12.16.25

Dear Amanda,

Coming up on Christmas I guess you could say I’m nearing the halfway point of the program, and for the past month all I’ve been able to think about is going home. I don’t like it here, I don’t want to be here, my asshole is chafed and I don’t know why. Something about the diet here is making my intestines inflamed and I can’t seem to pinpoint what it is. I thought it was the water for a long time but I stopped drinking the tap and those fiery shits came crawling back. My latest theory involves the potentially expired bottle of balsamic vinaigrette I’ve been using on my salads or the deli meat I get from the grocery store since those were the only two things I ate yesterday.

Here I’m often reminded of an old SNL sketch that Adam Sandler did a few years ago while hosting. He plays the owner of a travel agency reading an infomercial for his business and after describing the exotic locations and trips his agency can give you, he adds at the end: “I have to remind you, when you get to Italy, you will still be the same person.” Then after describing a luxurious trip to Fiji, he says again, “You are still you in Fiji. You can leave the country but you cannot escape yourself.”

I can only write about what’s on my mind and while I wish I could tell you about the three different countries I just visited over Christmas, or the amazing, world famous ski resort I stayed in in France, or the food in Geneva or any number of universally jealousy-inducing experiences I’ve just had, those things are not what’s on my mind. What’s on my mind now that I’m back in Orihuela with a week before classes start and nothing to do again, is the fact that I came here with a handful of goals that I don’t feel I’m accomplishing. 

Goal 1: improve Spanish. This might be occurring in small ways currently unnoticeable to me, but all of my friends are American and I have yet to make any relationship with a Spanish person. The culture is a bit cliquey and serious and hard to break into, and I’ve leaned heavily on my American colleagues for socializing.

Goal 2: get better at being alone. This was a stupid goal to begin with and I no longer agree with it. Being alone sucks and is lonely and I don’t think I should force myself into isolation out of some vague, eat-pray-love notion of getting ‘in touch with myself.’ I think humans were made to socialize and the only self-reflection I can do when I’m feeling homesick is ‘damn, I miss my friends and family.’ And I am in touch with myself. I touch myself a lot.

Goal 3: move away from codependence. This was a positive spin on the previous goal, and speaks more deeply to the issues I have with being alone. I still feel like such a kid so much of the time, and from what I’ve heard, some of that never goes away. But learning how to take care of myself as an adult, emotionally and physically, is something I’m still learning how to do. Physically, I’m not great at cooking (hence the fiery anus) or remembering to eat or drink water (I’ll never forget a beer) and emotionally I usually need some sort of woman to regulate me and remind me of my self-esteem. Part of goal 3 was to move past a certain tie I feel towards a certain person back home and I assumed that being across continents would instantly solve that issue for me without having to think about it, plan for it, or work towards it. But it’s taken me three and a half months now and I just remembered that calling her everytime I can’t sleep and texting her everytime I feel lonely wasn’t very Goal 3 of me. I didn’t want to do it and I still don’t like that I did but I deleted her number and it’s hard to admit I don’t think I will ever reach out again, after six years of friendship, three of which were an entanglement of codependence and back and forth romance. Even though I’ve been alone here in Spain for a lot of the time, I feel so much more alone today. Maybe I can count one victory towards this goal.

Goal 4: get more teaching experience. It’s hard to call what I do teaching. Most of the time I’m sitting face to face with one student and trying to get them to repeat the sounds that make the numbers one through ten. I am not allowed to instruct a class on my own or be in charge of any lessons or planning. I’m sort of the place where students go when they’re expelled from the classroom and the teacher can’t handle them anymore. Then we sit and talk about complex ideas like, “hello,” and “my name is,” which prove to be beyond their capacity. I’d like to know what its like to teach a class, but right now I have to settle for teaching myself patience.

Goal 5: become more extroverted. Sometimes I’m confident and fun and funny but its usually dependent on being around people who already know me and like me. Here I was hoping I could be confident and fun and funny a priori but that’s hard to do when I stumble through every conversation in the second language and my roommates are queer Portlandians who have every right to cancel me. I wanted to be more extroverted here since I knew that making friends wouldn’t be something that spontaneously occurred, especially across cultures. But the hardest part in learning a language, I’m discovering, is not maximizing vocabulary or memorizing the subjunctive cues, it’s getting over your damn self and acclimatizing yourself to looking and sounding stupid. I think I have much more of a hesitancy to do that because I find myself preferring to stay quiet (smart) over jumping into a conversation, grammar ablazing (dumb).

But yeah so Paris was cool and I saw the Eiffel Tower and drank a few coffees. Nothing beats our family though and I’m sorry I ever hated America.

Luke