The year before my study abroad trip to Spoleto, Italy, I was at a standstill. I transferred to College of Charleston after a hilariously awful semester in Boston. I had a difficult time fostering new relationships, so instead of joining clubs or perusing parties, I buried myself in work. I got a job at a grocery store to fill the time during my first semester and took six classes my second. Nothing quite touched me emotionally except the threat of losing my GPA by a few points, which I did. In a city like Charleston, equally gifted in beauty and depravity, stillness and movement, history and modernity, I had a difficult time opening myself up to the possibility of vulnerability when the world I was in was already so confusing. So I did what was easy. I became complacent.
I applied to study abroad in Spoleto mostly for the credit hours. In retrospect, I find that a very silly thing to look forward to when traveling to Italy. I didn’t understand, then, what I signed myself up for: some of the most emotionally rigorous and rewarding weeks of my life.
Something seemingly otherworldly happens when young strangers are placed in a close proximity in a foreign country together. I would call my parents from my apartment balcony and tell them I felt as if I was in a reality TV show. After a year of refusing to push myself to navigate the social scene in college in a misguided, holier-than-thou effort to succeed academically, my trip to Spoleto swiftly whipped me into a world that was the opposite of the one I had back home. I was forced to relinquish all of my illusions of control. I was surrounded by a random selection of girls I had no familiarity with. My ability to communicate was haphazard, at best, for my two semesters of introductory Italian. I walked everywhere and saw everything in mirages of heat.
It was difficult. There were all of these brief moments where everything that I knew was beautiful–the looming aqueduct and scruffy cats lying in the sun– was tinged with a deep, heavy feeling in my chest. Maybe it was because I knew my life would never resemble that of someone in Spoleto, and maybe it was because I was grateful for that and ached for the life I was living before. Some combination of sleeplessness, social exhaustion, and homesickness seemed to trail behind me wherever I went. It was faint, but I never fully forgot about it.
There were times, though, that I remember thinking to myself I will never be able to do something like this ever again. Or, I have never felt this way before. The idea that the moment I was living in (what an intense, shockingly beautiful moment it was) was whizzing past me is what seemed to knock me off my feet and point a finger in my face, urging me to make the most of this.
I was urged to be a person that I was not able to be at home. I had to be relentlessly social. I was patient, and I was kind, even when it was the difficult thing to do. I had to be shockingly present at all times, because I had no time to escape into a solitary world of lounging alone in my room or watching hours of television. And because I had to make these changes, I noticed that I was changing, myself. I felt like I was totally divorced from the person I was just a few weeks ago– in situations I never would have found myself in, reacting in ways that I didn’t know were within me. When you spend a fair amount of your life avoiding pain, you lose a portion of who you are.
Growth and wisdom, to me, are becoming aware of how little you know. And learning a few more things in that process. I felt stunted for so long because I wasn’t faced with any real challenges. I wasn’t experiencing the growing pains that come with meeting new people and allowing them to change me. I am aware of how lucky I am to have met so many admirable people at once and in such an odd situation. Travel is commonly thought to be about the destination visited. My trip to Spoleto completely challenged that idea– teaching me that so much of travel isn’t about the people that you observe, passively, from a distance. It is partially about those you come with, and more intimately, yourself.
I will never be twenty years old, nestled in a small town in Umbria ever again. I may never stroke Mao’s head again, or hand my card to the quick Pavone worker again, or bake in the heat of the laundromat by Conad again. In the same respect, I will never be the person I was before I went to Italy, either. After a few bizzare and wonderful weeks in Spoleto, I find that to be less terrifying than it is thrilling.
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