Waterford 2009

{{ Dr. Dabundo - I forgot to ask in class yesterday, so I hope this is okay….I started writing this for last week, but it ended up being a lot longer than I expected. I think it works well as a sum-up for the whole trip, and as it’s over 1,000 words, would it be all right if I counted it for my last two blog entries? Let me know if that’s a problem, and I’ll be sure to write another entry, but I thought I’d check. Thanks! }}

It’s funny to me how I always learn more about myself when I’m around other people. For most of my past, I’ve always been more content on my own than in the company of others. I wouldn’t consider myself anti-social, necessarily, but I so often get caught up in pursuing my own interests that I forget to pursue friends. In fact, the best friends I have today are the ones that consistently call me and keep up with me...otherwise, unless I see them everyday, it’s easy for me to simply let friendships go.

Thus, this experience in Ireland has exposed me to interactions with others that I would normally protect myself from. Not only have I been socializing (with far more ease than I could have ever anticipated) with people on the trip, but also meeting new people in pubs and hostels in a manner that is totally new to me. In fact, I would venture to say that in the few weeks I’ve been here, my approach to talking to strangers and making friends has altered significantly.

I feel like I’ve grown up a lot on this trip. It may sound silly, but I used to get very anxious about mundane, everyday things, like checking into hotels, asking for directions, or walking into bars. Most of these anxieties are based around my fear of being judged by strangers...there’s always that voice in my head, wondering whether they’re judging me, whether they think my clothes don’t fit right or whether they see the big zit on my forehead I’ve tried desperately to cover up.

These seem trivial concerns, but nevertheless, such worries have always colored my communication (or lack thereof) with others. Like I mentioned in my last post, here I have been able to largely abandon those concerns. I can envision myself in the eyes of the stranger and see myself as no different from any other person. Partially I attribute this to the friendships I’ve made amongst our group - meeting new people isn’t so scary when you have the support of your friends. I also attribute this to the welcoming attitude of the Irish; they have shown me that a smile goes a long way, that sitting at the bar with a pint is all you need to make a friend, and that no matter what you look like or where you come from, we’re all part of the same human race.

I suppose what all this is really about is making myself vulnerable. Vulnerability, even in such low-risk situations as asking a stranger for directions, has always terrified me. Thus, to be here, making myself vulnerable, and to have such positive experiences as a result, has brought me a long way. I’m more willing to take risks now. I see strangers, not as people that may potentially dislike me, but as people I could potentially befriend. This is not to say that the switch has been overnight, and that I’m forever cured of my fear of rejection. However, it has put me on a new road, one that I hope to bring home with me and that will allow me to be more open to new relationships.

I know I’m going to miss Ireland and the Irish terribly when I return home. However, the lessons I have been taught here are more valuable and more enduring than any souvenirs I may bring back. I lot of these lessons can be applied to the next adventure I face in my life, which is transferring to UGA. It is something that, in the past, would have inspired lots of fear and worry; learning my way around a new (and gigantic) campus, meeting new people in my classes, adjusting to life away from my parents, learning to live with roommates and figuring out where I fit in in the whole grand scheme of things. But now, instead of something scary, I see my transfer as an exciting new challenge. With the boost in self-esteem that this trip has giving me, I know I will find making friends and socializing with strangers not only much easier, but much more pleasant. Instead of just “getting by,” as I’m typically known to do, I expect to thrive in ways I never have before. Something about doing things that are scary for me in a foreign country, and succeeding in my efforts, makes doing them at home seem so much easier. That’s not to say that I expect to be changed overnight into a social butterfly, but I won’t be the wallflower any more either.

Some of these things were expected when I made the decision to come to Ireland - while I have been making lots of progress with coming out of my shell at home, I knew that coming here would do a lot to not only speed along the process, but to increase my confidence in ways that I couldn’t achieve while still mostly in my comfort zone.

When I was little, my mom used to read me a book called Leo the Late Bloomer. I think she originally bought it for me because I have an August birthday, but it was a book that applied very well to my life. Like the little tiger in the book, I spent most of my childhood in a state of awkwardness, uncomfortable in my own skin. It’s funny how certain books have big impacts on you, and I can remember mentally referring back to it whenever I felt inadequate or that I’d failed at something. I’m a late bloomer, I would think, it’s not my turn to bloom yet, but one day I will, and life won’t be so hard. Finally, at the age of twenty-two, I think I’ve finally reached that point. Late bloomer I may be, but looking back at the many times in my past when I wondered if I would ever bloom at all, it seems incredibly well-timed.

