It Isn't Culture Shock: Notes On a Return and an End

Photo Credit: Lindsay Needels

I’m in Santa Cruz again.

I live on campus in the Redwood Grove Apartments. That part of campus is darkest at night, and it is very cold. I feel alone like a girl who has run away to the woods to live the way Holden Caulfield always wanted to. But there are aspects of that life he didn’t think through. At night when I can’t sleep, I look outside my window at the forest until my eyes can’t strain any longer. I have strange and terrifying dreams.

Before I studied abroad, they told me that a reverse culture shock was to be expected. But this isn’t that. I went to about the closest place to the United States I could go that is still across the Atlantic Ocean. It was easy to adjust to my home culture after being in London. However, since being back on campus I have been stricken by an intense feeling of melancholy that tests my strength and patience. They didn’t tell me about this.

In 2012, I lived so much. I laughed harder than I can remember, at least since I was 13. I made friends and connections that I will hold dear the rest of my life. I lived in the first house that was truly mine, at least in part. I visited over 20 cities besides the ones that I call my own, all around the world. Now I am in the forest again and my life is suddenly still. My friends are living and working in different cities existing elsewhere and I am living in an arrangement that bares a horrifying resemblance to the one I had my sophomore year, when I lived sad and alone at Kresge College, so afraid I couldn’t bring myself to use the front door of the apartment, in fear I might catch someone’s unfriendly eye in the living room.

It is not that Santa Cruz, California is not the same. On the contrary, it is exactly the way it always was. More so, even, for now I feel that I understand it better than I ever did before. I never appreciated the beauty of this campus. More than ever before I am struck down by the absolute majesty of the redwood trees that stand around me as I study and sleep.

But they have always been there. Nothing has changed. Though I have spent the last year of my life growing and shifting in dynamic thrusts of change, the environment around me appears static. When I open my eyes and see the trees, the same trees that have stood since I first began my time in Santa Cruz, it is as if 2012 never happened, or at least it didn’t matter.

I have six months left as a student at UC Santa Cruz, but I am not afraid of this inevitable end. No. I have an immediate need for a change in scenery, so that this sickness of the heart might subside.

This is what they don’t tell you.