FOMO sapien: A year abroad

If you’re about to embark on, or are in the midst of, a year abroad, Beth Lodge explains why the inevitable Fear Of Missing Out isn’t all that bad.

| UPDATED

When you’ve had an amazing first two years of uni, the thought of a looming year abroad seems like the end of the world. This time last year, I couldn’t think of anything worse than leaving behind my life in Sheffield. But now I’ve realised that there’s one evil fiend making me feel this way: FOMO.

Such FOMO.

FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, can eat you up inside and mess with your head until you become unsure why you started studying languages in the first place. It’s a feeling heightened by the yearly pilgrimage that is Freshers’ Week, which, conveniently, falls around the first or second week of your year abroad.

While your friends are going for reunion drinks in West Street, you find yourself guarding all of your worldly possessions in a dodgy hostel. While your ex-housemates are having house-warming, pre-Corp pre-drinks, you sit in a smoky bar drinking acidic wine and eating something that you only half-understood from the menu. Sangría means sangría in every country, right?

Who’d have thought anyone could miss Corp?

But as time goes on you notice a slight change. While your friends are becoming emotionally attached to a specific desk in the IC, for you, a brunch-time glass of wine is now a regular occurrence. At first it sucks to be missing out on what feels like a 21st birthday every weekend. But you’re reminded that, back in Sheffield, folk are ‘going home at midnight because they have three articles to read in the morning’ whereas pre-drinks with your new friends are just starting and you probably won’t leave for the club for another couple of hours.

Not clubbing.

So the FOMO does get better with time, but a few curveballs still get thrown at you out of the blue. The other day I woke up to a text from a friend of mine back in Sheffield: ‘Just met your doppelgänger at a party’, it said, ‘she looks sooooo much like you!’ Great. They’ve replaced me.

Birthday Fiesta Replaced.

To make your FOMO even worse, you’re punished for spending the last two years getting involved in as many CV-boosting, extra-curricular activities as possible. The more you used to do, the more you seem to miss out on. And you get that familiar twinge of jealousy when you see photos of socials from your old job, sports team and course friends, all on the same day.

Try dealing with that while you are simultaneously dying from last night and you can’t even get some hangover food as nowhere is open on a Sunday.

But, on the bright side, it will soon be what we Brits class as ‘beach weather’ here in southern Spain, and the FOMO will not seem as bad when I am swimming in the sea beneath a bright blue sky every weekend.

Not so FOMO.

All I know is that, come September, I will be scaling Conduit Road in the rain while simultaneously trying to read a 400-page novel for the next morning’s seminar. Some of my uni friends have admitted that they are suffering from symptoms of FOMO about me and my travels. In the end, the grass is always greener on the other side, but I still can’t wait to be back in Sheffield tucking into a Harley Burger and swigging an overpriced pint in Bar One.