Last night was really amazing and insightful. Going uptown for five minutes and then ending up spending the night with a bunch of friends in my own living room talking about things I feel only adults talk about makes me somewhat certain that I really am one now. The thrill of going out 4 nights a week and getting sloshed and acting like a fool has gradually lost its appeal. That feeling of goofiness pales in comparison to the feeling of real connection with people found in intimate conversation. Is that being grown up? If so, I kind of like it. Though, it definitely has its downsides.
Things like, understanding how the world really works. How money truly is the root of all evil and how it permeates every aspect of our existence. To understand the astounding greed that motivates so much of politics is heartbreaking. The weight of America's happiness is on the shoulders of the rest of the world and it seems that no one is doing anything about it.
Last week I was asked to come talk about my experience in Senegal in front of some first year students in the Global Leadership program I'm in. I was really happy to go back in time and attempt to put myself there again. Yet, I felt so limited. Given countless hours it would be difficult to summarize, giving credit to everything, the experience I had there. I want to not just describe the experience but open people's eyes to the grave injustices I witnessed. Babies who are numbers, women who are nearly slaves to their families, men who work so hard for nearly nothing. Maybe this is why I am so thrown off when people ask me, "how was Senegal?". What do you say to that? It was the most incredible, wild, eye-opening, exhilarating, heartbreaking three and a half months of my life. But every one of those words has so many stories and faces behind it. There's absolutely no way to summarize it. What's more, Senegal is one of the most stable countries in the whole of Africa, considered to be "doing well", and I myself can be there and take bucket showers and live among them but I will always be American and no matter how much I strive to put myself on their level, if I am injured, I will never end up at the Post de sante of Ouakam where I watched so many people receive inadequate health care.
A part of me feels like I'm still in the air, in limbo. When you're on the plane you're someplace in between. You're not really anywhere. I feel like I never actually landed, I'm still someplace 34,000 feet above ground floating in between the US and Senegal. I've been home over a month- I wonder when that'll stop.
Alex still calls me on a regular basis and I get messages and e-mails from him all the time. My heart is so apart from him now and I am consumed with guilt. How can I explain to him that I will probably never be his again? I don't want to have to do that. I feel like I did something destructive. When I was there and with him I was so in it. Part of me missed home but overall I felt right where I should be. Now that I'm back it's clear to me that I could never marry a person who doesn't challenge me. Challenge me to grow and educate myself. Someone who doesn't stimulate me on an intellectual level. I don't know why, I don't understand it. I'm so angry with myself for being so detached from someone I love and who seems ready to never stop loving me. He just turned 29; what did I do to this person? I was his hope for something more, something better than that life. Looking back I'm so furious with myself for things I said to him, things to give him that hope. I meant them then, I really did. There was some innocent part of me that was naive enough to believe that this love was just. I wanted to be in love and I was but it was some completely other me. I feel that I did something selfish and unfair. In the beginning I kept telling him I would leave and it would be over but I fell so hard that stopped feeling like an option. I felt that I had to see him again and that he was the only person I'd ever met who really deserved my love. Perhaps it's true that he is the most deserving but somehow you cannot align your heart and your head to always love the one you know you should love.
When I came back I realized how terrified I am of commitment. I've worked incredibly hard to do what I'm striving to do and I always promised myself I wouldn't sacrifice my dreams for any man. I don't know if sacrificing love for dreams will find me happy in the end but that's life. I know I'm going to be a workaholic because I'm already obsessed with being almost a professional. Like everyone I'm floating through hoping to bump into another person going my direction and it's horrifying to think that maybe we will miss one another somehow but in the meantime all I can do is live and love myself and keep hoping.
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