Who Am I?

I fly to Beijing tomorrow and I still don’t feel anxious.
It’s not real yet.

But I thought I’d write about why I want to study in China for six months. I get that question a lot. I know it’s not going to be fun or easy, but nothing worthwhile is.

I don’t really have an answer to that question. But I’ll try.

First of all, I have wanted to study abroad for a few years now. And more recently, I decided that I wanted an extreme cultural experience. If I’m going to study abroad, I might as well go for it in a country that I know little about and where I don’t speak the language. China definitely falls under those categories for me. More obviously, my school has an exchange program set up with this particular university in China.

In addition to experiencing a different culture, I want to learn about myself. I know I have it easy here in America, and I want to know who I really am.

Like I mentioned before, the title of my blog comes from a song by the band Sherwood. A few of the lines are:

All of the ways that I have tried to understand
Have taken me further from the place that I had planned
And maybe the reason I have strayed so far from home
Is I have insisted upon traveling alone.

For me, this song is about understanding who I am, where I am from, the world around me, and where I fit in. And every time I think I have something all figured out, I don’t. I keep getting further away from what I thought was true. So now, I’m going far away from home for what is hopefully one of the best experiences in my life.