I know it’s been quite a while since I posted anything but I’ve been busy traveling around Europe and have only just made it home. I’ve decided that I’m going to break up my trip into a couple of different posts so that it’s easier to get through. These posts will range from stories about my backpacking trip, to reflections and observations from my time abroad. For my first post, I’m going to start at the end. During my time abroad, I took a class that helped me to author my study abroad experience and for our final, we were required to write a reflection paper of our time abroad. I thought a good place to start would be to share this paper with you, so here it is! Enjoy!
We’ve all heard the stories. The ones where people claim that studying abroad changed their life. I remember sitting in my study abroad orientation and thinking to myself how cheesy they sounded. I understood that this experience was going to be the adventure of a lifetime but I knew that I wasn’t going to be one of those people, gushing about how life-changing studying abroad is. That’s not me, I thought. I thought I had a pretty good idea of who I was. Well, I thought wrong. And never in my life have I been happier to admit that. Studying abroad has changed my life in more ways than one. It’s taught me things about myself that I would have never discovered if not for this experience. It’s funny. You think you know yourself, but in hindsight, I had no idea who I was before I set off on this adventure.
One thing that this adventure taught me is that it’s okay to need people and to be dependent on them. Now, this might seem a little backwards. You might have expected me to tell you that being abroad, I found out how independent I am and how I realized that I don’t need people, but let me explain. I had always considered myself an independent person. I don’t like to rely on people for things; I don’t like asking people for help or my parents for money; if I had the option of asking someone to do something for me, or doing it myself, the chances are I would always pick the latter. I equated dependence with weakness. But this was naïve of me. From my time abroad, I have learned that it’s okay to need people. It’s okay to miss your parents. It’s okay be homesick sometimes. Needing people doesn’t mean your weak, it means that you’re human, and the fact that I can admit that I need people doesn’t make me weak, it makes me strong.
I have learned not to care. This also might seem like a strange statement, but again, let me explain. At home, I was constantly involved in other people’s lives. Whether anyone likes to admit it or not, we often invest too much of our time worrying and caring about what other people are doing. But why? Who cares if so-and-so drank too much the other night? Or if what’s-her-name failed her chemistry test? Or if that one guy that you kind of know because he follows you on twitter got a DUI? IT DOESN’T MATTER. There are more important things to spend your time on than caring about what other people are doing, like being happy. Which brings me to my next lesson.
I have learned to do things that make me happy, and to embrace the pure joy of living. Happiness isn’t something that only lucky people find; happiness is a choice. I have learned to choose happiness. This lesson actually goes hand in hand with my last lesson, about learning not to care, because not only did I learn not to care about what other people are doing, I learned not to care about what other people think of me. People can think I’m strange. They don’t have to like the way I dress, the way I dance, or the way that I live my life, but I don’t care. I choose happiness. And if my happiness comes from something that you don’t like, I don’t care. This may sound ignorant or selfish, but yet another thing that I learned is that being selfish isn’t always a bad thing.
Being selfish gets a bad rep. When people hear the word selfish, it comes with a bad connotation. But to get anywhere in life, you have to be at least a little bit selfish. You have to make decisions that benefit you, even if they don’t make everyone happy. Choosing to study abroad was a selfish decision. I was choosing to leave my friends and family and other commitments I had made, to pursue a dream, how selfish of me. But in order to accomplish your dreams and become who you were meant to be, it is necessary to be selfish. Making that selfish decision was the best thing that has ever happened to me.
I can’t believe that my time abroad is over and that I had to say goodbye to this place that I’ve grown to call my home. The people that I have met and the places that I have been are things that I will cherish for the rest of my life. But more than these, I will cherish the lessons that I learned. So yes, at the beginning, I was a skeptic. But as you can probably tell, this experience has changed me. I am in no way the same person I was when I first stepped foot off of U.S. soil. I have grown in so many ways. And I can’t wait to be one of those people, gushing about how studying abroad changed my life, because it did. And I couldn’t be happier about it.
EuroTrip 2K14 