Kids are cute. Learning spanish is hard. Doing something nice feels great. Living in a world as big as ours is tough. Trying to make it a better place is tough. Challenging yourself to do things you never thought you’d do is tough. But, here I am.
I’m living my life in a foreign country, with a different family, surrounded by new people every day. Wait, say that again? Yeah. I still can’t believe it. As I write this blog post on the last day of May, thinking back on the fact that I only finished my first year of university ~25 days ago, and knowing how much I’ve accomplished and have done in such a short amount of time, is crazy to me. A summer I thought would be spent watching KUWTK and TWD, lazily zombie-ing around my house, in my pajamas all day, is being spent in a whole different way. And, I think this is what I’ve always wanted.
I’m being shown different sights every day. I’m seeing parts of the world every day. I’m not just at home like I always once was. And that’s the crazy part to me. I remember being 8 years old and wanting to leave home forever because I just hated it. I had wishes to travel the world, see things that would make me independently happy, make new friends, and become the person I always imagined to be. I’m not that person yet, but I think I’m taking the steps in the right direction. So, it’s crazy that something I wanted when I was only 8 years old is finally happening, 10 years later.
Look at all of these alpacas and llamas. I’m seeing more llamas than ever in Peru. I now know the difference between the two (llamas have longer mouths). Sure, I could have found that out back in America, but do I think I would have cared that much to even search it up? I’m not sure. Things are different when you leave the comfort of your home to travel and start doing things that make you fear doing nothing.
On many occasions, I still doubt and fear everthing. I fear I’m missing out on things my friends are doing back in the U.S. I fear I’m being selfish with my own ways of traveling and leaving my family back at home. I fear I’m leaving home just to fulfill something in me that says ‘you need to find out more about the world.’ There are a lot of things I fear, but when I think about it some more, I think a lot of those fears are made by that annoying side of the human conscience that wants you to live in a bubble.
I’ve found, on my one year journey of happiness and self love (almost a year. I started fall 2016), that life is meant to be lived. There should be something in life that makes you smile and excited to breathe the next day. There should be something that gives you meaning to do what you want, laugh how you want, and smile however often you want to. It shouldn’t be weird to just look out the window, see a flower, and smile- Actually, shouldn’t that be normal? IT’S GOOD FOR YOU.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that you should want to do what makes you happy. Personally, I’m not sure if traveling makes me happy just yet, (I’m only on my first out of the country experience) but I can say that it does make me feel differently about the past 18 years I have lived my life. And, I think with all the doubts I have about myself, that different feeling I get from being somewhere foreign and unknown gives me pride and happiness to keep finding out what exactly makes me want to live.
Did any of this make sense? Probably not, right? I just took 2 pills of advils to cure the funky feeling in my stomach (traveler’s sickness?) and I’m about to go to bed at 9 pm. If this doesn’t make sense then let’s just blame it on my traveler’s sickness, okay? Goodnight.
