Living outside your country is never easy, and being alone doesn’t help. Being 15 and leaving your family to cross an entire ocean to spend three months on your own teaches you a lot of things.

When I first landed in the United States, I was terrified. I just left everything behind, put my whole life in a suitcase and moved to another country. Even if I knew everything was temporary, I still had to live alone for three months, and that was scary.

At the beginning, I had a big cultural shock. A lot of things were very different: food, the town, the people, and of course, the school. The first days here were difficult; getting used to life in Milford wasn’t easy. I didn’t know anybody, and I had to adapt to the environment without having previous knowledge about life here. 

The thing that I found the hardest to adapt to was the school; everything was so different! I think I got lost at least 3 times the first day. The schedule was very strange, with totally different classes that I had never had before. Also, this school is huge, well, huge for me, a person who came from a school with 600 students.

I was scared, maybe I wouldn’t be able to adapt to this new school, maybe I couldn’t speak the language, and people wouldn’t understand me. What if I couldn’t make any friends here? Maybe people here would be so different, I wouldn’t know how to act. A lot of thoughts were crossing my mind when I first crossed the doors of Milford High School, and I was very anxious; I didn’t want to come back to my country saying I didn’t have a good time. Luckily, after a couple of hours, my fear started to fade away, and when that happened, it started to get replaced by excitement. A million opportunities were waiting for me inside the school, and I knew that a new version of me would be leaving this country.

I think that experiences like this, when you’re able to experience the world on your own, the real world, you feel everything with more intensity, and faster, you make bonds with people very fast, make friends that are like family for you. Everything you do is important; you don’t have time to lose. Trying not to waste opportunities, you end up doing things that you didn’t even imagine six months ago. And that’s the point of the experience, being brave to do new stuff, to make mistakes and learn about them, to leave the person you were before, and change, discover who you are, and also, to learn English.

I’m leaving this country soon, and before coming here, I really thought that this was really only to improve my English, but when I got here, my perspective completely change, this was more like a journey, to break who I am in to pieces, just to build a completely new version of me, and in the way, make friends, create memories, dare to do things I was completely scared of. I learned how to ride a bike, I dyed my hair, I even acted in one of the school plays, I fought with my friends, I cried, I laughed, and I had the time of my life.

If I could speak with my past self, she probably wouldn’t believe me, she would be here just for the language, a person who didn’t even look at the eyes of the people who she talked with, she would say – “ who is she?”, and personally thing that’s the point of the experience, achieving in some way my own “American Dream”.