Step 1: Get over homesickness

There’s something about being surrounded by people who have known you since you were born, about spending a weekend with someone who knows you better almost anyone else, about seeing the ways in which your best friend has changed in the past 16 months that you weren’t there to witness, that makes it hard to come back.

And, as I broke down to one of my best friends here the second night I was back in the country, I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by those people once more.

When we had made it past the initial outburst, she told me something that her friend had told her: In relationships (all kinds) what makes them work is what you are able to bring to them. Many people look for people to make them feel complete, but what really matters is that you felt whole beforehand. You are nothing if you aren’t able to define yourself outside of your relation to others.  

She told me, that above anything in my life thus far, this experience is going to be what I am able to bring to the table.

These 16 months have been hard and complicated and sometimes made me a person that I never wanted to be, but it has shaped me and made me stronger and taught me more about myself than any other experience I have ever faced.

I have walked away from classes cursing in English under my breath. I have mastered a transportation system that seems to lack all sense of logic. I have convinced a 14-year-old girl that she was capable of asking for more than what life had initially given her.

I left a significant portion of myself at Gate 58 in Kansas City, but I have things here left to do, people left here to teach and parts of me that I have yet to discover before I can truly have an experience to bring to my relationships afterward.

I only ask that those I left behind wait another 11 months.