I knew I wanted to study abroad before I knew what college I wanted to go to, before I really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew it was my destiny to go and study something beyond the limits of my previous understanding, and when the opportunity arose I jumped on it faster than I could blink.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

I packed my bags for Australia, ready to learn about Aboriginals, maybe have a fasting period in the arid landscape of the interior, see Australia's Zoo (my equivalent to Disneyland) and fight off poisonous animals on my daily walk to school. I was ready to go to the beach and get trapped between perilous sneaker waves, schools of sharks and a swarm of jellyfish. I wanted to learn the secrets of Indigenous Australians and somehow step on beautiful red earth and leave a lasting foot print.

Nothing like what I've described above occurred.

I got here, and I simply lived. I stayed with a host family who taught me how to be an older sister, and what it really meant to have a full house. I invested in the lives of beautiful and somewhat lost elderly who gave me their smiles and their effort to keep moving forward—even in an assisted living home. I had days where I wept constantly, missing home, and days I beat myself up for not. I had days where I completely forgot about home all together.

I saw the Irwin family perform a crocodile show, saw a Manta ray swimming off the coast of Stradbroke Island, visited sacred Indigenous landmarks many would have seen as a mere landmark and kept walking. I watched the sun rise over the horizon in the outback, rode in the back of a Ute, ate vegemite, snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef and visited Sydney. Yes, I did go to the Opera House. Yes, I did run my finger along the glass which separated the high end restaurant at one of the spikes from the insane tourists like me outside. No, I didn't weird anyone out or get arrested.

Good food made it's way to my table, and so did good company and conversation. I slept well some nights, poorly others. I found out the mailman rides a cross between a moped and a dirtbike and if the bright yellow were taken off his uniform, he might look like he was enlisted in the Imperial Armed Forces from Star Wars.

Despite all these good things, no, I didn't meet Christ when I got to the top of Mount Coot-Tha, or the top of the ridge near Tyrone Station in Charleville, Queensland. I didn't have a sudden and important special revelation telling me what I should do with my life and who to talk to to accomplish it. I had mosquitoes plague me, I got headaches and I had days where all I wanted to do was lay in a puddle of sweat on the floor and wished I didn't have to interact with anyone.

I looked at the beautiful city around me and unlike so many of the people around me, my heart broke when I saw the skyline... and I couldn't care less. The place was beautiful, undeniably so, but I couldn't get myself to invest my energy and affection into it.

Months passed, and eventually, I began to smile when reaching familiar places, forming inside jokes with the people I was building relationships with, and getting to know each member of my host family for the beautifully complicated person they were. I got to know my teachers, my classmates and random places took meaning. The culture became more understandable, and it's intricacies and differences than what I initially took to be similarities bloomed.

Then it was over. I sit here, back in Oregon, and while I'm grateful to finally be operating in the same time zone as people here, I'm no longer operating in the same time zone as the people I've met.

Most likely, I will never see my friends at the assisted living home in Brisbane again. The next time I see my Australian siblings, they'll be older, wiser and have lived life without me. The friends I made have gone back to their prospective homes (or are still adventuring) and we only have a thread of contact to keep us together. The staff and faculty I came to know will move on, get different jobs or keep trucking away, but I'll have to work hard to keep up with them while being swept away in the tide of being home.

Study abroad doesn't mean your life in one place gets put on hold; it means your life changes into a different frame, and you learn things about the world you never imagined. Then your time is up, and you jump back home, but your roots are pulled out—transplanted back into a new environment. It's a shock. I can hardly believe I've only been home a week.

The times, people and eventually places I spent three months experiencing somehow sneaked into the fabric of myself, and I won't tear them out, even though it was painful leaving.

In a sense, therefore, I hate study abroad. I hate how it removes you not only from a community you know and understand, but then makes you love a new culture, a new group of people and form new habits. I hate it because it painfully challenges all you know and not always in a way you're used to.

I hate study abroad most of all because I can't bring myself to hate it in the first place. �I've stepped on the beautiful red earth, the urban coasts, the tropic north and the bustling city of Sydney, but when I picked my foot up, I didn't leave a footprint. Instead, the shape of my foot changed.