"'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.'" — Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
I’m sorry for my lack of updates in the past few days. Something devastating happened, my internet went out! Okay, I’m joking, my lack of internet was by no means devastating, and in truth I should be ashamed to use that extreme word in relation to my internet situation in light of the real catastrophes, such as the earth quake in Haiti, that are occurring around the world. Which reminds me, if you can, please match my donation of $25 to the earthquake relief fund of Partners in Health, http://www.pih.org/home.html, an organization that works to provide healthcare for needy people all over the world, founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, someone my dad calls “a genius and a hero,” whom he met in Rwanda on a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment. With that said, not having internet for the past half a week, taught me some very interesting things about myself, the simplest of which is that I am far too reliant on the virtual world!
During my internet outage, I flipped open my roommate Tusana’s book When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron. (By the way, I’d like to mention that Tusana, or Tuey as I call her, is by far one of the most amazing women I have met in the past several years; she is theatrical and animated, soothing and relaxing to be with, insightful, emotionally and psychologically aware, and one of the kindest, most easy going people I know.) I opened the book to a page on loneliness, and there appeared a quote that was most perfect for the moment: “When we are lonely in a “hot way,” we look for something to save us; we look for a way out… our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair… It’s a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don’t have to feel any pain… Could we just settled down and have some compassion and respect for ourselves? Could we stop trying to escape from being alone with ourselves? (57)”
I realized that for me, the internet has been my escape since arriving in Venice. With the internet, I can video-chat with my loved ones in the U.S. and pretend they are right here beside me, I can keep tabs on all my friends through the almighty Facebook, I can know what’s happening throughout the world in one quick click to the New York Times online, and worst of all I can distract myself from my loneliness by voyeuristically entering the lives of others through meaningless gossip websites. (Perhaps a side point, sociologist David Harvey, a specialist in urban culture, calls this concept, “annihilation of space through time,” also known as time-space compression. In other words, for better or worse, the rapid advancement of technology has eliminated spatial barriers by enabling the dissemination of information over vast amounts of space in a short period of time.)
Thus, I decided to try and forget about the internet for a bit, not have it fixed right away, and sit with the emotion of loneliness, allowing myself to fully experience it, without trying to mask it,in hopes that it would pass peacefully. I am still unsure of whether, or not, I was successful in that goal, however at least I had time to internalize an important lesson from my dad: I am not loneliness, in other words Gabi ≠ loneliness, but rather loneliness is an emotion that I am feeling now, and that is okay.
The exercise I just described turned out to be some sort of cosmic blessing because I ended up having the best few days I’ve had since I’ve been here. I spent even more time than usual developing relationships with the amazing women who are my fellow Peggy Guggenheim Collection interns and working toward the fulfillment of one of my primary goals upon coming here, which is to build life-long friendships. The current group of Peggy Guggenheim Collection interns is made up of approximately twenty women, (no men,) all from different countries and backgrounds; we all studied different types of art, we focused our studies on different historical periods, we have different hobbies, and yet we get along more amicably than any other large group of women I have been a part of. (By the way, at age 21, I am the baby of our Guggenheim family, which leads me to believe that the peaceful nature of this group is in part a product of maturity… Thank god Peter Pan doesn’t really exist.)
And so, yesterday I took my computer to Vodafone, where I met two lovely men who spent an hour getting my internet back up and running, I got lost for 45 minutes on my way home, I eventually met up with my PGC pals who had found a new, absolutely perfect apartment for Tuey and me, (another cosmic wonder, as I was just about to settle on a one bedroom, which most likely would have lead to increased loneliness,) and I began a whole new chapter of self discovery…
I can so relate to that feeling of loneliness. And the importance of feeling it, accepting it, and then not allowing it to control your daily life. While I was living abroad I wanted to spend every waking moment I had on my host-family's computer. But the evenings when my "brother" Daniel would spend the evening chatting with strangers were the evenings I spent away from my long-distance boyfriend and out on the town. These were the nights I gained the most cultural exposure, and the nights that I cherish most to this day. After a few weeks (that long? yeah... I know), I stopped living life by the availability of the computer and had my own experiences on the town in Santiago. It was fun, and at the end of the night I could always send my loved-one a text message, knowing that in a few short months we would be reunited. But in a few short months I would also be far removed from that foreign and unique land. It became so important to me to make the most of my time there. Difficult, often lonely, but invaluable time abroad.
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