Exploring the Familiar

BY LILI SARAJIAN

I was committed. I had saved up the money and worked up the courage. I had, somewhat reluctantly, sacrificed a summer making money, doing an internship and spending time with loved ones. I was ready to study abroad, and I was all in...

...until I was dragged back out.

It was supposed to be stifling heat and sticky skin, open air markets and delicious scents, my first taste of Peking duck and crowded train rides into Beijing, awkward mistakes while I fumbled to speak Chinese and newfound confidence by the time I left.

I was so looking forward to meeting the girl that I would become after spending three months learning Chinese in Tianjin. I hoped she would be fearless, having conquered some of her greatest anxieties like traveling alone and speaking Chinese with locals. I hoped her eyes would have been opened a bit wider and her heart softened a bit more to the world.

Instead, the girl that is writing this spent her summer in her childhood home and working at her parents’ business in a small city in Wisconsin. In fact, she was roped back into a world so familiar that, after a few weeks, it was like she had never left at all.

But, something incredible happened while I was stuck, immersed in the familiar. I changed. I learned new things about myself and who I want to be. I might have even learned more than the girl that spent three months in Tianjin.

Spending way too much time with my family allowed me to see the ways my loved ones have changed

and grown in recent years. We slowly repaired strained relationships and learned how to make our time together count. With hours of excess time on my hands, I spent many of them in self-reflection, thinking about the way my past has shaped me and how I can change to become the person I want to be. I dedicated myself to figuring out what my true passions are and what I really want to do with my life. And, like a true Midwesterner, I drove around aimlessly, testing out new playlists while I discovered the hidden parts of my hometown that I never knew existed. All of this is to say that there was a lot left to explore right at home.

We expect that traveling will mold and change us, and surely it often does. It forces us out of our comfort zones and expands our perspectives by showing us what we can’t find at home. We leave home, sometimes running at full speed, to get our hands on as much of the world as we can and discover where we fit within it. In fact, I thought that heading home this summer, instead of getting on an airplane to fly across the world, was going to be like moving backwards and falling behind. Instead, I found myself soul searching within the confines of my four bedroom walls.

I FOUND MYSELF SOUL SEARCHING WITHIN THE CONFINES OF MY FOUR BEDROOM WALLS.

Traveling is a blessing that inspires us, shapes us and broadens our outlook—this is what we know and chase after with every penny we can spare. But, what we sometimes fail to miss is the value in the familiar.