If you have been following me along the past year both on Facebook and on my blog you might have observed that I haven’t always been positive. I spoke about my issues with housing, the fact that I felt my second year abroad was harder than the first, the impression that I have temporarily lost my vision and so on. And you might have reached the conclusion that I am unhappy or depressed or that my life decisions were not the right ones.
And you could be right. If these were all the facts. But they are not. Remember, there is always more to the story than you know. And such is the case for me too.
Indeed, this year, I have been publicly sharing my struggles more than ever. But I only chose to do that because I felt no one else around me was doing so. At times I felt alone in my struggles, although it seemed to me they could not have been experienced only by myself. Perhaps not paradoxically, I was ready to share those seemingly weak moments only when I was at my strongest point, after the storm had passed. That’s because it took a lot of guts and thick skin to publish those snippets of life.
Yet, I have not been completely unhappy. Rather, I would say, in the big picture, I have actually been happy more times than I have been unhappy. I built a life for myself exactly how I wanted it, in a way I am more than sure my younger self would be inspired by and my older self proud of. I surrounded myself with the best of things and people, as much as I could, and I did my best to enjoy each day.
And yes, there were hard days! But never, NEVER, have I thought to give up. Never, NEVER, have I said to myself that I made the wrong decisions. Never, NEVER, have I considered that I was not exactly where I was supposed to be.
Truth be told, I have grown up. I might have lost a bit of my teenage innocence and my sweet naïveté, but I have never felt more like myself. And yes, I experienced many many happy days and I still believe with all my heart that Life. Is. Beautiful. It’s just that now I mostly keep these moments to myself.
I don’t want to be phony, I don’t want to be hypocrite and I most definitely don’t want to project the idea that living abroad is easy. Because it’s not. So I will not cast everything in a pink and flattering light just so I can get more likes and more hearts and more congratulations messages. Because these are not warming my heart. Lately I chose to share more of my troubled moments to help others and to create that sort of accepting environment where we don’t feel judged for opening up. Yet, that is exactly what happened. I felt like my own story got distorted, as if my life could be resumed only by those fragments of text. Did the filters and the curation of social media content trick us that life is always easy, gentle and kind? Have we forgotten that life is made out of both good AND bad?
Frankly, I am bloody happy and freaking proud of where I am now. I achieved so many things on my own that bring me joy every single day, and most of all, I Did It My Way.
And watch out, because I got my vision back, and this time, I’m not letting it go.
P.S. I think the highest form of praise, satisfaction and embrace of life is saying that you would make the same choices again. Which I would.
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