DEAR CHINA, I MISS YOU, LOVE EMILY

I’m not totally sure what’s happening to me right now, but I miss China.

I’ve spent the last two hours reading and re-reading my blog. And I get it. I cognitively understand all the reasons that I was so miserable, and I still wholeheartedly maintain that leaving was the right choice for me. But for the last two weeks I’ve been consumed by this strong, strong craving to go back and visit.

I think it all started with Micah. My friend Micah, who works with me at Cheesecake, is leaving for the Middle Kingdom in a few short weeks to visit his sister who teaches in Xinzheng. As his trip has drawn near, we’ve had a handful of conversations about what he’s going to do and where he’s going to visit. I think this is what triggered my China-brain; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about all the things I liked about China, all the stuff that I could experience again if I visited.

So, I’m making another list. Maybe this will help me.

25 ways to make me fall in love with you.

1. Be ambitious. Be going somewhere.

2. Smile a lot.

3. Make me laugh. Often.

4. Must love cats. Or at least, must tolerate cats that are constantly cuddling with me. Extra super bonus points if you don’t roll your eyes when they wake me up at 8 in the morning so I can feed them wet food.

5. Let me make you laugh. You must think I’m funny to be romantically compatible with me. This is just a fact of life. 

An analogy.

I wrote a surprisingly eloquent post a few nights ago when I was drunk. It was about me leaving China and the Cheesecake Factory and what has brought me to the point that I’m at right now. But it wasn’t focused and obviously needed a little editing. So I’ll start it like this.

Every night, the most important decision I make is what music I’m going to listen to as I fall asleep. In high school, I used to always listen to music at night, mostly in an attempt to quell my terrible insomnia. This started again in China, when my restlessness made sleeping impossible unless I was completely worn out (… or in Beijing. I slept like a baby in Beijing). Every night I listened to the same playlist: a compilation of all of the Death Cab for Cutie albums I own. It always started with the same song: Tiny Vessels. I still can’t listen to that song without thinking about my rock-hard Chinese bed with its stupid non-fitted sheets.

I digress.

Now, I constantly struggle to find the right song to fall asleep to. As I write this, I’m listening to old Gomez. But I can’t sleep to them. I need specific music that puts me at ease from whatever emotions are buzzing through my brain while I’m trying to sleep.

Often what’s more disorienting isn’t the album I choose to fall asleep to, but instead what my iTunes scrolls to while I sleep. I start with a nice calming album, wake up to Backstreet Boys. Fall asleep to Grouplove, wake up with Hot Hot Heat. The list goes on. But to wake up to rock music at 3am when I need a glass of water can be really confusing to my brain.

I liken this to my memories of China, somehow. And this was what I tried to write about the other day, moderately successfully. There is this strange dichotomy that will consistently be a part of my memories of China. I was miserable there. There isn’t really any question in my mind that leaving was, 100%, the right decision for me. But I still have some amazingly fond memories from my time abroad. I found myself in ways that would have been impossible had I stayed at home. I saw some amazing sights and loved so hard I thought I would explode and found beauty in the quiet moments between exciting events. I came home a changed person.

The fact remains that I spent 4 years in college changing and growing around another person. It’s not good and it’s not bad; it just is. Coming home from China and facing that fact that, suddenly, the only person who I had to consider in all of my decisions was me…that was a surprisingly hard adjustment to make. I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that nothing is really keeping me here. If I wanted to pack up tomorrow and take my cats to Denver because that’s where I want to live, I can. I have no one to consult and no life-changing job to stay for. I can do whatever I want, and that’s overwhelming to me.

I spent my four years at Drake creating a very specific idea of what I wanted out of my life and how I was going to get it. That all has changed. Most of my frustration in the last 9 months has been career-related. I maintain that KNOWING what I want to do with my life and being unable to do it is probably the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. My tendency is to control; I like to know what is going to happen when, and the best way to know that is to be in control of when everything happens to me. I’m loosening up; this is the first time in my life that I can say I’m just “seeing where things go” in more than three aspects of my life. I’m living instead of planning.

But it feels an awful lot like falling asleep to different music than I wake up to. My life was planned and exact and I knew what I was going to be and where I was going to go, and then I came home and have been forced to enjoy and live in the chaos of having no idea where I’m going to go. At Drake, I fell asleep to a soft acoustic song. I’ve woken up in the last three months to something loud and driving, and I think I’m enjoying that more.

Unlikely associations

I said that writing was cathartic, right? I’m working through an idea right now. So you get to work through with me. Nothing I write on here is a big secret; I tend to be a fairly open book about my life, these are things that I would talk to anyone about at this point.

Music, like writing, has always been a big part of my life. I can remember way back to being a little girl and recognizing the difference between music that moved me and music that I listened to just because it was fun (aka the difference between the first two albums I ever owned, The Wallflowers and Spice Girls). Today when I was driving home, a song came on the radio, and something clicked inside my brain.

This is a happy song for normal people.

