Yay! I figured it out! Website editing is more difficult than I thought it would be…
For my very first blog post I want to go back to the headspace I was in on the flight to Taiwan. There have been so many incredible memories I’ve made in just the past 12 days of being here in Taiwan but I think that it’s important to document where I began my journey. So, without further ado, here’s a little journal I began writing on the plane ride from San Fransisco to Taipei.
I sat on the plane from Asheville to Denver on my 24th birthday, listening to “Byegone” by Volcano Choir and watching the Blue Ridge Mountains roll away beneath me, bidding me farewell. Tears rolled down my face as I watched them grow smaller. I’ll return, I tell them. I’ll come home to you.
The first time I listened to “Byegone” was on my 18th birthday on the plane ride home from New York City to Asheville. I cried then, too, yearning to return to the city after taking the biggest trip I’d ever taken away from home alone. I remember feeling so sure that I would return to New York and attend Columbia, the school of my dreams. I was sure I would study there and play for the Lions. The years of college volleyball recruiting in high school, the endless elite skills camps all over the United States, the hundreds of hours spent emailing coaches, editing game film, taking SAT and ACT tests to get a high enough score to attend my top schools (Columbia, Pomona, Tufts) would all pay off and I’d achieve my dream. I was sure of it.
I remember choking on sobs in the closet of my junior year chorus class when I got the call from the Columbia head coach that they’d decided to go with a different player for the Class of 2020 setter position. In that moment, there was no future that made sense to me. I had worked so hard at both school and volleyball, maintaining a 4.0 GPA all of high school, making varsity my freshman year and becoming a captain my sophomore year, and the endless nights without sleep balancing long practices with hours of AP homework. It felt like I’d worked for nothing. I almost gave up on the idea of playing college volleyball completely until a season-ending injury concluded my previously undefeated senior season, crushing my dreams of going to the state championships. I decided that I wouldn’t let my lifelong volleyball career end on an injury and decided to stay in Asheville and play locally.
I earned a full-ride scholarship to play Division 1 volleyball for my hometown college, UNC Asheville, but it stung to see the poorly hidden disappointment in my high school teachers’ faces when I told them about my decision. They had seen how hard I’d worked in school and there was a level of expectation that I would go somewhere seen as more typically “academically prestigious.” Many of my friends at the time thought I was making a mistake, and there were times I questioned my decision. How badly did I want to play in college? Surely I could get a scholarship at a better school for academics and play volleyball for a club team. I had a lot of conflicting feelings about what parts of myself I wanted to reward for my hard work. In the end, I settled on UNCA. My time at UNCA allowed me to study abroad twice, serve as a 2-year D1 volleyball captain, Big South Conference student-athlete of the year, and college valedictorian. And now, a little over a year after graduating, I am living in Taiwan and teaching on a Fulbright grant. There was no world where my junior-year self crying in the chorus closet imagined this could become my fate after being so devastated with the loss of Columbia. I sit here daily trying to soak in the wonder of being in this new country and the joy of fulfilling a dream I never imagined I could actually achieve.
All of this to say, listening to “Byegone” on the plane from Asheville to Taiwan felt like a prophecy fulfilled. While my dreams over the years have changed, the effect “Byegone” has on me has not. I still get chills feeling the plane take flight as Volcano Choir urges me to “set sail.” As I write this, I’m setting sail yet again, following new dreams.
As I embark on this journey, I want to remain ever cognizant of the home and the community who have gifted me the strength, love, and support without which I could never have achieved this incredible dream. I spoke with an elderly family member before I left home. I’d been making my rounds and saying goodbye to all my loved ones, but this conversation with my great-uncle hit me the hardest. I walked through the care facility basement floor to find his room along the dimly lit white hallway. This building had a heavy feel to it, almost like you could feel the weight of abandonment and loneliness that permeated those white calls. Elderly folks using walkers or wheelchairs wandered the halls, often vacant stares pasted on their faces. I found his room and lit up at his smile. We got to catching up and I stayed probably 30 minutes or so. Not long enough. Never long enough. He told me when we spoke that he didn’t have any roots or a place to call home. He said I was lucky to have a home and lifelong friends. As I was leaving, he told me “I wish I could leave this place.” I wasn’t sure what to say then and I’m still unsure of what I could have said now. However, I know that moment made it really sink in: I was about to leave the only home I’d ever known and pursue an adventure the likes of which most people do not ever have the opportunity to experience in a lifetime. I wanted to soak in every moment of my time in Taiwan, and I never wanted to forget what a blessing and a fortune that it was to both leave and, one day, to return.
I’ve been reading communion by bell hooks during my time in Taiwan. I started it in the Asheville airport, but I had to put it down because I couldn’t read the words through my tears at the time. In communion, hooks decrees that “the communion in love our souls seek is the most heroic and divine quest any human can take.” While the journey I am about to embark on in a country over 8,000 miles from home feels quite heroic for my North Carolinian heart, I want to always ground myself in my deeper pursuit on this earth: to love, to cherish, to build community. I am unsure of what this year will look like, and I have genuinely no clue what the years after this one will hold, but I want to always remember that love and family and relationships and friendship and memories and home are what matter the most to me. I have seen the faces of men and women at the end of their lives, begging to escape the suffocating white walls of isolation. I don’t believe one of them wishes they would have worked harder, stayed longer hours at a job, or loved less. People crave community and companionship and family and home, not just at the end of their lives but certainly then. And while I am far away from home while I write this, I know that I have a home to one day return to and I want to again repeat how endlessly grateful I am for that truth.
To all those who have loved me, supported me, or encouraged me to pursue this journey, thank you. You all are my home, and I cannot wait for the day we are reunited and I return home once again.
All my love,
Ona
P.S. If you haven’t listened to “Byegone,” do it!!!