Give Yourself the Opportunity to Surprise Yourself

I’m a home body. Even when I was younger I would have rather stayed at home with my parents and watched a movie than go to a friend’s birthday party or to the amusement park. As I got older, I wasn’t very attracted to the idea of traveling the world before I entered the workforce, or venturing too far away to go to college. Had it not been for the scholarship I received from a school I thought I’d never get into in New York, I would have gone to UMass right here where I grew up, and would have never made it to Italy to study cuisine or to Ireland to live for the summer. I would have continued to play it safe, and I would have robbed myself of the opportunity to surprise myself. What a shame that would have been, knowing what I know now.

I still can’t believe that I was able to find it in myself to travel alone to a completely foreign country- where I didn’t know a soul and couldn’t speak the language. I may have cried most of the plane ride there out of sheer terror, but I’ll never forget how proud I was of myself once I made it to the plane that took me home. I found a strength in myself that I would have told you didn’t exist before that experience, and finding it opened up so many doors for me