I've gone through a lot lately, and now that I finally see where I need to be heading, I've been thinking about Turkey a lot and the person I grew to be there. I don't know if everyone has such a deeply personal experience on study abroad trips - I suppose they do, and that's why they're so popular. But the beauty of personal experiences is that even if everyone has one, they'll always be unique for each person. To me, it felt like more than a study abroad trip.
I'm going back a week from today. Through hard work and a series of fortunate events, I got the opportunity to do research for my thesis over the break, paid for by Plan II.
I've been having very vivid memories of certain times in Turkey for about a month now. Memories of my time there were never really that suppressed, but they had died down when my semester got crazy (and this semester has been the most stressful I have ever had, hands down). But lately, they've been coming unbidden, usually when I get a couple of minutes to myself. They're the kind of daydreams that end with a shock when I realize I'm not actually there. For some reason, the most vivid have been of bus rides in the East, Selçuk, the Kale in Ankara, or my home.
I close my eyes, and the next thing I see is the sun peeking out from behind tall blue curtains, my friends sitting close in the seat in front of me, debating whether this Turkish saying means this or that. I see the young, scrawny and slightly sweaty attendant on the bus passing by with a tray of Nescafe, tea bags and chocolate cake in plastic wrappers, Lake Van out the window glistening bright blue. I see women and their children dressed in mismatched, baggy, flowered layers, their heads covered, beating their carpets in a stream between two bare hills. I see flocks of sheep roaming plains that seem to go on forever. I count the minarets of mosques in villages.
Or I see all of Ankara spread out in front of me, my legs dangling from a centuries-old castle over a narrow cobblestone street, the sun setting in clouds over a city where probably a quarter of the people are drinking tea at that exact moment.
Or I'm laying in a field of flowers under a ridiculously beautiful tree. I can still taste the cheese, coarse bread, olives and fruit wine that was our picnic and I'm laughing, because my friends are eating the carpet of flowers for dessert. I'm tired, because it's the last day of our trip, but I don't want it to end. Snippets of Turkish rise from the village over the hill, and I can understand some of the language that weeks earlier seemed so foreign.
Really, though, what I got out of being there was not so much a file of memories that I can pull out when I need a diversion, but a new sense of myself. It was the first time that I really experienced being me, myself, and being happy with that, not wishing that I was this, or that. Not wishing I could be more... or be less... or be here, or there, or with this person, or away from that person. Not waiting for this, or that. I knew that I was who I was, and that was who I needed to be, and that although I may change over time, I was always going to be myself, and that that was enough.
There were times this semester that I missed Turkey desperately. Partly because it was so fun and there was so little responsibility besides keeping myself alive and not lost, but really because I missed feeling how I felt about myself there. Now I see that I don't need Turkey to feel that way about myself. I'm working on it. But I know that just because I'm a work in progress doesn't mean I'm not a whole, complete person right here and right now.
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