When you go away for a long period of time, one of the most wonderful processes is taking place. Some secret ingredients are: to be far away from home, almost no option of going home, talking even with very close friends only once per month.
When everything I mentioned and a lot more happens, you discover yourself, your true self. But a small details: most probably, all the people around you will not discover that (depends on each person, but you got the idea). When you go far away from home, for at least one year, you will automatically put yourself in a bubble, trying to protect yourself or to enjoy as much as possible without judging anything and anybody. From my point of view, that is the moment when you are making it very difficult, for people around you, to get to the core you and discover your true self - they need to break that bubble in order to find you.
I thought about this in the last week, mostly because of a lot of things that are happening in my personal life, things that forced me to think about what I want to do, who I am and why I want to do all the things I wanna do. Meanwhile I was talking with very close friends from home about our plans for the future year and I realized that I really need to start thinking a little bit more about what I want to do. And while talking with my friends I discovered that you might present a person to the people around you, but the circumstances of being so far away from home, from your friends, from everything that defined you for more than 20 years, are presenting you as a different person. Even if you don't want to do it, the circumstances are not helping you to do it differently: you many things that define you might not be close to you.
You might lack the support, your friends, the money, the power, the knowledge, the familiarity, the places, the music, the food, the coffee, the cars... or you might just lack the moments that are bringing the true you to the surface. And then I had another AHA moment. This is the perfect situation to meet people exactly the same as you...that are acting the same as you are acting home.
No, I did not meet anybody like me here yet. I had the opportunity to meet that person at home, in my safe environment; here I had the opportunity to meet people that have the same behavior that I have at home, when people do not know me. That's the difference: at home when I met that person I managed (I hope) to spend enough time in order to "break" that person and manage to see the true self; here I see the behavior of a person acting when the other person does not know the core self and when they think they can act however, because the other person cannot read them completely.
Back home the circumstances are helping me to be myself, are helping me to not not to fake, but to do/be/act exactly how I am. I used to talk with my girls about guys coming with different cars to pick us up from home, just trying to impress us; but we were doing the same: going to clubs with different cars, just to show off. That's childish, but it happens. Or how some of us are attracted by foreigners, just to talk a little bit more English or to see how a different culture thinks. But being home, in your self environment, with all the right circumstances, make you act in specific ways, ways that you would not choose as a way to express yourself when you are away from home. Because you don't have everything you have home to rely on; sometimes you know so clear that home you would react differently, but away from home you simply... cannot...
That brings me in front of a very important question for me: if you need all of those things to be able to express your true self, then how do you know everybody is true? How do you know you do not take a wrong/good decision based on circumstances which would forces you, that in a safe and know environment, to act different? I'm not lying, but I know that in some situations I might have acted differently if I would have been at home... so, am I true or am I lying, just because I don't have the right circumstances? Personally I think it's ME all the time, but sometimes I wish some people could see me at home...
PS: this is for a crazy girl willing to pursue a crazy dream with me, which is reality for us already... this is for discovering a new country, a new culture, a new experience, this is for discovering the true us!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwsSNrSEONc
