Saying Goodbye

Since many of you never knew me in the first eighteen years of my existence, I’m going to make one of the more blatant understatements I’ve made on this blog: I was a big youth group kid going up. My youth group, NFTY (pronounced “nifty”) dominated my high school experience—almost all of my extracurricular activities went to some facet of NFTY life, my closest friends were all in the youth group with me, and the nineteen NFTY regions quickly supplanted the 50 states as my way of dividing and categorizing this great nation. One of the things that NFTY did really well was saying goodbye, partly because it’s a Jewish organization and Jews like to linger in others’ company and partly because it’s a youth organization and teenagers use long, drawn-out goodbyes to reinforce the genuineness of their friendships in the all-too-fake world of high school. At least half an hour on the last day of every event was dedicated to the rather kitschy “friendship circle,” where we would all offer reflections on the event and talk about people we’d miss, and it took another half an hour for everyone to say goodbye to those who lived in different cities and meander onto the buses. As for me, I would make a plan of the people to whom I would say goodbye, ordering it so that my best friends came last and I could act like the only thing that parted us was the incessant prodding of my youth group advisor. In those exchanges, I would hug and (if I had found romance) kiss the other person, share some of our favorite memories from the event, talk about how much I’ll miss them, and then hug and/or kiss again. As I would get on the bus, I invariably felt content, enveloped in the love of my friends, if not a bit sad that the event had ended. I still remember some of those goodbye exchanges as some of the most tender, empowering moments of my high school experience.

For better or worse, my goodbyes have become a little more mundane since I started college. As I became more sure of myself, I grew to realize that the depth of a friendship can’t be measured by the length of a goodbye, and I think my friends have as well. Yet I think I’m still a bit haunted by the nonchalant goodbyes I gave to the people on my program, and to London itself. After classes ended, everyone started to trickle out of the city to catch flights back home, meet family, or do more traveling. Amidst packing and planning travels, and given that all but one person the program will be back in Chapel Hill next fall, saying goodbye became more of a rushed sideshow than anything else. Why waste the time to say goodbye to someone when I know I’ll see them again within a few months? Why say goodbye to a city that I was going to fly out of in a few weeks anyway?

Returning home from living in another community can always be disorienting, whether we return from university life, another continent, or even a youth group event. In making our journeys, we uproot ourselves from our home culture and shred others’ expectations of us, our comfort zones, our fears, and eventually our own expectations of ourselves. We forge new personalities when we venture to new places—the Jonathan of Jacksonville is different than the Jonathan of Chapel Hill, and those Jonathans are markedly different from the Jonathan of London, who is perhaps a bit different from the Jonathan of Aix-en-Provence or Amsterdam. Yet it’s not just that we develop different personalities in new situations, we allow those new personalities and expectations to interact with and to mold each other. In short, we change. My thoughts on music, labor movements, travel, packing for travel, risk-taking, my own privilege, and the tastiness of certain types of vegetables have changed pretty substantially from my thoughts on those topics five months ago. Yet when I return home, I’m confronted with a community that knows that I’ve changed, but for simplicity’s sake is forced to assume that they’re talking to the Jonathan that left for London five months ago. (I remember my mother’s shock when I didn’t pick all of the mushrooms out of a dinner dish.) For my first couple weeks in Jacksonville, I found myself in a funk because I couldn’t quite navigate the path between the London version of myself, the old Jacksonville version, the version shaped by my parents’ and friends’ perceptions of me, and whatever I wanted the new Jacksonville version to be. I couldn’t quite pin it down at the time, but I was having a mini-identity crisis—Jacksonville felt safe and fun, but

For all of its idiosyncrasies, my youth group understood that the NFTY versions of ourselves were different than the home versions of ourselves (to this day, I am called “Jonny” by my NFTY friends and “Jon” or “Jonathan” by everyone else). NFTY understood that we could only move back to our homes once we spent time saying goodbye to these “other” versions of ourselves and the people and places that made up those other versions. In my race to distance myself from my high school affects, I forgot about this nugget of wisdom. I made sure to cram all the travel and sightseeing I could into my time in Europe, but I never took the time to say goodbye to friends, places, and even myself. The community that gets together for our London reunion this fall will be different than the one that stayed in Bloomsbury a couple months ago, not because it will be comprised of different people but because the people who comprise it will have changed. I assumed that I’d see my friends from London again, but I realize now that I won’t see them in quite the same light. And I’ll never see myself in quite the same light, either. Am I sad about that? Not really. But I should have mustered a goodbye to my European way of thinking.

Hyde Park.

Tower Bridge at night.