One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past two months that I’ve been here in London is the idea of a home. I consider myself really lucky to have had many places where I have felt at home in my life. To me, that feeling becomes clear when you return to a place after being away for a long period of time, and it feels like exhaling a breath that you’ve been holding in for too long.
Of course, nowhere gives me that feeling quite like my home in Kennett Square, but there have been lots of other places that give me that sense of calm and happiness. In high school, Shanahan was certainly a second home for me, where I had friends who felt as close as siblings. Whenever I go back to Ocean City, NJ, I feel so full of joy, and Longwood Gardens never fails to bring me peace every time I step through the entrance.
I was so scared to go to college because I was going to be further away from my many homes than I ever had been before, and I knew it was going to be hard to develop another one. Much to my surprise, however, Notre Dame gave me more of a feeling of home than I ever thought would be possible to find at college. Every time I had to leave at the end of the semester, I felt a sense of loss when I thought about how many days stood in between me and seeing the Golden Dome again. That sense of loss was incredibly difficult to deal with as I left at the end of last semester, knowing that it would be eight months before I would be back on campus.
The thing that kept playing in my head whenever I was sad about leaving to go abroad was, “How lucky am I to have a place that makes it so hard to leave?” It’s a truly beautiful thing to have something special enough that leaving is so emotional and difficult, but that doesn’t really make it any easier to say goodbye.
The sadness of leaving Notre Dame last semester was coupled with the same uncertainty that I had faced in August 2017 as I left for college: will I be able to find a home in this new place?
Within the first week of being in London, I was already sad about leaving this city at the end of the semester. Coming back from our classroom building every night, as I cross the Thames, I look up at the skyline and am taken aback every time by how beautiful this city is. Every time I get to go to a new restaurant or market or museum, I am overwhelmed by the thousands of things there are to do here, and the knowledge that there are going to be so many things I have to leave without doing just because four months is not enough time to experience this whole city.
Most of all, though, I’ve come to really love the most mundane things about life here. As I wrote about before, I love taking the tube and getting to experience life as a London commuter. One of my new favorite things is going grocery shopping and getting to walk around and think about all the different things I could cook for dinner that week. Every cloudy morning feels exciting, and the sunsets get more beautiful every day as it stays lighter later.
There’s only one week between us and spring break, and unfortunately for me, that means two papers, two exams, and a quiz. As a result, I knew from the beginning of the semester that this weekend was going to be a lot of sitting on my laptop and working and would probably include very few fun London activities. Even so, the fact that there was nothing notable about this weekend was notable in its own way. A few weeks ago, I discovered my new favorite coffee shop to do work, and so this weekend has been the perfect opportunity to spend time there drinking coffee, eating gluten free donuts and cookies, and revising papers.
On Friday night, a few friends and I went out to an Italian restaurant that we had gone to on our first night in London. It was such a simple thing, but it felt so fun and exciting. We remarked several times about how it felt like we had just come from work and were doing a girls’ night out in the city.
That’s definitely been the best part about this experience for me so far: these last two months have felt like a trial run of adult life, and it’s been so fun. Going to work, grocery shopping, planning my meals, living in the city and having free time that I get to decide what I want to do with it, it’s all felt so much like a sneak peak of what life is going to be like in a year and a half. And for as much as I’ve feared life after graduation in the past, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that I really love it.
We’re now just about at the halfway point of this semester, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around all the changes that I’ve gone through and everything I’m learning. I’ve loved getting to travel and go to museums and do touristy things in London, but without a doubt, it’s the mundane things that have been the best part of this experience so far. Things like having a favorite coffee shop that I go to once a week and the fact that if you were to drop me at a random tube station and tell me which lines ran through there I would feel fairly confident in my ability to get back to the dorm on my own are so exciting to me.
There’s still a lot more I have on my London bucketlist to get done, and I know I still have a ton of room to grow and plenty of things to learn, but, with half the semester behind me, I know that I’ve been able to find another home here. I’m sure that come May, I’m going to miss London in the same way that I miss South Bend and Kennett Square right now, and I think that that’s pretty cool.
Eileen's London Semester 