It's coming to the end of my year abroad, and as I spend my time researching the cheapest ways to send all the things I've accumulated back home and trying to plan a trip from San Francisco to New Orleans, it seems only right to start to arrange my thoughts and feelings on my time in the states.
It's funny now, but before I left I had a very clear vision of who I thought I'd be in America. This girl would be tanned and confident, long beautiful hair curling down her toned back, twirling between football games and frat parties, loved and adored because of her "cute british accent", but somehow seamlessly fitting into American life. She was an amalgamation of Emma Watson and Naomi Clark, a bubbly and beautiful Sarah 2.0. Well, you can guess how that turned out.
America is, at the end of the day, just a country. And American college is just university with a different name. And Sarah in America is, well, the same girl she always has been.
Knowing what I know now of the social structures of American college and the obsessive need for college students to be in a strict group, be it a sports team or a frat, it seems ludicrous that I ever thought that I would be someone who would suit greek life.
And I know several British exchange students who have spent this past year in the US, girls who have become pseudo-American, exclaiming their love for the states endlessly on social media, assimilating the sorority girl poses and smiling at the ground in candidly posed instagram photos. And there is nothing wrong with that at all, for some people, that has been the perfect way to experience America, in short because that is how a lot of American kids experience America. But it was never going to be my experience. It was never something that would suit me.
For all the red cup party perfection of American high school movies, I don't really see America as exceptional. Not that it is bad, it is has its flaws as all countries do, some more blatant than others, but rather it is not, as a girl once said in my American studies class back at Kent, "just so much bigger and better than England". It is different. And it has been interesting to start to understand that difference rather than hold it up to such inflated standards.
For me, coming to America was about immersing myself in another culture and seeing what life was really like beyond grinning photos at the top of the Empire State Building and meandering through a sunlit Central Park. I moved to Pennsylvania, a small, once prosperous, industrial town split down the middle and divided between students and locals. There are many things I have learnt and observed and experienced since moving to Bethlehem, and most of them lie beneath the sheen of glamorous college parties and sun kissed road trips.
For some reason, when I first pictured my time at Lehigh, things like writing and politics didn't really come into it. But these things, so important to me back in the UK, are also important to me here.
America is a country in flux. There is a restlessness and an itch for something different. The stale family politics, the oppressive systems that dictate the way people communicate and understand each other, that dictate the paths that people must take, the gap between those with and those without, seen clearly in my little town, the dissonance between the idea of America- freedom and unity- and its reality. There are conversations being had that I feel privileged to be a part of surrounding the plausibility of fixing the system or looking outside the capitalist structures currently in place. Following the campaigning and the primaries this year, seeing the comparisons and differences between candidates here and back in the UK who are promising real change, has been fascinating. The world is stirring, things are being stretched and challenged and examined.
In my classes, I have been a part of discussions on the stigmatisation of mental health and the dire implications of the private health care service available here, I am currently taking a class that looks at the history of the #blacklivesmatter movement and the hidden injustice facing people of colour in the US and back home in England, structural oppression mislabeled as a cultural issue.
Whilst I have enjoyed travelling to new cities and places, indulging in the privilege that has brought me to America for a year without financial implications, I feel like I have learnt so much more about the world than just how to navigate Philadelphia.
As I prepare to leave, I do not worry about sentimentally missing America. I know it is somewhere that I have enjoyed living, somewhere that I have made great friends and had great adventures exploring. But if I miss anything, it will be the conversations with classmates and cafe staff and my pastor at church, conversations that have taught me so much. But I won't leave them here in Bethlehem, I hope to continue them over the pond, watching and hopefully participating in the changes coming.
I did not become the girl I hoped I would when I came to America, I am not any more tanned or any taller, I do not have a plethora of frat boys' numbers in my phone or the perfect selfie in front of an American flag. And I am more than happy about it.
And I think its pretty apt that I still haven't been to a party with red cups.