I have this habit of draining a song after something bad happens to me, forever linking it to that event, even if it has nothing to do with what is going on in my life. Something about having that one constant is good for me. And, honestly, I have two songs that are inexplicably linked to major moments in my life that, I think, are only sad to me.

On being OK now

A few days ago I was trying to figure out why I haven’t been writing anymore. Not just on here; obviously I haven’t been writing on this blog much at all since leaving China. But I’m talking at all, period. Since I was about 13 writing has been a major cathartic exercise for me, and I used to do it almost daily. That would ebb and flow depending on how sad I was at any given time in my life, granted, but I used to love the process of putting words onto paper. I mean, I still do, but I used to consider it a big part of my life process, and that’s suddenly stopped.

Since moving to the apartment, I’ve been combing through lots of the stuff that was stored in my parents house. I have journals upon journals of my words, and I read through most of them before throwing them away. It was with the last one that I realized why, even when I sit down to write purposefully in my journal, nothing seems to come out of me anymore.

It’s because, for the first time in what feels like my whole life. I’m okay. This summer was weird and full of false positives; I kept thinking I had broken out of the depression that came with going to China then leaving early and then breaking up with Tyler. I would bust out for a while, then fall back into it. Maybe it was August, when absolutely nothing triggered some kind of major breakdown in me. I took a week and completely rebooted myself, and since then, the change I’ve felt in myself has been major and profound.

I’ve spent the majority of my life hating myself in one way or another. I hated the way I looked, I hated the way I tended to interact with other people, and most of all, I hated how little control I felt I had over my feelings. My brain works in strange ways; I’m intense, as many people know, and my thoughts and feelings tend to tornado around inside my brain for days on end. But this last month and a half has been different. There is a remarkable lightness that has taken over my whole life.

There’s something peaceful and beautiful about the way I finally understand myself. My feelings are okay, even if they’re irrational at times. But I can finally step back from myself and see that I’m being irrational, and I finally have the skills to feel my feelings for a moment or two, let them pass, and then keep living my life.

People at work have been commenting on how I look different lately. That’s what it is. I’m light. I finally feel free, for the first time, from the shackles I put on myself for such a long time. It’s been an adjustment, there’s no doubt. There’s a noticeable void in my thoughts where that negativity used to be. I’ve been “getting better” for a long, long time, but this is the first time when I feel like it’s actually happening.

I’m happy right now. So remarkably, unshakably happy. Part of it, I’m sure, is that I finally feel like my life is going somewhere, what with all of my teaching stuff FINALLY coming together. But more than that, I’ve accepted who I am, have accepted my limits, and I feel like I’m actually living in the present. I’m not constantly worrying or stressing. 

It’s hard to explain to people that haven’t been in the place that I’ve been in. It’s hard to explain the way I’ve been my whole life, honestly. I can’t explain why that darkness has always been hiding in my chest. It came out of nowhere when I was in middle school and I started to think that it was something I’d always have to deal with.

But I don’t and I’m not. And I have this happiness busting out of my brain one hundred percent of every day, and I want to share it with everyone. I don’t want to be around people who don’t want to be happy. I’m no longer accepting the people that I invested time and care in that treated me like I was different or unworthy. This is my life now. Hey, everyone. I’m finally there.

Aftershock

For some unknown reason, this blog is still getting decent traffic, despite being completely dormant for 4 months. I feel flattered.

So I’m coming up on the 5 month anniversary of my return to America. At times, it feels like I was living in China yesterday, and others it feels like it was a million years ago. But as my life continues, in disarray, I’ve been spending more and more time reflecting on my life in China, what I learned, and what I’m taking with me as I continue down the path of my life. I decided to share these things.

Firewall free

For those of you who don’t know, I am now officially back in the States. I had a big long post explaining why I came home, but I figure it’s more time-efficient for all of us if you just email me and I can explain it all there.

But, here I am, in the San Fransisco airport, waiting for my second flight to Kansas City, Kansas. I’m mostly posting so everyone knows that I’ll continue to write on this blog for a month or two; I have a lot of things that I haven’t chronicled yet, and it’s much easier to tell lots of people on my blog. Plus I’ll be able to post pictures.

This will be much easier because I won’t have the firewall to contest with, so uploading pictures will take minutes instead of hours.

I must say, though, that even though I’m really excited to be back in America (I ate a sandwich today that I didn’t have to order off of a picture menu, it was a religious experience), a huge part of me is really sad to leave China. Once I adapted to living in the Chinese culture, I really became endeared to the country. But my teaching situation was making me miserable, and Shijiazhuang is less than the ideal city. In other circumstances (aka if Tyler and I had gone to Shanghai from the beginning), I know I would still be in China. And that’s why it was so hard to say goodbye to Tyler earlier today.

….in other news, if Chinese people stared at me before, they EXTRA stared on the plane today. I imagine I did look pretty ridiculous; one of the only foreigners on the plane, sitting at the end of her row, silently crying for the first two hours of her flight. An appropriate way to leave the country that taught me the definition of humility.