Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.
Going into the Peace Corps, I thought I knew what laid ahead of me, or at least some idea of what to expect/not expect. I pored over blogs, the reddit page, and Facebook groups to have a clear idea of how to prepare myself for my service. I spent hundreds of dollars buying new luggage, hiking shoes, backpacks, etc. and gave/stored away my fun party clothes, candle collection, panini press, etc. in order to fit the image of what I thought was a Peace Corps volunteer: a granola-munching, early-mid 20s liberal who eschewed materialistic aspects of popular culture (e.g. make-up, the Kardashians, etc.), who’d rather spend three days “roughing it” in the mountains than three days in a 5-star seaside resort, and who’d work relentless to improve the welfare of their students, school, and community through the dozens of projects they’d be conducting at their site.
Even before I checked-in at staging I knew this image not to be true. A casual scroll through the Peace Corps reddit page or Facebook group shows that volunteers truly come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Not everyone is young, not everyone is liberal, and certainly not everyone likes hiking.
Peace Corps is hard. There are many a days when the only thing holding me back from ET-ing (Peace Corps lingo for ending your service early) isn’t my cluster of friends whom I know will always be there to lend an ear when everything seems to be going wrong nor my loving host family and counterparts who would be so devastated to see their volunteer leave and wonder if it was because of them, but the prospect of having no prospects, professional or otherwise, when I land on American soil. Because as difficult and shitty things can get, I can endure all the staring, racial comments, and uncooperative students when my other option is no job, no income, and no place to live.
And now, with roughly 11 months (less than that, if I get the COS date I want) and 12 more Diva Cup-aided periods left in Georgia, I’m forced to think about what I want to do after the Peace Corps. It’s especially scary for me because for so long (since my sophomore year of college), I knew this (Peace Corps) was what I wanted to do and it gave me more time to think about whether or not I really wanted to go to graduate school or enter the workforce or some other untraditional career trajectory that I hadn’t yet thought of. A wave of anxiety comes over me every time I think about the graduate school applications I will have to submit this winter. What if my Statement of Purpose isn’t good enough and I don’t get in? What if I do get in but it’s too expensive? And what if I get in, it’s affordable, but I change my mind?
Joan Didion wrote that “[o]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” I know this to be true. Half of my close friends here are also recent college graduates trying to figure out what they want to do post-Peace Corps but somehow I still think that my problems and situation are unique to me and only me.
Right now, things just suck. It’s hot and I don’t own a fan. I’m bored (which could easily be remedied by me working on my applications but anxiety, remember?) but if I spend too much time on my laptop, it gets really hot and since it’s so hot outside, everything just feels miserable. I’m still getting over some things and for the first time since April 2015, I feel really homesick and just want to cuddle with my dog on my memory foam-topped bed in my house where there’s air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter and within the delivery radius of a variety of restaurants so I’m not stuck eating the same combination of bread, tomato and cucumber salad, and an oily protein every day.
This isn’t to say that Peace Corps is always terrible, it really isn’t. I have lots of nice and wonderful things to say about my village, school, counterparts, students, host family, etc. But when bad things just seem to pile on top of each other one right after the other, it’s very easy to become jaded.
I’m trying to deal with these problems the best I can. I talk to my friends back in the US and in Georgia often and vent to them when I am struggling. I read books and watch movies and TV shows to mentally put me in a different place. I’ve been exercising every morning so that the endorphins will better my mood. Some of these problems just simply take thing to be solved and others require more effort. Joan remedies hers when she leaves New York for Los Angeles. Leaving Georgia isn’t an option for me yet but I’ll try and make the best of things for now.
Midnight Marshutka to Georgia 