The following post was written by Bridge Year Fellow, Kathryn Chao
It’s September 18th. I’m sitting at the gate waiting to leave the US for the next 15 months–and I don’t feel anything. I can’t say I’m nervous or even excited. I think the stress of packing and leaving everything behind has completely depleted my ability to feel anything right now. But I think that’s a good thing. I want to land in Cape Town without any preconceptions for what the next three months will look like.
I have yet to cry which apparently happens to everyone pre-departure so I’m waiting for some wall of emotions to hit me. But while I’m here, waiting for the adventure to start, I can reflect on how this past weekend has been pretty amazing and bittersweet.
I spent the weekend with my cousin and his fiance in New York since I’m flying out of JFK. Since I was little, this was the place I wanted to be for my 20’s. Definitely driven by media depictions of the glamorous yuppie lifestyle, it was so surreal to experience living with two actual NYC yuppie transplants for the weekend. I got to see the routine of their lives, the urgency of their work schedules, the domesticity of their home within a never-sleeping city.
It was the kind of the perfect quintessential American sendoff. We ate burgers in Prospect Park, walked through the city from Midtown to the World Trade Center, and listened to early 2000’s pop while playing pool at a local bar. I saw a Broadway show, which for theater-obsessed high school me, was 40% of the reason to move to NYC in the future. I ignored a mariachi band in the subway which I’m pretty sure makes me a local.
I’m so grateful to have a good family, and to have experienced all the things I used to dream about when I thought about my future in the US.
By the end of the next 15 months, I may not even want to live in the States when I grow up. I think my younger self chose New York as the dream because it felt like the center of everything–culture, opportunity, romance–in every movie I watched and every book I read. But once I return, the world will probably feel much bigger for me than it ever has, and New York will seem much smaller.
Maybe NYC in my 20’s won’t be as appealing despite a decade of wishing for it. But I’m okay with that. At least I got a taste before setting off to explore the rest of the world.