Coming home after your first year of college is one of the weirdest experiences in a person’s life. You’ve just spent a year living on your own with a complete stranger, figuring out an entire new city with people you’ve just met days, sometimes minutes, before, and you’ve learned how to write term papers, conduct archival research, and master the school’s cheap printers all on your own. And then, you come back home, only to find out that home doesn’t really feel like home anymore. Suddenly, home feels like a place where you have to explain every minute of your day to your parents and endure the day-in, day-out monotony of your hometown skeptics, and face the fact that everyone in your hometown has stayed the same and expects you to be the same, too. In this way, it’s incredibly challenging to break out of the mold of who you were before college and embrace all of the ways you’ve changed and, just as importantly, find comfort for how hard that struggle has been.
I can still see the frost on the road as I walked my dog on those snowy December mornings, roads that had always brought me comfort yet now left me feeling hollow and numb. After suffering the loss of my first love in the midst of a brutal exam season, I trekked those backroads, hoping to take my mind off the quiet loneliness in my heart, feeling frozen as the ground beneath my feet. Never with such passion had I mourned for another soul, whose love I could still see in the back of my mind, that I could still want, still dream of, but could never touch again. Once brilliant, vivid flames had died into embers, barely burning red in the recesses of my memory and, most painfully, in the chambers of my heart. In one way, I was simply burnt out from always pouring the best of myself into a person who simply tolerated my adoration, from always keeping an overly strict sleep schedule, even when my body was begging for mercy, and from, quite frankly, never offering myself the same grace that I preached religiously. With the intensity of a competitive and elite East Coast university, I constantly felt like I had to keep pushing, keep doing more, keep proving myself to the world and to yours truly.
So when I began searching through my school’s study abroad programs for the summer on a chilly January evening, speaking honestly, my rationale was that this was something that would look good on my resume without forcing myself to apply to an official, nine-to-five internship in downtown D.C. that I didn’t think I had a prayer of getting. The other motivation behind this last-minute decision was that I hated that people would still treat me like a kid in my hometown, especially if I went anywhere with my parents. Everyone from my father’s co-workers to my orthodontist told me, “If you were my daughter…” followed by some version of well-meaning but not-so-helpful advice that immediately shut my ears and hardened my heart. Through the heartbreak and the burnout, I figured that since I was dealing with adult problems and was forced to play the part on my own, the least the world could do was treat me with the respect of an adult. Perhaps if my ego had not been so bruised, I would have not felt the need to prove myself through a six week intensive program, when my energy was already burnt to a crisp. However, I think God, in His great mercy, took the shards of my broken heart to create a mirror that would allow me to see myself as whole, once more.
My second semester had its share of triumphs and tragedies, yet I had learned from my trials in the fall not only how to better pace myself with my assignments but, more importantly, how to pace my soul for life and how to give my body what she needed when she needed it instead of three months passed its due date. With the support of my new group of girlfriends, my professors, and, most of all, my Queen, I began picking up the pieces of my heart and reassembling the shattered fragments to create a life that left me feeling fulfilled without feeling like I needed an emergency exit. But to my surprise, I was accepted into the study abroad program and was then faced with a choice: do I throw out everything I had rebuilt and potentially lose it all again, or do I let go of my stability and follow God’s calling. Against my fears and, probably, my better judgment, I decided that if God would call me, there must be something good awaiting me; so I hit the ‘Submit’ button on my post application requirements and prayed that I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my Georgetown career.
When I first arrived in Ecuador, the blackness of the night did nothing to quench the joy burning within me; I collapsed into my professor’s arms, exhausted and elated to see a friendly face after a fourteen hour travel day, four airports, and a sprint through the Miami terminal. Even though I was ready to pass out on the hard, concrete floor of the Quito baggage claim, something inside of me had shifted. Maybe it was the chaotic day of delayed, canceled, and rebooked flights or the kind eyes of three strangers looking so thrilled to see me, but something about that first night in Ecuador felt like home. Somehow, driving to my host parent’s house in the sheer darkness covering lush, green mountains made me feel like I was coming home. And my ego happily took a backseat as I had to explain to my host parents that my dog was indeed not my sister.
Someone once told me that all the world’s problems happen because of one of two things: miscommunication or oversized egos. In hindsight, I guess the former could have totally derailed my entire experience, since I was not permitted to speak English during the duration of the program; and even if I wasn’t, I was met constantly with people who didn’t speak my first language, which consequently forced me to use my Spanish in everywhere from kitchen tables to hospital rooms. I didn’t know the word for spoon, let alone for chills, vomiting, and constipation, leaving me scared, confused and immensely deflated. While some people did give up on trying to understand me, more because I was a White, U.S. citizen who they assumed didn’t know one word of Spanish than my actual Spanish skills, the majority of people did not. In fact, my professors and my host family always were so patient with me as I stumbled over my words and conjugation, giving me all the time I needed to tell stories of my life back in the States, share my experiences there in their beautiful country, and ask questions about dulce de leche and catcalls. Although most of the people around me were giving me space and grace to learn, I wouldn’t have grown if I hadn’t allowed myself to accept that grace, which I think speaks to the second cause of the world’s problems. Instead of becoming impatient when my host mom couldn’t understand how I injured my knee in an awkward play during a soccer game, I had to keep calm and continue explaining what happened in different ways, using different words every time, until she got it. Despite the fact that I didn’t know how to say sweet potato, I had to think of every adjective I knew to describe it before my host family had a look of understanding in their eyes. And although my patience is close to nothing, I was forced to accept that I would screw up whenever I kept confusing the word for hair and horse in the huge group chat and had to simply roll with it. If I hadn’t experienced such a total burnout in the fall, I don’t know if I would have realized how important and how unselfish it is to take care of myself and treat myself with kindness; I don’t believe I would have done so if I didn’t know what it felt like to drive on empty and be my own worst critic (with which, I still struggle).
Studying abroad is the most empowering, humbling, exhilarating, and terrifying experience I’ve ever known. It simultaneously encourages you to be your best every damn day and reminds you that no matter how much you’ve learned, there’s always still such a long way to go. It reminds you that you occupy such a small space in the world while letting you in on the secret that the world is yours to explore, savor, and be a participant in. In short, it is the single most life changing event I have ever experienced, not because of what I learned but because of who I met: myself. I felt like I grew up in Ecuador, and this nation will always have a piece of my heart, because it gave me, or rather God gave me, something that all the money in the world could never buy: a mirror on the wall of my mind’s eye to see the beautiful, strong, independent woman She’s made me to be.
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