Back in 2011, I had an interesting blog of my study abroad experience in Madrid, Spain. It was fabulous- pictures of my sweet host mother, the unique cuisine (tapas, anyone?), and jetting around a city so unlike an American metropolis with its culture and cobblestones. Ever since returning home, I've toyed with the idea of rebooting my blog or starting over. And yet, I faltered in returning to writing until now. I graduated in 2012 with a dual-degree from university, but my experiences across the Atlantic had left me hesitant and uncertain on my once-determined, expensive career path to become a physician. If you've never studied abroad, I'll explain culture shock both going there and coming back: it takes every childhood value and every book-learned skill, twists them upside down, and makes you relate to yourself and other people in an entirely new light. Specifically, everything that's the 'norm' here is not the new 'norm' that you'll learn and become accustomed to abroad... and vice versa. So when I-- a midwesterner accustomed to wide-open spaces, my own car, a conservative manner of politics, wearing tennis shoes and my hair up in a ponytail on a daily basis, and considering news as the Good Morning America and the Cincinnati Enquirer, etc.-- moved into a cozy (or as many might say, 'cramped') Spanish apartment in the basement of a plain building, where public transport was the only reasonable transport, people built upwards instead of outwards, my host mother was a liberal attached by the heartstrings to President Do-No-Wrong (Obama), world news was the staple of morning breakfast, and gym shoes and ponytails strictly belonged at the gym, I was in for a rude awakening. A rude awakening, but a life-changing one. I went abroad having no idea what I was getting myself into for 3 months. I came back having no idea what I was getting myself into for the rest of my life. Now, money mattered less, the fellow man mattered more. Quantity mattered less, quality mattered more. I mattered less, you mattered more. It wasn't even 3 months, it was 10 weeks... and I'm a different person now because of it. I'm sure my Spanish experiences will still bleed into this blog as there is still plenty of material I've never mentioned and it might add spice to the otherwise challenging task I have now before me: writing about well, a transitional period in life. For the longest time, I felt my current state of applying (and reapplying) to medical school, taking the MCAT three times, having the social life of a hermit crab for two years while working two somewhat dead-end jobs in customer service and being grossly underpaid for my two college degrees was dull and boring. And it is dull and boring, but I guess it's a pretty relatable existence. I don't have it all together like those other girls from my elite college prep high school. I'm not married, never had a boyfriend, don't have a 'big girl' benefits job. I am twenty-five, living paycheck to paycheck, at home, in debt to my parents, and have nothing substantial to my name but two degree certificates from university in a manila folder, safely tucked away. I can't even afford to frame the damn things. I'm a twenty-nothing that reads those Women-of-the-Year awards in Glamour in every December issue and swears upon it that by the time I'm a thirty-something.... I'll be one of those women. I'll be recognized. I'll have made a difference, somehow. People say overnight successes are years in the making... but no one writes about the realities of those quiet, unsuccessful years: the twenty-nothing years while they're 'in the making.' Why? Because every twenty-nothing is too busy pinning our diy-projects on Pinterest and watching cat videos. It's true. I do it too.
