(no subject)
I've been having professional development at my new school for the past two weeks, and I love it. The staff and sense of community is tremendous. As someone new, I’ve felt so welcomed these past few days: teachers have come up and introduced themselves to me, several have checked in to ask how I’m feeling about all the new stuff, many have extended invitations to happy hours and lunches. There are probably a total of about 60 or so teachers on staff, and everyone seems to respect and even genuinely like one another. I’ve only been at school a little over a week, and it’s already starting to feel like home.
What’s been difficult? This profound sense of displacement I’ve been feeling for the past six weeks. I’m realizing now, after some 22 years of life, that I don’t do change very well. A lot of people probably realized it far earlier, and many, I bet, during their freshman year of college. But I didn’t. I don’t know why-maybe it was because I already had so many connections to people at Swat even before I moved in, maybe it’s because I got lucky and formed a really close group of friends really fast. But I don’t recall ever feeling this discomfort of being thrown into an entirely new situation, this sense of rootlessness. Swat felt like home so fast.
It’s a little silly because D.C. is probably the least new/strange, new/strange place I could be in. I’ve lived in the city for two summers now, I have a bunch of friends who’ve moved down here as well. But despite that, I’m so so homesick-- homesick for home, homesick for Swat, homesick for my friends. I don't know. It's hard being a real person in the real world, of not living in a college dorm surrounded by people you know and love. It's hard to find time to see them when they're living across the city, and not across the hall. It's hard. I don't know when or how or if I'll ever get used to it.
How do people be single adults without being immensely lonely?