Blog #6
My highschool graduation was a little over a year ago and I feel as though mentally, I have changed tremendously since going on my gap year. I can say with a fact that I am definitely more confident in myself and in my decisions. Before I graduated, I would constantly second guess myself and have a lot of anxiety over little things. I think a lot of this anxiety was also tied with how much other peoples’ opinions of me weighed on my mind. A year ago I was also constantly worried about what other people thought about me and was scared of being constantly judged by those around me, this also definitely affected my actions and held me back from doing or saying certain things.
Although I still have a lot of moments of insecurity in my decisions, I have noticed that I am more confident more often in myself after having gone on my gap year abroad. Being alone and having to decide almost everything for myself has taught me that most of the time the decisions I make eventually lead me down the right path and if not, the wrong decisions aren’t detrimental enough to ruin my life: they just interrupt things slightly. I take on decisions with a more calm attitude instead of constantly fretting about the possibility of having a negative outcome.
Along with still having some insecurity in making decisions, sometimes I still feel myself worrying about the unsaid opinions that others have on me. But again, going on the gap year abroad has allowed me to lose a big part of that fear of being judged. It’s not that I don’t still fear what people think of me, I have just taught myself to not care about it when I am just trying to make myself happy. At the start of my year abroad, I refrained from asking to do certain things because I was scared that my host family may judge me for going out too much. After a few months I literally told myself to forget about that fear. I had to let go of how people may judge my actions when I was only trying to get the most out of my year abroad, and when my actions were not harming anyone else. The fear that I had prevented me from doing so many things in the beginning. Letting go of caring what people do or might think of me opened up so many more opportunities during my year abroad and I wish that I had started with that mindset in the beginning. And now, I strive to use this attitude to more things in my life so that I can experience more things.
In regards to my world view, before leaving for my gap year I thought that I had a pretty good understanding of the world and other countries because my parents had given me the opportunity to travel around the world with them multiple times. But now, I think that I understand other countries, especially Belgium to a whole new level. There is a BIG difference between visiting a country for a few weeks or a month at a time versus living in a country for almost a full year. When you go on short vacations like I had in the past, you don’t really get to actually understand the culture of a country. You don’t get the opportunity to interact with locals, eat local food, or live like a citizen of the country you are visiting. You mainly stick to hotels, fancy restaurants, and visiting tourist attractions. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but after really integrating with Belgium and the Belgian people, I was able to see the country and the culture from a perspective that I have never viewed another country that I have visited before.
