When I left my home country to study on the other side of the globe, everyone kept telling me that I should prepare myself to face the unknown. In a way knowing that I would be entering a whole new world was a form of preparation an sich. Moreover, my school, John Carroll University, took the responsibility to have a seperate orientation week for internationals students only where we would be introduced to all things American. Add to that an one credit class the first semester of college to learn about the American lifestyle and culture to make that culture shock not so bad as anticipated.
As the school year furthered and I had gotten used to the American pace of life, I started to wonder and analyze the life I had lived before in the Old World. I thought about my day-to-day life, my friends, my high school, my family, my part-time job, my fears about growing up and not being able to find myself and I came to the conclusion of how irrelevant it all seemed. The person I had been a year ago seemed like a distant memory, a mere acquaitance of a life once lived. Everything that was once the centre of my universe seemed so utterly pointless, I had grown, learned and finally felt complete all in the time span of a year.
That being said, the anticipation of my return wasn't high. How could I leave my new build life only to go back to the old? I had had my spiritual awakening, did I really go through the trouble of the Renaissance only to return to the Dark Ages? I felt dreadful about leaving, but then again, I couldn't stay. Summer break arrived and all my American peers retreated back into their homes, there was nothing left for me but to do the same.
I finished "In a Dark, Dark Wood", a book I bought at the airport with the hope that it would keep my mind of the situation during my plane ride. The situation being that I wasn't looking forward at all to being home for three months and that the premise of the book didn't deliver. My plane landed and I felt numb. One particular question came to mind: What is left for me here?
My parents took me back to our house and I instantly saw how nothing had changed. Or did it? I was so blinded by how much I had changed that I never even considered that home could have changed as well. Yes my life there had been something of the past, but the place itself wasn't. It might not have changed as radically as I have, I mean I did cross an ocean, but that doesn't mean that you can't see the little changes that had taken place in my absence. The difference might not have been as clear at first glance, but it was all around. My younger brother's friends were taller, roads had been renewed, old shops had been replaced by new shops and all my friends had been building new lives at their respective universities as well. Had I been so arrogant in thinking that only I could change?
Going to the U.S. on my own has picked me up, shook me around and changed me to the core. I might have changed fundamentally, but that doesn't mean that nothing else has either. Of course everything I had been through was different, new and exciting, but I came to realize that that was only the case for me and not for Cleveland natives. If they had gone to Amsterdam all those would be applicable to them and they would be bored by the idea of having to go back to Ohio.
Every experience is subjective and by admitting that we can grow as a person but also don't reject everything that we have known our entire lives and has shaped us into the person we have become. It is good to challenge what you already know, but don't forget where you came from.
