is easier to just not think about it at all, but to just get lost in future plans, exercise, Netflix, classwork, baking— the list could go on. The thing is, I don’t want to be in that place. I want to feel all the emotions that come with being torn from a different world and tossed into another. From having the embrace of an incredible community be pulled apart, and then shut off into an isolation of sorts. Again, I will say, it sucks. There really is no other way to say it. It really, quite simply, sucks. And worse, it is easier to put that simmering pain in a box and push it aside to be unpacked later. Though “later” never seems to come, and the whispers drifting from the box into my ears, my mind, my heart still plague me constantly and set me on edge. It is like an itch I can’t scratch, though I am fully capable of doing it. That’s how I currently feel right now.
I finally journaled for the first time since coming home, and realized just how beneficial that was, so this is what I am going to do: I am going to use my blog as a platform to sift through my emotions, while sharing the experience with everyone who deems my writing entertaining enough to read. I didn’t do a great job in sharing my experience in Jordan on here, so as I work through the emotions of coming home so soon, I will also revisit the great times I was blessed to be able to have in the two months I was there.
So please, if you would like, join me on this emotional, melancholy, joyful roller coaster as I share the great, the good, the bad, and the ugly of my time in Jordan— and my time leaving Jordan.
Shall we begin?