Uprooting

These past couple of years have involved a lot of moving around for me. First, moving to Eau Claire for undergrad. Next, moving out to Italy for a semester abroad. A little over a week after returning from there, I left for Colorado and then for York, PA to spend the summer out east. Came back to WI for my final year of undergrad, and then I moved to Madison for an internship. And now, I'm sitting on my balcony in St Louis, gearing up for graduate school.


Each move uprooted me in one way or another. Going to UWEC I knew a couple people from high school, but not many. I had some family there, but I didn't spend the majority of my time with them. I was still in school, but the structure of everything changed. To most people on campus, I was a complete stranger. Heck, I started off living with someone I had only met once before. In a way, my life was a blank slate. Yes, I brought my background with me, but few people knew where Hartland was on a map. No expectations were laid out for me because the majority of the people I was around had no prior experiences regarding me or where I came from. 

Now, I didn't take this time to let loose and go wild. I took this time to identify my thoughts on different issues, what activities mattered most to me, the environments I wanted to and didn't want to be in, where my strengths and weaknesses are. And this process continued when I went abroad.

Leaving for Italy brought with it a whole new sense of being uprooted. This time, I knew no one as I boarded the plane. But I was grateful to have two people from Eau Claire with me (who I later became friends with). I had never been to Florence, let alone outside of the US. It had only been 2 weeks before I left that I learned the names of the 3 girls I was going to live with for the next 3.5 months. None of my classes were related to my major, and I had little hope of seeing familiar faces from one class to the next. I was a stranger in a foreign city.

There, my most basic roots mattered. I had people dismiss me as being uninteresting without exchanging much more than names and home states. Meeting anyone from the Midwest was like taking in a breath of home. Choosing to feed my Catholic roots and join the Upper Room group led me to countless friendships and smiles. Having the chance to focus on food opened up a whole new way to experience the world around me. I had an insane amount of free time to fill by exploring my new home and "foster country" or to just relax - something I didn't do all that much in Eau Claire.

And then I embarked on my adventure with Group Mission Trips. Instead of at least having people from UWEC with me, the only connections I had with anybody was experience with Group, a love for Christ, and a desire to serve. I packed a Chrysler with two people I barely knew and left for PA, a state I had never been to. I left feeling unqualified for my position, slightly afraid of the random problems that were bound to come our way, and excited to be a part of something bigger than myself for an entire summer. Camp was crazy. We had our ups and downs, as any site does. And I left amazed at how God made himself present every single week, feeling like I was right where He wanted me to be that summer.

Coming back to Eau Claire and while living in Madison, I had time to readjust myself to my more "normal" life and reflect. With so much moving around and so many new people, I knew I had changed.  It is still a process for me to pinpoint just how. For once, returning to a place that felt like home actually left me feeling uprooted. It made me wonder about the day-to-day choices I make. How I choose to spend my free time after having so much of it and then so little. Going back to where I personally knew so many people instead of being either relatively invisible or one of the people everyone else kinda had to know on a basic level. And in this position of feeling out of sorts, I decided where to spend my next 2 years.

I got to choose between two great programs. One was in a city where I would be close by to many of my friends from Eau Claire. The other being somewhere where I would again be unknown to all. I chose the latter. Not because I wanted to detach myself from the friendships I had developed the last 4 years, but because I felt the need to be really stretched again. I needed to be uprooted to remind myself what my roots are - how my root system interacts with different soils. To grow in new ways. And so my adventure begins in St Louis, my new home.

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