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Grabbling with leaving U.Va. for a Semester at Sea

On being ready to go but unwilling to leave

I first heard about Semester at Sea through an old friend’s Instagram account, which is indicative of a whole handful of things, but especially of the heightened globalization of the world. Without getting technical or meta or anything of the sort, how crazy is it to think that a single series of photographs determined my path five years into the future?

I distinctly remember seeing my friend’s pictures appear on my phone, promptly some further Internet research and writing in my journal — right then, right there — that I too was going to do Semester at Sea, at some point, some way. And here we are, over 1,700 days later and I am fewer than 100 hours away from embarking on that same voyage my 10th grade self swore to someday do.

Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to these coming moments for a long while. This past summer, when this whole dream began to become a reality, I thought through what these next few days, weeks and months would look like, over and over and over again. But as the fall semester rolled along, I got swept up in the present — not a bad thing, certainly — and stopped throwing myself into the future.

This happened accidentally, of course, in between the tests, the readings, the car breakdown, the never-ending and hellacious visa application process, that pleasantly surprising date function and that perfectly impromptu trip to Boston where we almost missed our flight. Somewhere along the way, throughout all those innocuous, seemingly mundane moments, I was no longer thinking about spring and all the traveling and adventure that would fill it. I had started the semester thinking I was more than ready to go; I ended it realizing I would never be ready to leave.

Those final weeks of December were, for me, full of an uncomfortable dualism — an awkward balancing act of excitement and tentativeness. I wanted more than anything to go, yet it was harder to leave than I had anticipated. There is a difference, I realized, between putting yourself in a new place and taking yourself out of an old one, even temporarily. The former is freeing. The latter is frightening.

When debating whether or not to study abroad, a chief concern — petty though it may sound — was that the life I would be leaving at U.Va. for a semester would continue on without me. I decided to go nevertheless, telling myself that just as my U.Va. life would continue without me, I too would continue without my U.Va. life. There was liberation in that — I wasn’t confined to any one place, any one person, any one rule.

But as the clock ticked down to that moment when I hugged my family goodbye for seven months and began the first leg of my journey to the Semester at Sea ship by boarding the plane to San Francisco, I began to feel that I didn’t want to be completely liberated from the places, people and rules that I already knew.

There’s a great Modern Love article that talks about this jumbled mix of wanting-yet-refusing to be tied down. It’s called “Security in a Bright Yellow Suitcase.” The author remembers traveling to and from her boyfriend’s apartment each weekend, packing her belongings neatly into a bright yellow suitcase each Friday evening and Sunday morning, coming and going easily and without question, able to leave whenever she so pleases.

At the start, she loves that she is able to so smoothly go, that while she relies on her boyfriend for companionship, she simultaneously stays unattached from him. She feels that her ability to move allows for a certain liberation on her end. But over time, things stop being so neatly packed into that bright yellow suitcase, and items that were once distinctly hers begin to be left at her boyfriend’s apartment, signaling a heightened coexistence. Surely there is something attractive and freeing about independence, but don’t we want someone and something to depend upon?

I don’t think I understood that concept so clearly until now. In moments of rejection or doubt, I used to reassure myself of my potential by thinking of all the places I someday hoped to go to, thinking of travel not just as a means for adventure but also for escape.

I’ve traveled before this, but never for such a consecutively long amount of time and never during the school year. This trip has already made me realize that “escape” is something which is much more attractive in ideal than in reality, that I want to have both the mobility to come and go as I please, as well as the desire to attach myself to a place and the people that fill it. I want to take my yellow suitcase far and wide, but be unafraid to occasionally let its contents out of the bag. 

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