When you take the decision to live abroad, be it for work or study, you don't realize how much of "you" has been left behind, until you've been away for a while. More precisely, until it's your birthday and you're receiving phone calls from miles away, but no one in the same room knows today is a special day for you. It hits you hard when your best friend gives birth to her first baby, when your grandma passes away and you don't attend the funeral, when your other best friend gets engaged, when you miss all the weddings and baptisms. You realize that life back home is never going to wait for you to get back. You also realize that you become your own support, your own backbone.
However, I want to take a moment to think of all the amazing people I have met traveling. It's incredible how you can find persons so similar to you at the end of a 25-hour trip with two stops, for example. Recalling the two times I lived abroad (Spain for my master's, and now Guatemala for work), I feel truly humbled and indebted to every single beautiful individual that helped me feel not so estranged at a country where I felt stranded from my immediate family and lifetime friends. Distance and time difference are more powerful than anyone thinks.
I will forever owe my survival wherever I lived away from home to the great friends I met abroad and who, in a way, became my family, and I became theirs. We become each others' support and comfort zones, eventually making life away from our homes, livable.
When you are a traveler, you have a different, wider, more diverse, panoramic and tolerant perspective in life. So, most of the time, when you meet other travelers, from your nationality or not, there's a certain "click" that happens. No one will understand your concerns, fears, disappointments, unmet expectations, and crushing stress, more than people who're going through the exact same feelings and experiences every day. Knowing that these people exist is more than enough to give you motivation to get out of bed every morning.
To all my amazing friends abroad, whom I consider to be family as well, source of my pride and comfort (and I hope I am to them), I am forever indebted to you (and you know yourselves). Thank you for existing and for being who you are!
However, I want to take a moment to think of all the amazing people I have met traveling. It's incredible how you can find persons so similar to you at the end of a 25-hour trip with two stops, for example. Recalling the two times I lived abroad (Spain for my master's, and now Guatemala for work), I feel truly humbled and indebted to every single beautiful individual that helped me feel not so estranged at a country where I felt stranded from my immediate family and lifetime friends. Distance and time difference are more powerful than anyone thinks.
I will forever owe my survival wherever I lived away from home to the great friends I met abroad and who, in a way, became my family, and I became theirs. We become each others' support and comfort zones, eventually making life away from our homes, livable.
When you are a traveler, you have a different, wider, more diverse, panoramic and tolerant perspective in life. So, most of the time, when you meet other travelers, from your nationality or not, there's a certain "click" that happens. No one will understand your concerns, fears, disappointments, unmet expectations, and crushing stress, more than people who're going through the exact same feelings and experiences every day. Knowing that these people exist is more than enough to give you motivation to get out of bed every morning.
To all my amazing friends abroad, whom I consider to be family as well, source of my pride and comfort (and I hope I am to them), I am forever indebted to you (and you know yourselves). Thank you for existing and for being who you are!
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