(Canberra, ACT, Australia)
I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to study abroad. I did it for a number of reasons, really, but my biggest and most compelling reason was that I wanted to challenge myself.
Before all of that started I wasn’t in the best of places and there was a lot that I did not like about myself. I wanted to be a better person. Then one day, I had enough of my misery. I sat myself down and wrote out everything I did not like about myself; then I wrote down everything that made me happy in life. Traveling was on that list of what made me happy, but I’ll write more on that later. From there I made a plan on how to become the person that I wanted to be. I went on a warpath of self improvement and growth for months.
As time progressed and I became satisfied with the results I realized that I needed to challenge myself somehow. “What better way to challenge yourself than leaving everyone you know behind and jumping into an unknown environment,” I figured. I would study abroad.
I figured that if I was to study abroad that I would have to choose a place where English was the native language. My goal was to really immerse myself in the environment I was living in. While I do love learning languages, I just felt that 5 months would not be a long enough time to understand the language and thus allow me to fully immerse myself in that culture. I ended up choosing Australia because that was the farthest I could get from the environment I was used to my entire life. Here, on the other side of the world, I knew no one. No one from my university studied in Australia that semester. No one in my study abroad program chose to study in Canberra. I knew it was too far for anyone that I knew to come visit me, and I certainly was not going to come back.
So it was here, in Canberra, Australia- a city that is almost completely unheard of in the US- where I made my stand. It was here that I tested myself to see how much I had grown.
Those 5 months in Australia were the best months of my life. If you follow this blog, you will definitely hear much more about those months.
