It’s the Sunday before midterms, and I’m sitting in an airport. I’m heading back to school after a weekend away, and I feel an overwhelming urge to run to the ticket counter and change my destination. It wouldn’t matter where, just as long as it is was as far away from my college town as possible.
I am suffering with ever-nagging, all-consuming wanderlust, and it is time to go.
In only a few months time, I’ll board another plane and leave for a solid eight months for different study abroad locations around the world.
This won’t be the first time I’ve uprooted my life in the name of travel, and I doubt it will be the last. If you share the same affliction, then you know the feeling; the one where you can’t seem to stay in one place for more than a few months, maybe weeks, without getting tired of it. And once you do leave, you feel like you’ve escaped. It’s like going under water in the swimming pool just to see how long you can hold your breath, and once you finally surface you’re gasping for air.
For me, travelling is like that feeling of finally being able to breathe again.
It’s not that I hate my college town. I just hate myself in it.
The same routine of waking up, going to class, studying, and Greek life functions has lost its luster. The stress of exams and the pressure for perfection is getting to me, and the thought of being trapped within the ten square miles that make up the location of my university grows more sickening by the day.
It would be easy to accuse me of simply looking for an escape from responsibility, and maybe in part I am. However, I like to consider it more of a longing for adventure. I know that there is so much more to life than tailgating, frat parties, and burying myself under loads of coursework.
Having been fortunate enough to have seen different parts of the world, my distress is only worsened by the thought that right now I could literally be in a thousand different places, and each one of them would be more interesting than here. I could be climbing a mountain, swimming in the ocean, touring an ancient city, or learning a new language by practicing it with the locals.
To be a college student with wanderlust is a both a beautiful and agonizing thing. You are technically an adult, but not so old that you bogged down by a family and a job. Your world is still full of possibilities, and it has the potential to grow. No one can tell you where you can or can’t go.
On the other hand, you are also probably broke, drowning in student loans, and swamped with exams, papers, and the unsettling notion that what were supposed to be “the best four years of your life” are not as fun as you thought they’d be.
At least, this is how I feel.
But unfortunately, as I sit here in gate C43, I resign myself to the fact that my plane is heading for Memphis, not Europe or Asia, and pray that I am able to make it until the next time I am able to break free, if only for a short time.
“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist... I’m never completely at home anywhere.”
- Danzy Senna
