Contributor: Paralith
I've tried to write this entry several times. There's a lot of complicated issues surrounding where I lived, when I lived there, and why, but in the end, the best way to answer the prompt is by describing this: I wanted out of my parent's house, and it was a battle to get to that point.
I could blame many things for my difficulty in really getting out into the world. I lived in the town I was born in for 22 years, never living more than 20 minutes away from my parents' house, and never traveling anywhere beyond our four usual family vacation spots. But in the end, if I had really, truly wanted to get out earlier, none of these things should have stopped me. Instead, they contributed to my biggest anchor - my own fear.
"These things" that I keep referring to - well, it's definitely a big can of worms. Many of them revolve around my much loved but anxious and controlling mother, and the death of my father from cancer several years ago. But these are big, big issues - ones I could write so much about, that this entry would never end. So I will leave them, I think, for another time.
So we'll start at my final semester in undergrad. I had long wanted to escape from my parents' house and dependency on mother, but I was also deeply insecure about my ability to make it on my own. I was afraid to go out on my own. I didn't want to admit it then, and blamed it largely on my mother - but it's the truth. I hadn't lived in her house since the summer after my sophomore year, but I still was never farther away than 20 minutes.
At the time, I worked as a research assistant in one of the labs in my school's zoology department. My particular lab was in a part of the building not open to public, where not many other students went, at the end of a long hallway, down a stairwell and through several doors into the basement. And one day, coming back from that basement lab, I found a flyer taped on one of the doors - on the side of the door facing the basement. Where almost nobody goes.
The flyer was for a month-long study abroad trip - the Behavioral Ecology of African Mammals, to Kenya. It wasn't even through my school but through a neighboring college. The Q&A and sign up meeting date had already passed by a week. After that day, I never saw the flyer again. I don't know how it got there or who put it there, but I knew I wanted to go.
Keep in mind, I had never been out of the US before. I had never traveled anywhere for longer than a week before. I had never traveled with anyone besides my family or close friends, let alone 30 strangers from a different school. I both wanted to go, and was scared out of my mind about what could happen if I actually managed to get over all the obstacles in my way and actually get to go. But, it had been a long time coming. I got in contact with the coordinators, had a long discussion with my mother about it, and finally, I went.
It was an amazing experience, and I loved it. But what happened there wasn't as important as what I learned about myself - I really could do these things. I could handle them. I could handle them well. And it made me realize how little I really knew of the world, and how much I wanted to see more of it.
When I got back from that trip, I was hopping to leave my hometown. I was ready to get out. To just stay there, where I had always been, where there was nothing new or different - the idea was simply sickening.
When I did finally leave, and move to a big city 11 hours away from home, it was exhilarating. It was like breathing fresh. It sounds corny, I know, but if there was any culture shock, it was lost in my happiness to finally be somewhere different, and to not be afraid of it.
Of course, as time went on, I had to learn the difference between visiting someplace new, and actually making a life for myself, by myself. That was where the real shock came in. And that's the subject of another entry.
