Making a new home

Going abroad was something I never imagined in my life. I have always considered myself a "home body," loving being comfortable and knowing everything around me. I am very close with my family and often times have struggles with leaving home, even for college. It took a lot for me to actually step outside of my comfort zone to do something like this. My experience was unique because I was very unsure, even on the plane, if I could physically go through with this. It was something that was definitely a challenge for me at first. I began to create a routine for myself that really helped me get comfortable in this new place. For the future, I want people to know that it gets better. No matter how scary it might seem at first, it will always get better. This experience is what you make of it so you have to make sure you keep yourself busy and do everything in your power to make this a positive experience. For me, it taught me so much about myself as a person, living with people you might not know so great at first, being independent, and so much more. This impacted my life in a really big way. During this semester, my older sister moved out into her own apartment, my little sister committed to college, and I went through a very messy breakup. Even though there were up and down emotions throughout the semester, it really taught me how to deal with big life events like this. My favorite memory was being on Piazza Di Michael Angelo with my new 6 roommates, not realizing we would all become best friends, we looked out to our new city and realized this is what we were going to call home for the next 4 months and we can't waste one minute of it. Leaving was very bittersweet for us and we still are adjusting back to America but this experience really taught us so much about being an independent adult being able to take on anything that comes our way. I think studying abroad is something very important to experience and if you have the chance to do it take it. You have a lot more support than you think as well. I ended up getting my passport stolen as well which was a stressful time but it allowed me to take initiative to something very important with the help of the right people and ended up teaching me a lot of things about how to handle issues and about myself.