My Dramatic Life, part 1

It's been a very eventful and emotional past 72 hours. Allow me to fill you in.

As you know, on Saturday I got on a plane to London. What you may not know, is that while going through passport control at Heathrow on Sunday morning I was stopped, questioned, and detained. My wallet was gone through, as was my luggage. I was held in the immigration holding pen/waiting room for hours, and interviewed again. Then, I was denied entry to the UK, and informed I'd be put on the next flight out to NYC.

In retrospect, I'm not surprised (at the time, I was VERY surprised. Or shocked, rather). There were enough suspicious things to add up to a very suspect case. I was coming in on the return leg of a flight. I'd only bought my flight back to the States a couple of days earlier. I'd last been in London a mere six weeks previous. I had no proof of enough funds to self-sustain, and no employment in the States. And to top it all off, I had my National Insurance card on me, as well as CVs and letters of recommendation.

Of course they thought I was coming to London to job hunt. Of course they turned me away. And the thing that kills me is that I didn't need to have my NI card and all that paperwork... the only reason I did was stupidity and oversight. But at that point, there was nothing to be done - they held me for a few more hours, then had two airport personnel escort me to my flight, retaining my passport and documents and handing them to the flight attendants to make sure I didn't make a break for it. They didn't give them back until we touched down in Newark.

Needless to say, it was a horrific experience. Humiliating and devastating and emotionally and physically exhausting. By the time I landed in Newark I was a wreck. Luckily Mom had been able to get ahold of my friend Liz, so she met me at the airport, and held me as I broke down immediately upon arrival (one of MANY breakdowns over the previous 18 hours). She put me up in her Bushwick loft in Brooklyn, and made me soup, and shared her bed.

That was Sunday night. The story isn't over. More to come...