Girl With a Suitcase

I was pretty vague, so far, on this fateful journey that should be the center of the blog.

As usual, I’ll take it from the distance, so that you can understand my motives and my fears.
I did mention how, even as a child, I felt the need to go . I did not know where, did not know why, but I was looking for something that I could not find at my house. There are people who are well wherever you put them. Others that don’t even care.
Not me: I am always looking for something.

I always liked so much traveling: I loved the feeling of freedom and anxiety in taking a train for the first time alone, or the surprise of seeing a new city, and also the wonder of meeting new people with strange and different accents…
I remained always close, but I was dreaming the “exotic” . 

My generation has grown more American than Italian : the show we grew up with, the music we listened to, the movies we watched at the cinema… think: Which of these things “made in Italy” can you think of? We have been bombarded by images of the American high school with cabinets and fountains, with the cheer leaders and football teams, with the proms and the professors who assigned absurd tasks . This was in our imagination.
Instead our reality was made ​​up of schools with peeling plaster, monotonous tasks and non-interactive, year-end parties where the maximum was carrying a coke in class for a cheers.

I always wondered if it was all true, if those images were exaggerated or whether, if over there on the other side of the ocean, there really were teenagers growing up as you saw on TV. My idols? The OC, Smallville, Hilary Duff, Witches, and so on and so forth . My first contact with America, thanks to television, it was probably earlier than I had with Italy.
It was then that I began to grow that dream . How many years was I? I would not even know it … Hilary Duff probably when I was still not even in junior high! 

During my second year of high school, a friend of my mother spoke of an association called Intercultura, who was organizing international exchanges between teenagers and everyone could participate as a host family, having in the house for a few months a teenager English, American, Chinese or Australian. We liked the idea immediately and we began the practice: she would come and stay with us for 6 months, a girl from New Zealand.
Heck, did not even know where the hell he was New Zealand! And that little girl who would come, a seventeen year old high school student, would come up in Italy, alone, for six months, and stay with a family unknown … how brave was she?

She was not. It was not at all! It’s been a nightmare at the beginning: this poor frightened creature came from a country where there are more sheep than humans and found herself suddenly in Milan; she did not seem quite able to learn Italian (in fact, in six months he had not learned much) and she wandered at home desperate and crying like crazy because she missed her family.
She stayed with us for 6 months. I can not remember exactly how our relationship evolved, after how many months it stopped being a stranger in my house and turned to be my sister, but it was so. She was My sister, a sister who spoke a different language and with whom I had nothing in common, but she was my sister. 
But this is not the important thing, at least not for the purpose for which I write. It’s not like she influenced me and my life. What matters is how that experience changed her.

Earlier I had not realized, and I believe she didn’t as well. She was young and confused, as is normal at seventeen, clear, and was not too good to face the difficulties of that experience. Then by the time she had his friends, she began to understand something of Italian (very little, believe me … at home, English was a must for not trigger crying spells), to go out and get to know Italy and its positive aspects. In life she had a great passion for fashion. She liked to eat, so much, but like any other person. She was young, confused, insecure.

Now we are still in touch. I know I still have a sister on the other side of the world, and even if I do not hear from her often I know it’s there, and that experience has made ​​us connected forever. She came back to Italy, a few times, and each time to see her was an experience. Throughout her life, her education, her career, have been moved by the experience in Italy : she  found to have two vocations: the kitchen, strictly Italian, and the Italian language …  She started to study it in New Zealand, she changed her course of studies, she started working for a catering company and prepared the thesis about the food culture of Italy. The experience in Italy helped her to understand what she wanted to do with her life and what she was good at, but also her way of approaching her whole life has changed so momentous, and I am firmly convinced that this too is heavily influenced by that experience. And now she is one of the most calm and patient persons I know, she began traveling the length and breadth of the world, returned to Italy to specialize and want to go back here soon, not afraid of the choices nor failures. Now she is able to bring with her that serenity wherever she goes. For me, it’s really become an example.

I never directly asked her how that experience made ​​her become what it is now. Maybe it would not even know the answer. But I knew that little girl, and now I’m lucky to know this woman, mature, self-confident and affirmed. And I know, when I look in her eyes, that there rumbles inside an engine fueled by what she found in Italy.
Since then, I knew that I wanted to make an experience like her.

When I was in third year of high school, I came home with an EF brochure … you know it? It ‘an agency that organizes study trips abroad, probably the most famous. The girl from New Zealand was back home by more than a year, and I began to see her changes over time, even if at a distance. Leafing through the catalog, I found a section that talked about “academic years abroad” and my heart began to beat faster.
Intercultural It was not like that, you did not choose your destination, but this agency gave me the chance: I could choose . I could go where I really wanted: in America.
So I started all the paperwork: I was 16 and I was going to spend a whole year in America. It was incredible. It was an experience that none of my friends would never have dreamed of doing. And … it was scary. Too much…
I do not know why, really, I do not remember … I just remember every reason became an excuse to make it seem like a bad idea. Whenever someone talked about it, I went up panicing. And I decided to give up: “It is too soon, there’s no time,” I told myself.

