My one-way flight to London is in three days. I have finished buying everything on my packing list and have begun saying my goodbyes. I wish I could skip the goodbyes. I have not felt much anxiety about this trip throughout the entirety of the planning, but the realization that I will not see my friends and family for a year has hit me. Though I feel very grateful to have the connections that I do. The people close to me know just as well as I do that this is what is best for me and for my life. And we know that time and distance will not loosen our bonds in any way. I am already looking forward to the phone calls home to catch up with everybody.
Many people ask me why I am doing this. There is the obvious reasons: exploring the cities, seeing the historical landmarks and monuments, eating the delicious foreign cuisine. As much as I am excited to travel to all of these new places and embark on these experiences, they are not the factors that drove me to make this choice.
I have lived outside of Indiana for two periods of my life, a few months in Montana and a few months in Vienna, Austria. During these short periods, I learned more about myself and about the world than I had in the entire rest of my life. I found answers to questions that I had not even thought to ask.
After reflecting on these experiences of living elsewhere, I have come to recognize that I had never felt more like myself. And more alive. Living elsewhere allowed me to disconnect from the environment that had made me believe I was who I was. It allowed me to break away from the people I have known forever, whose perceptions of me are based largely on a version of me who I no longer am. And to escape the monotonous daily routine that I felt was taking me nowhere in life, and ditch the old habits that I could not seem to shake.
Once these disruptions were made, I had a place to start fresh, and I could begin discovering myself for who I truly am, rather than for what my environment had told me that I was.
So it is not the locations or the pictures or the food that I am after with this journey, it is the opportunity to create a life that I am happy with and become the person that I know I can be.
I have known since I studied abroad in Vienna that I was going to travel, but it was not until more recently that I knew what that meant for my life.
I view this upcoming journey as the start of a new chapter. Or, more accurately, a new book. I feel that much of my life up until this point has revolved around school, college, work, and other things that I felt no passion towards and that I felt were requirements rather than things that I actually wanted to do. The start of this next book is the beginning of the life that I have chosen for myself. And I can not wait to begin filling the pages.
– Ryan