London in retrospect

Maybe eventually I'll finish writing about my travels on here; I do have a few more good stories to tell. But for now, this is a short paper I wrote for Literary Non-Fiction about London.

When Misery Has Company

I went to London last semester with 30 other freshmen for Houghton College’s First-Year Honors program. We had to pay for the privilege of living in London for three months by working incredibly hard: sitting through three-hour lectures, spending all afternoon at museums like the National Gallery and the Tate Britain, reading works of philosophy and literature by the likes of Plato and Dante in one evening, and writing a five-page paper every weekend. It was intense, and very often quite stressful. Yet now, I can look back on the experience and honestly say that I loved it.

This is not because I had fun racking my brain every Saturday, trying to figure out what an ancient chess set had to do with faith and reason, or because I enjoyed staying up late reading Hume (my friends know I did not enjoy that at all). But although I was often unhappy and sometimes downright miserable, I never truly despaired, and the reason why is, as I just mentioned, my friends. We were all going through the same things, and we made the most of that. On weekends we would write our papers together, complaining to each other about topics like “With appropriate and specific references to relevant materials, analyze and describe some of the ways in which the Renaissance was a catalyst for the Reformation,” frantically trading papers to read over and critique when we finished our first drafts.

It was this togetherness, this sharing in hard times, that made them bearable. The food at the Highbury Centre, where we all lived, was often unpalatable, but when I sat down to dinner and saw that it was their infamous quiche, I had a table full of friends groaning along with me. One day several of us were out doing our museum assignments, having discovered that we were taking yet another trip to the British Museum, when it began pouring down rain for the first time since we had been in England. For no good reason, except that we were tired and stressed, one of my friends and I began yelling at each other as we walked to the museum, shouting through the rain. We were not mad at each other, but we were able to take it out on each other without actually being mean, and when we reached the BM the situation had become funny, and I felt better.

And when I was really, truly down, someone was always there to notice, to ask what was wrong, to listen while I ranted about the anxiety and pressure of the program—and I knew they understood completely. Often I got discouraged about participating in colloquy, the group discussion we had three times a week. When I told my friends about not having an opportunity to talk because everyone else had too much to say, they could empathize, because they went through the exact same thing. Looking back on the London program now, I see that being miserable does not have to be an awful experience—as long as you have friends who are right there with you, being miserable too.