Years passed, and I spent my fourth year of high school in my usual school in Milan. So also the fifth. It was approaching the time of the choices, , “maturity”, the diploma … but who feels mature at 19 years old?!? How do you decide what to do with your life, when you studied for 5 years greek and latin and you have no idea how it really works outside ? I did not know what I wanted to study … I did not know where I wanted to study … DID NOT know what I wanted, but it was immediately obvious that going for exclusion is not easy when you have thousands of possibilities ahead. I was in existential paranoia!
A EF brochure came back to help me, in these moments of panic. And this time not talking about summer vacation, nor to attend American high school … I proposed a year of preparation for university abroad ! The power of marketing, eh?
And so began the rigmarolewhole thing again. Again, I was going to do something, I was going to leave. But then …my countless fears (yes, again …I would like to start from the highest peak, but then I look down, I can not see the bottom … and I decide to go down ) joined the force most powerful of the earth: a new love!

You will tell me “What an idiot”. Yes, it’s true. But in hindsight I do not regret anything, I swear. I made ​​my choices, and all have had important consequences: I would not change anything. The fact is that when you fall in love, especially if you’re still young, you tend to think you’ve found everything. You‘re happy, he is perfect, you have the story of your dreams: why leave? And suddenly, without you even realize it , you forget what were your dreams … no, worse … you remember them, but do not feel them anymore like they are your own. You can not connect the person you were and what you are. You are missing a piece, and you should be fine. Not too many questions.

But time passes. At eighteen you fall in love and you feel like there’s nothing else, that will never go away, that time will not do anything. And make sacrifices, involuntary yes, but always waivers , which is going to settle on one another. Move pieces of your life depending on him, and he does the same with you, and that’s okay … but then one day you realize you’ve done too much. You do not recognize yourself anymore, because you’ve stopped to ask who you were and what you wanted for so long that you’ve forgotten. You just realize that you’re somebody else .

For some people it can also be fine. Some of my friends who have girlfriends the same as me, have my own path and are happy. There’s nothing wrong with that, I am not wrong nor are they wrong . Just I wasn’t happy anymore with it.
If you choose to open some doors and close others intimately because you feel that it is the right thing, then it’s fine.
But if you choose not to open more doors, simply sit still, in order not to put love to the test, to avoid the risk of having to start over, to avoid the risk of losing … then you destroy yourself. And your romance becomes your prison. And your mirror image becomes something that you do not recognise. Blurred image, a memory, a heap of tarnished regrets.

In life, every time you make a choice between several things, it creates consequently a possible regret. And well, that’s life. How do you do then?
According to me the point is to have  only “positive”regrets. Sometimes, you choose one thing rather than another simply because that makes you happier. Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe you’ll regret it, but at that moment, as you are fought, you know where you will find your happiness.
It was so when I had to choose between love and America. It’s been so when I decided to come to Urbino, rather than anywhere else. It’s been so when I broke up with my boyfriend, and I decided to get back together. Are choices, and every time you choose you are faced with two doors open: you can not get in either, and you can not even go back once to see what’s inside . You just have to do a few calculations and hope to be lucky.
Whatever door you choose, rest assured: the other will become a regret. It ‘s so by force, because you never know what was behind the other. But if at that time you were honest with yourself in making your choice, then it was the right one.

Sometimes, however, you are wrong. Indeed, is not that wrong, because in fact you do not know what you’d find behind the other door. More than anything, you realize over time that your choice is not enough. Does not make you as happy as at that time. Lets say that does not make you unhappy, but this has not turned out like you thought. It‘s where the regret  becomes a “negative” one … and that’s where the attrition begins.
The moment of choice, however, is gone and will never come back … then you wait, and wait, and wait. Wait a sign, a sign that never comes.

I have done so. I waited a long, happy and unhappy… in the wake of this sentiment, which now regularly takes me every time as you may have read, I found the usual trick: I found myself in the hands of the announcement for a scholarship , guess where? Bravo! In the United States of America. They were only 3 scholarships. They could choose me, they could not pick me up. I had the TOEFL, as requested, but I was not the only one. And anyway, I could always decide later, is not it? Trying does not cost anything.

Two months later, came the answer. ” We are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded a scholarship for a period of one semester in the United States . ”
Then I did not know what to do. I had not even told my boyfriend. I barely knew that I had made ​​my request.
I still do not know what choice I made. Still do not know if I am realizing my dream, if I had just hidden it in the bottom drawer, or if I’m just running away from my life and from my responsibilities. I keep telling myself that this will help me … that will teach me many things … I will clarify my ideas about the future … I’m not wasting my time (note that I am in the third year, I could graduate in September and I could instead start the master with perfect timing), but I am investing to make a more informed choice after …

It ‘s true? Or am I kidding? I do not know, really, this time I do not know. I know I’m very good at making fun of myself and others, so good that sometimes I can not tell where my truths end and begin my lies …I do not do it on purpose, but to put on, so as not to be judged, not having to deal with my weaknesses, I begin to make excuses for others who then become valid also for myself . And I get lost in the labyrinths of my mind.

This time I do not know which option is best. Or if it is a positive or negative regret …
Indeed, This time it will not be a regret . At best, it’ll turn into a regret … but this time I will not give up before. The rest I will address later.