My London Semester Journals

Before I blogged, I was an avid, albeit inconsistent, journaler.

I started young, the oldest one I can find I bought from a Scholastic Book Fair in early elementary school.

I continued off and on through grade school, college, grad school and young adulthood, until I began writing and sharing here, on my blog, in April 2007.

There was a period of time, between January – May 1996, during my semester abroad in London, England, that I wrote prolifically and very consistently. I made the decision to do this before I left, when one of my closest friends, and “pledge mom” in our Alpha Phi Sorority at the University of Illinois, who had studied for a semester in Granada, Spain two years earlier, gave me a journal for Christmas in 1995, as a going away gift.

I knew that my time overseas would be a very unique, special, and memorable experience and wanted to be able to look back and recall as much as possible in the future. I ended up buying a second volume, while abroad, both of which I filled by the time I got home in early May, with a final entry in June that year.

I started on January 1, 1996, at 10:25 p.m. Evanston, Illinois (my hometown)/CST/January 2, at 4:25 a.m. London/GMT time, while on my British Airways flight to London. Going forward I would always start my entries writing both the date, time, and location where I was, along with what date and time it would be in Evanston.

I don’t recall if and when I ever read them back, after writing them. And if I did, it had certainly been 15 – 20 years or more since that might’ve happened.

So six weeks ago, when I found out that an old friend, who was a big part of my semester abroad in England, died of a brain tumor, four years ago this week, I found myself revisiting my words and reflecting on missed opportunities from so long ago.

It has been incredibly nostalgic and bittersweet to read about my relationship with my old friend and how our friendship grew into more, during the four months I was living across the pond. There was so much I didn’t remember and it all started to come back to me, which was both wonderful and painful, in light of his death.

After allowing myself to find and wallow specifically in the memories of my time with my old friend, that I wrote about in my journals, for a while, I started reading from the beginning and was fascinated by the level of detail I shared about all of my experiences. I found my accounts of life in London, as well as my travels around the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy to be really interesting, especially 22 years later, from the perspective of my 43-year-old self.

I never thought I was that great of a writer, until I’d been blogging for a few years. That is when I often say I learned to love to write and appreciate my own way with words. However, going back to that spring semester of my junior year of college, I see that my love and ability formed sooner than I realized.

Which brings me to something I decided to do, in the coming days (and likely months), here on my blog. I am going to share my entries, one at a time, chronicling my London Semester Abroad, as I did back then. I will remove/replace the names of the real people who were part of my journey/experience there, in effort to protect and respect their identities/privacy, though sadly I lost touch with most of them (within a few years of our time abroad) and haven’t been able to find/reconnect with them since. I will also not share details that I think and feel are too personal for anyone I interacted with, my loved ones, and me.

I was talking with Sean and Abby about my intention to do this and we started discussing whether I should come up with pseudonyms/aliases for these people or maybe just use their first initials. I told them that as I was reading through my first few entries I noticed that two of the women I met early on were named Brianna and Bridget.

Note: I don’t think sharing their actual names in this context is out of line and it is relevant to this part of the story. And when I do mention them in the future it won’t be obvious who I am referring to.

Anyway, I said that I’d considered using initials until I got to them and realized how far I’d have to go to distinguish them = BRIA & BRID, which aren’t really effective aliases and cracked me up.

And that reminded Sean and me of Gary Gulman’s hilarious stand-up comedy routine about the process of re-abbreviating the United States into two letters each, making the whole thing even funnier, at least for us!

So as I figure out how I will refer to these people on my journey abroad and get ready to share my first entry, I will leave you with that comedy routine.

And for my fellow bloggers, regardless of how often you post these days,

Did you journal much, if at all, before you began blogging?

For those who have ever journaled,

Have you/do you ever re-read what you wrote?

If so,

What is/was that experience like for you?