That's just humiliating, I can't do that.
Fuck anyone else, I care what I think of me, which isn't much right now.
- Mason Evans Jr., Boyhood
It means don't handle over the controls to your self esteem to anyone. You are responsible for you. And if you truly take care of you, you will be amazed. The good thing is you're feeling stuff, and you've got to hold on to that.
- Mason Evans, Sr., Boyhood
A Spanish teacher told me the first day in my erasmus university that the re-entry shock you experience when returning to your home country is even bigger than the culture shock you experience when entering a new country. I never experienced that culture shock when I lived in Spain. In consequence, you can all guess how big my re-entry shock is now.
I figured it would be pretty nice to enter this field of happiness, my abandoned blog, with a melancholic review on my erasmus experience. But yet again, few words are left. I lived a dream, and now it's time to wake up and be left with the eternal sangria hangover. We all know those can be pretty tough to tackle.
There is definitely a pre-erasmus-me and a post-erasmus-me. I prefer the last one. It is very fulfilling to look back at a period in your life and realise that is changed you into the person that you are now, that it helped you becoming the person you want to be. It makes me scared, though, to feel that I have more difficulty with starting a complete new life than continuing my old one. It teaches me a lot about how I really want to do things in life, but also how your environment influences this strongly.
Coming back to Belgium and to my student life here in Leuven was startling and strange. The city changed, my friends changed, I changed, but somehow, everything managed to stay exactly the same. Some houses are burning, some are abandoned, some redecorated without asking your opinion about the eggshell colour of the walls. Relationships changed in such a subtle way that it is impossible to find balance right away.
I hate it that my life here doesn't give me the opportunity to mourn, to experience this sadness thoroughly and miss every single element that I loved so much in the city where I felt completely in peace with myself. In Belgium, everything feels like a battle now. Being just yourself isn't an option anymore. I have to fight the feelings to to talk about my erasmus friends that my friends here don't know. I have to fight the urge to start my stories with "In Spain...". Only in the territory of my private flat, I completely surrender: my ringtone is 'Travesuras', stare for minutes to my pictures and sent pathetic voice-messages via WhatsApp (sorry for that).
It will be clear to you all now that I only write blog posts when I experience my quiet rage (read my very first blog post: http://zaragotcha.blogspot.be/2014/08/quiet-rage-furia-silenciosa.html), when I need to structure my thoughts and somehow need to ventilate those. The moment I stopped posting was the moment I felt completely in peace on erasmus, I figured.
I will have to look for a constructive way of living my day-to-day life here, without feeling like I'm not going anywhere, without feeling I'm not growing and becoming. Finding this will probably take some time, cause all I can see now is how the Spanish lifestyle is so much better than the Belgian one. I managed to discover the fundamental difference between those two: in Spain, people only aren't friendly when you aren't. In Belgium, people only are friendly when you are. The secret here lies in not giving up on those Belgians. And so I won't. I promise, I will try.
You know how everyone is always saying "seize the moment"? I don't know, I'm kinda thinking it's the other way around. You know, like, the moment seizes us?
Yeah, I know, it's constant, the moments, it's like it's always right now.
