Instagram, study abroad and all the ways I’ve lied to you

Here’s a secret about study abroad: everyone’s crying. The people posting pictures at parties in the city center and gorgeous sunsets from their balconies are crying. All of them.

And if they’re not crying, it’s because they’re either too busy pretending not to have homesickness and culture shock, or they are exceptionally good at managing it. I had a solid two weeks where I dreaded going to class because I didn’t understand the transit system and I didn’t know enough Polish to ask for help. I also dreaded coming home from class because I had no friends. I would just sit in my room, in this beautiful and historical European city, and wonder why I didn’t have what it took to go out and experience it.

In hindsight, it turns out that’s what culture shock is, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I would come home from a few hours of errands exhausted because everything was so foreign. I felt the same kind of brain tired I did after I took the SAT in high school — like I’d just finished something incredibly difficult, and I needed to sleep.

It shouldn’t be this hard, I told myself. My classes were comparatively easier; I didn’t even have a job anymore. Why, then, was I struggling so much? How was this justifiable?

In the same building, there were probably more than a hundred people who felt the same way, but we were busy pretending to have fun. Like a game of chicken, but instead of driving cars head on at each other, we were putting on cute clothes, doing our makeup, and going out. I won’t pull back if you won’t. When I talk to the people I met during those nights now, they tell me they were scared, and homesick and jet lagged. But no one wanted to say it. So we danced and pretended we weren’t afraid.

I’m not writing this because I want pity. I recognize that I’m lucky to have experienced this at all. I’m writing this because everyone I know did their best to hide this part of the travel narrative from everyone but a choice few people, usually just the people who had to know because they were our support networks. We certainly weren’t publicizing it the way we did with the best parts of our experience. Cheyenne Coop, if you’re reading this somehow, it was for you, and everyone like you. I don’t want to look weak or sad in front of the people who didn’t like me in high school but for some reason still add me on Facebook. I want to look like I’m a self-possessed and brilliant young woman, traveling the world with an indie-chic vintage backpack and the confidence and grace of a young Audrey Hepburn.

Imagine, now, the Instagram pictures none of us were taking or posting.

Me, crying in my room in front of my roommate and her mother, two absolute strangers consoling me in English then switching to Kazakh to speak to each other, while I tried so desperately and so sadly to figure out how to put my sheets on, which consisted only of a flat sheet, a pillowcase and a duvet cover that honestly smelled like it had been sitting in a dark and dusty closet of a Soviet-era building for longer than I have known about the Soviet Union’s existence.

The look of sheer and unadulterated terror on my face the moment I realized that I had taken the wrong tram and was now in a park at the edge of the city instead of at my Polish class, which was starting in ten minutes.

A picture of the kefir, a fermented milk drink, that we all repeatedly bought thinking that it was milk before we learned to read Polish well enough to grocery shop (I imagine this one with the hashtag #ruinedcereal and the angry cat face emoji — not because it’s an especially feline emotion, but because the angry cat emoji, for reasons I cannot comprehend, is rotated 45 degrees to the right, staring angrily, which exemplifies the kind of externally-directed rage I imagine we all felt at kefir in that moment).

Is this a feed worth following? One that captures our lowest points as well as our highest? This question seems like the kind that would quickly turn philosophical. It’s existentialism masquerading under a slipshod veneer of social media and millennial angst. But underneath, the question is: are we equally defined by our worst moments as our best?

And I, utilizing a tactic that exemplifies the writer under-qualified to write about philosophy, will leave it up to you to decide. What I do know is this: those pictures of me laughing against the Prague skyline, my hair blowing in the wind? Those moments were real. But so was every second of fear and doubt that I felt. And if my younger self, about to sign her exchange paperwork, could follow me on social media, I’d want her to know about both.

-Katherine Taylor is a sophomore studying journalism. Though she’s currently studying abroad in Poland, she still spends a lot of time thinking about Tandoori Oven.

-katherinetaylor@aggiemail.usu.edu

@_the_katherine