T-minus ten days to my return flight home to Chicago! Before flying to Italy and starting my new life here, I already knew the day and time that my adventure would end. I imagined myself in the future and what it would feel like to come home after my big adventure across the ocean. I thought I would be ready to come home. I thought I would have had enough of living in a new place and that I would happily take the flight home to my old life.
The truth is that I feel like a totally different girl. A different girl will be boarding the flight home than the girl who boarded the flight to go to Italy in the first place. I might look similar on the outside, but on the inside, I feel completely different.
Imagine that you take a deep breath and you feel just like yourself. You feel confident and cool and that you know that you can do hard things. You know that if there is a problem, you will be able to fix it in some way. You look at yourself and love yourself. Life acted like a tornado, stripping the things you didn't need. Now that all the swirling air around you has lifted, you are just left with yourself. And you like what you see.
The experience of moving to another country, of leaving all the people, routines, foods, and places I knew behind, has been the best thing that ever happened to me.
