What Has Changed and What Has Stayed the Same or An Apology To Myself For Writing Less

I have all-but abandoned my goal to write on the blog weekly during the course of this “second gap year of sorts”. I’m a big goal person, and although this outcome is quite obvious to anyone keeping up with the blog, it’s still hard to admit. 

Recently, rather than just push down the ever-present slight sense of anxiety that I need to write something, I’ve been trying to investigate why I haven’t felt nearly as called to express my thoughts and feelings as prolifically as I did from September-December. 

This blog really is just for me, but my email correspondences are not, and keeping up with those has brought me even more anxiety as I seek to keep up with loved ones from afar, and maintain a series of written messages that are even more honest and detailed than my blog posts. It’s a lot of writing, though, and a pretty tall task I set for myself to keep up with, especially now that I’m (technically) a real student again. 

But besides the time constraints and general fatigue of keeping up with everything for months on end, I’ve been wondering about what’s changed internally that has made me less keen to hop on my computer and bang out a blog post about everything going on in my life. It’s not that I’m not thinking, per se, but I am definitely thinking less interesting thoughts, and I’m absolutely reflecting less than I was last semester. 

Last semester I had a lot of time for reflection, spent staring out at savannah landscapes through car windows, or on long, hot bus rides, or sitting by the water in Ushongo. This semester one element of my life is that I’m just far more busy, with classes during the week and all-consuming weekends of backpacking, long drives, and trying to reset to do it all over again. It feels like I’m constantly catching up in this half-and-half life I’m living, in which Monday-Wednesday are spent on school and Thursday-Sunday are spent on fun. I feel I’ve had less time to talk to loved ones, write, and reflect on what all I’m learning.

I’m also just, undoubtedly, learning less. Whereas last semester was constantly full of new ideas that had never occurred to me, new experiences that altered my world view or challenged my personhood, this semester, as I said in an email to a friend, I am basically just a college student living in a beautiful place. Nearly everything about being here culturally is, just as I expected, pretty darn easy. I blend in in public, I speak the same language as the people I encounter, I’m living in a deeply Western country, I have tons of agency, I own a car, I recognize all of the foods in the grocery store, I interact with more than 15 college-aged people every day. Many of the challenges that made for the richest growth last semester just don’t exist here, and for the most part, besides the lack of fodder for writing, I’m not all that upset about the change of pace.

What I’ve given up in reflection I’ve gained in happiness. I’ve come to realize that last semester was entirely full of high-highs, moments of pure joy that knocked my socks off, but that I wasn’t necessarily happy on the day-to-day scale because of the myriad of challenges that came with living in a new, often difficult place. 

In comparison, here, I think I am the happiest I’ve been since my gap year, making the most decisions that bring me joy, and embodying a work-life balance that doesn’t seem plausible. As I said on the phone with my dad the other day, after leaving Christchurch on a Wednesday afternoon for a half-week of adventuring on the North Island, “I’m spending down my savings and I don’t care about school at all. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted me to do?”. It feels really good to be living an objectively awesome life, and I’m so busy living it that I haven’t really had a ton of time to reflect on how that might be changing my sense of self or forcing me to grow as a human being. Because, frankly, I am not growing in nearly the same shattering way that I did last semester, and coming to terms with that feels like a relief. I’m wicked happy, I’m seeing incredible sights alongside wonderful people, I’m utterly obsessed with the lifestyle I’ve built.

I suppose this post really is just a way to make myself feel better about my lack of output, but once again I am challenging myself to think differently about this exercise. I will have no shortage of writings about my many adventures to look back on from this year, and I am grateful to be spending my time in such exciting and all-encompassing ways. Also, who gives a hoot. 

That said, I’ve still encountered some beautiful ideas recently, and in lieu of longer posts about each one, I’ll write about one of them here. 

Recently, hiking with Dylan on the Tongariro Northern Circuit, I told him about my ongoing difficulty tracing the throughline of my life, believing that the person I am today is the same one who lived on Hurricane this summer, who used to live in North House, who lived in Chile, and so one backwards through the years. Every experience of my life has shaped me so intensely that it’s hard to believe I am the same person as the one who came before, sans the new experience(s). Ever since I started thinking about this, it’s gotten easier to put together, and as I explained this to Dylan, he told me about his older brother’s advice about going abroad: when you meet new people who have no sense of context of who you’ve been in the past, you get to decide who you are now, and who you are to that group of people. 

This made me think about the groups of people I’ve been so lucky to share space with this year, from my colleagues on the island to my incredible group of friends in Tanzania to the community I’m building this semester. I realized that my life is actually a snowballing collection of these places, experiences, and people, building on each other in a way that feels inseparable from what came before but in a way that is creating something quite spectacular. Who I want to be, and who I am, is a person indistinguishable from the shaping of my most meaningful people and experiences. I want to be a sum of these parts, and I am, forever shaped by each new piece and the pieces that came before it, like a braided river system gaining steam as more threads tie together. 

Minutes after this conversation I jumped in a waterfall and said “I’m not even cold, just alive”. If that doesn’t sum it all up, I’m not sure what does.

One happy, often salty, often sandy, always busy gal