Hit the Pavement Running
I can vividly remember waving goodbye to my mom sixteen months ago as the National Express bus began to drive her back to Gatwick Airport where an airplane back to America would be waiting for her. I was somewhere in Southampton city centre that I didn’t recognise and continued waving and walking, in hopes to live out one of those movie moments where I’d keep the bus in view until it turned a corner. Almost in perfect timing, I tripped over the sidewalk, or as they call it over here, “pavement”. That sort of incident was not an out of the ordinary sort of fumble on my part, but a foreign feeling paired with it and it washed over me as I hit the ground — I was alone.
I could ramble on about my first actual travel experiences abroad, where I always seem to exaggerate and announce to people with great hubris, “I lived in Dublin,” and I’d hold my nose up high and smirk like a little child until they asked me for how long and I’d utter under my breath, “…Four months.” Now, studying abroad was an excellent experience, and I’m not trying to belittle the adventure for anyone who’s done it, because I still talk about it to this day with the same level of hubris as always. I won’t ignore the fact that I was too scared to leave my room for one of those four months and learned a great deal about independence while traipsing around Ireland when I eventually did bribe myself to go outside for a pint. But I knew I was coming home at the end. This time was different.
Around the end of summer 2019, I barely recognised my inner self anymore. I was depressed, full of anxiety, in a horrible situation-ship, and generally just unsatisfied with my job and where I was living. I’d never really been more than one hundred miles away from my snowy home of Buffalo, NY for a long period of time and felt like I wasn’t living for myself anymore. I’d lost my spark and desperately wanted it back but was too afraid to ask for help. So, I did what any mentally unstable human would do — I applied to a job abroad. It was a job with the company I was already working for, so my assumption was that they’d have to consider me since I was an internal candidate, right? They’d at the very least look at my application, ring me for a basic interview, I’d get to hear a few cockney accents, and then they’d respectfully decline me since there was a Brit who was ten thousand times more qualified than my American self. The next day, my assumptions were deemed correct as they set up my first interview. Once I got to the fourth interview, I started to realise that my hypothesis had been deviated from. I remember waking up at 4 a.m. one morning in October to an email saying that they wanted to offer me the job. I remember instantly blurting out, “Well, I have to go,” in my sleepy slumber without even thinking about it. So, I went. I dropped everything and started fresh to rebuild myself on the inside. My family and friends were thrilled for me, saying things like “LONDON BABY!” mimicking Joey from Friends, or singing Fergie’s iconic “London Bridge”. First, I wasn’t moving to London. Second, I was moving to a port city that was known for the launch of the Titanic, so its reputation wasn’t a stellar first impression for me.
After tripping over the pavement and miraculously finding my way back to my tiny flat, the next few months were filled with missing trains, accidentally paying bus drivers with euros instead of pounds, adapting to new temperature scales, a new diet, co-workers uttering the weirdest phrases (my favourite being “rougher than a badger’s arse”), saying “chips” instead of “fries”, adding random “u”s to words, replacing “z”s (or “zed”) with “s”s in other words, and most of all, the feelings of missing home. Two months into my new life, the pandemic hit. I had just returned from a holiday in Germany when my boss told me we’d be staying home indefinitely.
Between England’s three lockdowns, I took time to travel to different cities within England by myself, since that was all I was allowed to do according to Boris and the rest of Parliament. I’d hop on the train after work on Fridays and head to Cambridge to see the streets that Isaac Newton walked, Oxford to see the sites where they filmed the “Harry Potter” movies, Queen Victoria’s estate on the Isle of Wight, the beaches of Bournemouth, Portsmouth, and Brighton, the Roman Baths of, well, Bath, the Floating Harbour of Bristol, the cliffs of Durdle Door, a previous boyfriend I met on Hinge in Reading, a concert in the middle of London, and so many more adventures.
In a way, tripping over the pavement at the beginning of my journey was a strange way of keeping me grounded to learn about the country I was now living in, rather than immediately gallivanting off to somewhere much warmer with a bunch of other people for a holiday. That feeling of being alone that washed over me sixteen months ago is now a feeling that I embrace and welcome with a smile.
*NOTE: Originally written for a First Experience Project prompt. Check out their website for more stories on finding common ground through first experiences.
