exchange

"Exchange is change: rapid, brutal, beautiful, hurtful, colorful, amazing, unexpected, overwhelming, and most of all constant change. Change in lifestyle, country, language, friends, parents, houses, and school; simply everything. Exchange is going from thinking you know who you are, to having no idea who you are anymore, to being someone new, but not entirely new. You are still the person you were before, but you jumped into that ice cold lake. You know how it feels like to be on your own, away from home, with no one you really know. And you find out that you can actually do it. Exchange is learning to trust. Trust people who at first are only names on a piece of paper. Trust that they want the best for you, that they care. Trust that you have the strength to endure a year on your own, endure a year of being apart from everything that mattered to you before. Trust that you will have friends. Trust that everything’s going to be alright. Exchange is realizing that things that mattered to us months ago don’t seem to matter so much anymore, and we start to realize how much things have changed, and we realize that the hardest part of being an exchange student is balancing the two completely different worlds we now live in."
 - Farid Alqottob