Now its over.
I´m back in Germany and to be honest, everything feels strange. Sure, by now most of my German is back and I can speak like always. But still, somethings off…
It was a great feeling to see everyone again, getting kind of back in the old rhythm. The food is nice, everything is nice and I feel most of the time like crying. Not for any reason necessarily, I can’t even explain it really.
I´ve been away a whole year, my life continued and everyone else´s as well. People act and ask questions like I’ve “just” been on holiday. The fact that my life has been turned around and I changed on the inside seems nobody to consider. I just ruined everyone´s expectations with not dyeing my hair pink. (Seriously, who should I ever do that?!) The people I kept in touch with during the year understand to an extended limit. However, nobody will ever understand, because nobody made the same experiences, they compare it to their experiences and come along like “I´ve been to London, I know exactly how it is in England” But let me tell you something: you don’t. London is a big important city, where I lived lots of people haven’t even been to London once in their lifetime. London is far away from what I was abel to experience, it´s a different world.
People telling me to know more about something I´ve been obsessed with, lived it makes me want to cry. I know it´s their way to understand and help me, but maybe I am to selfish to accept that.
In Germany nobody really is interested in what I want to do/talk about. It starts with my family, I want to watch English TV, talk in English, do everything in English, but they don’t. Okay they tried, but my father is the only one I could make watch something in English with me (even though we had subtitles on)
Furthermore, my brain hasn’t really realized yet, that not every person in the world is an English freak. While I was talking to a friend it took me some time to notice that maybe the topics I was bringing up weren’t that interesting for her. Not everyone loves English (culture) and I really need to remember that.
The first week back was the strangest. The postman asked me if I was a family member before giving me the parcel, we´ve got a new landline phone and I don’t recognize the ringtone, I accidentally spoke English in the shops several times, some people gave me some strange looks after seeing me again, my parents and everyone is actually there not just on Skype, here we have real bread and while I feel like everything chanced it still feels so familiar.
Most people still know my name which is good, however I forgot a lot of them. I see their faces and can tell them which classes we had together, but no idea what´s their name. Someone actually asked me if I just moved here, it´s not like we were on the same school in the same year for the last five years, but anyway. (Okay we hadn’t had any classes together and I don’t know his name, it´s a tie i guess)
Till now the most embarrassing moment was when we had a class meeting and thanks to the bus I was a bit early so I waited in front of the room and everyone looked confused at me. Later during the meeting my teacher said out loud I should come to him after the lesson for some organization stuff and for a moment everyone stared again at me. Exactly what I wanted.
My plan of just sneaking back into the school life didn’t really work, but I met tonnes of new people and thankfully I just once had to give a little report in front of a class.
My head of year didn’t even know I was back, so I hadn’t have any lessons and spent my time at school chasing some teachers and sitting in the back of the room while everybody else was discussing their work experience. It was okay I guess.
Now that school is over we went for holidays to Italy. Another thing that really helps with me settling back in. Right now half my head is in England, the other half in Germany and my body in Italy. It´s just one culture shock clashing with another one. However, it is good at helping me to forget about this identity crisis I’ve gotten myself into. It happened way to much in the last year, but that doesn’t mean it was bad.
It probably was one of the best years of my life so far. For the future I just have to learn to not expect so much happening again.
This whole year showed me a lot about myself, now I have to take that and maybe learn how to show it to everybody else. I don’t know how I am going to do that. For now I just decided to write everything down. Not like I did on this blog, I´ve let lots of things out. Just for myself. The memories fade so fast and I wish they wouldn’t.
For now this is goodbye, project England is over.
Theresa