I have always considered myself an extremely ordinary person. I wake up at seven every day and then I go to school for seven hours. I go to work, then I come home and I do my homework. Then maybe, if I’m not too tired, I watch an episode of Gilmore Girls or Star Trek, before I go to sleep. My neighborhood is a typically suburban white-picket type, where the most interesting thing that usually passes below my bedroom window is the garbage truck on Thursdays, or the snowplow at 2am in January. We keep our eggs on the wine rack and the kitchen is usually not clean. A big, yellow, old dog and the typical monotony of life just twenty minutes away from the nearest major city, which in and of itself isn’t really that major.

So it makes sense that for a long time, especially when I entered my teens, I tried as hard as I could to distance myself from the white-picket-fence suburbanite identity for fear of coming across as boring. It’s a complex that everyone of that age falls into. You’re either too compliant or too divergent from the norm, no matter what or who it is you are.

As I grappled with the intricacies of my life in an attempt to garner something more from my origin story than “I was born in Hanover County, Virginia,” I found something that didn’t give me any more definition, but for the first time, made me realize that the origin story don’t matter, so long as the life that follows does. I found my thing in foreign languages. I found that singular subject, hobby, skill that I had never before encountered which I could approach with excitement every time, something other than travel soccer or piano lessons to learn, a mark on my applications that, shockingly, translated to a mark on myself. Studying languages made sense. They transported me away from the suburbs of Richmond to the suburbs of cities I had never before been able to pronounce. For a while it all seemed like dreaming, like reading and immersing myself in a book and then putting it down every day when I came back to reality. But the most beautiful thing about language was that it wasn’t an escape, after a time -- it became my reality. It wasn’t a hobby I had to make time for, it was a skill I developed every day and a passion that translated into every aspect of my life. Language painted the white picket fences with murals I had never been able to see and enticed me to create my own.

When I went overseas for the first time (and to my perpetual surprise and gratitude), it was like being shoved underwater, held there for a very long time, and only let up again just as you were beginning to develop gills to breathe there. Immersion is a bitch. It tears down everything you think you know about words and forces you to rebuild it with greater tenacity, fortitude, and endurance than before. It’s hard. Language had never been hard until I had to speak it with more than the eight people in my class, and do more with it than repeat translations of sentences. That’s easy. Using it is hard.

My Arabic class as soon as I went abroad consisted of a native speaker, a girl who had lived in Israel for five years, and three students who had studied with private tutors for upwards of four years. And then me, who had studied in a classroom for less than two years. And it was painful and stressful and decidedly not fun to realize that while some of them could write poetry with metaphors like Shakespeare, I was still figuring out the words for “wall” (which our textbook never thought to teach) and “floor.” There came a day where I realized, the clear underdog of the “Advanced” class, that I had two options. I could ask to move down to a lower level and hope I understood more than 70% of what was happening at any given time. Or I could put on my big girl panties, straighten out my hair, and deal with it.

When I stopped worrying about falling, I started to fly.

There comes a time when, before you realize you’ve done it, you’ve garnered a sense of pride from the impossibility of what you’ve just done. Therein lies the beauty and the great fear of language. You never reach that pride if you are afraid of it. You never speak if you don’t know what to say. It took a few thousand miles and some Arabic classes to realize that what I was doing, what I had to do, was never supposed to be easy. I was supposed to be an ordinary suburbanite with a proclivity for grammar. But I became instead a hunter, a student of life, and an exception. It was only through speaking Arabic that I found my sense of patriotism, the pride in one’s history that comes from professing without hesitation, “Ana imreekiya,” I am an American, and knowing you have taken that identity and formed from it a self. I had taken the white picket fence and painted it all on my own, created a person from a conglomeration of possibilities, through my fumbling attempts to speak that confounding language.

So God bless suburbia, God bless the monotony of my life that became something extraordinary only when I realized the true easiness of my position in it. Without those fences and brick houses I would never have come to understand that the world doesn’t wait. And neither should I.