Anyways, I hope all of this makes sense...a lot of my feelings on this subject are jumbled and tangled and rather difficult to qualify. I suppose this is to be expected, as many of the things I’ve written about are very close to my heart, so I hope I’ve managed to communicate them somewhat effectively. In any case, it feels very good to put them down in words, and I am glad of the opportunity to do so.

While sketching beside the Quay last Wednesday during my drawing class, I was approached by two children, a brother and a sister, named Donna and Thomas. The girl was older (going on 13, as she put it) and the boy was 10. The girl came up first, curious about what I was doing. She seemed quiet and shy at first, but not so much as to prevent her from asking what I was up to. I explained that I was drawing some buildings, and the boy, after observing my friendly response, seemed to decide it was safe to join his sister. We chatted for a while - I asked them if they were finished with school, which they were. The girl asked what America was like - I didn’t exactly know what to tell her, so I assured her things were nice there but that I loved Ireland just as much. Then they stood for a while and watched me draw, chatting casually until the end of class grew near and we were gathering up to go back to campus. I walked away with a little more bounce in my step - a symptom I often seem to develop after conversing with the Irish. After I began to dwell on the encounter, I picked up on some cultural differences that stood out to me.

Firstly, their parents weren’t hovering over them. I imagined they must have been waiting for the bus (I was drawing just in front of a bus stop), but I never noticed them. Instead of calling to their children not to bother us (as I imagine most American parents would have done, they stayed in the background, allowing their children to talk to us while they kept a watchful eye. It seems such a small thing, really, but to me, it just reinforced the friendliness and openness of the Irish people.

Such encounters have colored my experience here in Ireland - while the scenery is beautiful and the ancient ruins are fascinating, meeting the people is what has stuck with me. Unlike in the States, where I feel like I have to look a certain way or act a certain way in order to be accepted by people, the Irish seem much more apt to see you for what’s inside than what’s out. This is especially true in pubs, where people are more interested in good conversation than anything else. I have found myself able to open up more, able to carry on conversation more easily, and as a result, I’ve seen my self-confidence increase dramatically. There’s a certain sense of brotherhood and togetherness when you’re sitting in a pub with a pint, tapping your foot to live trad even if you don’t know all the words. Sitting in a pub in Galway over the weekend, I remember looking around at one point and getting the sense, probably for the first time, that I was part of a group that could not be qualified by any common trait beside our humanity.

I hope that with this new outlook that the Irish have given me on my fellow humans will continue once I return home. I know I will miss the fellowship that I’ve found here, but I plan to enjoy it and make the most of it while I’m here.

As an English major, it should not be a surprise to anyone that I like books. Thus, I expected to enjoy Dublin quite a bit. Almost everything I read mentioned the rich literary history of the city, and so I had little doubt that I would be thoroughly delighted by whatever things made it so.

It was with this attitude that my Dublin adventure commenced. I walked through the exhibit at the Writer’s Museum, listening to the bullet-pointed version of the lives of the writers on display. I touched the passport and journals of Yeats at the National Library. I stood in awe at the miraculous collection of books towering over me in the Long Room at Trinity College. I found each of them both informative and interesting, and felt that much more connected to past Irish writers because of them.

Still, I felt like I wasn’t as excited as I should be. I had gotten it into my head that stepping into places like the Writer’s Museum, the National Library, and the Long Room would make me want to write my heart at...shouldn’t literary history such as what is displayed in these places be profoundly inspiring?

But I soon found that Dublin’s literary history is really not in the museums. It’s not in the carefully planned exhibits, nor the government buildings with security guards eyeing your every move. It’s not something that can be contained, defined, or put on display.

I found it, instead, in places like the cobblestones of Trinity College, once tread upon by the likes of Swift, Stoker, Wilde, and Beckett. In the basements of used bookstores, where personal notes have been made inside the covers of old copies of O’Flaherty and O’Brien. On the stools of the pubs and the faces of the people inside of them.

It’s all part of the elusive spirit of Ireland that I have begun to sense as my knowledge of the country slowly widens. There’s something here that we don’t have in the States, and it’s rather hard to explain, but it lingers under the surface, connecting the people and scenery, the present and past.

It wasn’t until the bus ride back from Dublin that I truly began to get an inkling of why language and writing have so much significance to the Irish people. The pure, magical beauty of this little island simply demands to be put into words. There is something about the soft curves of the hills, the rampant palette of greens, the jagged, geometrical shapes of the rocks and the frothy blue sea that blows against them that puts one in the mood to create something. Such natural beauty makes one desperate to discover the exact words that will portray them perfectly on the page.

As such, my greatest desire while here is to explore the beautiful nature of this place, both of the landscape and of the people. I believe that it was by the observation of these things that the pens of so many great Irish writers were inspired, and I can only hope that I might receive even a fraction of such inspiration.