By Dina Aldabbagh

Leave. Home. Let your worldview change. Let another place form you. Let yourself be bothered by things and learn how to cope with them. Let yourself learn that there are whole cultures outside of your way of doing things that are not bad, just different. Let yourself be disappointed and let yourself find hope again. Let your heart break when you realize the world and life doesn’t unfold to your plans, expectations, or previous reference points to what life is. And then let yourself fall in love with life again. 

This is my 52nd blogpost, and at one blog a week, that makes this my 1-year post. In the last year I lived in Spain and moved back to the United States, to a state I had not previously lived in, and if there’s one single piece of advice I would tell people — especially those young enough to not yet have their identity set in stone — it’s this: leave home. 

You don’t know what you don’t know. What the world has out there for you is greater than you can even imagine, but until you are exposed to it for the first time, you don’t know it exists. You may have seen it from afar, but until you witness something so up close and present for you, it doesn’t click in your nervous systems that, “Oh, this can be real for me, too.”

Leaving home is the most surefire way to see other ways of doing life — to see what’s really possible. When you are born and raised without ever being exposed to anything outside of the same 200 miles, you don’t understand that there are a whole number of ways of doing life that work for so many people, and they can work for you too, if you choose. Until you go out there and feel the discomfort of the world not fitting into your current worldview, you don’t really know what life can be. The trick is, then, that you must adapt. 

When I lived in Madrid, there was a phenomenon that occurred that every other American there could attest to, and that was that Spanish people would walk directly at you on the sidewalk. It was like they didn’t even see you, and even if you had nowhere to go, that they expected you to move. Every American I knew hated this, and in the beginning of my time there, I really did too. It felt like an offense — especially coming from our American culture where space is sacred and respecting boundaries is seemingly innate. The Spanish walking directly at me and pretending as though I didn’t exist felt genuinely offensive. “How rude’ — with so much reason to be angry!” she says. 

And then I realized…“I can’t let this make me angry all the time. I came to THEIR country; this is how they function as a culture. Therefore, I must adapt.” I came to understand that it was not at all a personal offense that the Spanish did this, but rather it was just sort of ingrained into their way of existing in a city. It’s funny, eventually I stopped letting it bother me, and somewhere along the way, I stopped being bothered by the many other mini-offenses that we can scout out in the actions of others. 

In such a way, being challenged by this cultural norm made me more calm, more grounded, more at peace, and less likely to search to be offended and angry about something. This extended to all areas of my life, not just walking on a sidewalk. 

I would have never been challenged in this way in my chicagoland hometown — where people barely walk around the neighborhood and everyone moves by car. And yet, because I was willing to leave home and allow myself to be challenged and frustrated by other people’s way of doing things, I came to find a deeper peace that emanates onto all aspects of my life. 

Since moving to Spain, I have become a kinder, calmer, and more understanding person — which was only born out of being bothered by others and forced to change myself. Being tasked to look honestly at myself and say, “This is how the people of this place do this thing and I chose to leave my comfort zone and come to their home — even if I disagree on the proper procedure of doing things, I have to adapt” taught me that actually….their way of doing things isn’t wrong, just different. And that actually, there’s value in their way of doing things. Even if I ultimately decide that my American taught norms are what I prefer, it gave me perspective to stop judging norms in a vacuum, but rather look at the culture as a whole and understand why things are happening and that the reason is not: “because they’re bad.” 

Leaving home is humbling, but if you allow yourself to be humbled, it’s also the most formative experience you can possibly have. It’s impossible to be the same as when you left, however staying at home forever and ever will likely produce a very similar self day to day. Nothing changes if nothing changes. 

I don’t want this to be taken as a lesson to “run away” or “escape,” but rather that you understand that nothing bad will happen from leaving your comfort zone. Will it be hard? Almost certainly. Will you have to change? 100%. Will you be temporarily disillusioned as to what your life is meant to be? Yes yes yes. But that’s the point. Trying to avoid difficulty actually only breeds more difficulty. 

You can try to evade the pain of growth, but if you don’t willingly grow…one day you will look at your life and feel an unnameable dissatisfaction. To attempt to avoid suffering is to end up avoiding life itself. We must accept the slight dissatisfaction and imperfection that the present moment holds, and know that it is only serving to form us into a more fortified version of ourselves. 

All things are temporary, even pain. No decision is final, even a transatlantic move. But in refusal to feel your fear, set it aside, and take the leap anyways towards the life you want, you may lose your opportunity and have to eventually settle for less than what you were destined for. 

Before I moved to Spain, as excited as I was, I confided in my mom that part of me felt a bit scared because I felt like I had finally created a community and a life where I was and now I was going to leave it all and starting again. She told me, “They will be here when you come back. Real friends will still be your friends when you come back.”

And she was right. All the people I loved and who loved me stayed just as present when the opportunity came back for us to connect again. But in the meantime….I lived in Spain. I changed colors as a person and came back more of myself. You won’t ever lose anything that’s really for you by going out and venturing out into the world. You will only gain. 

The core point here is that living in Chicago wasn’t enough for me, but I could have allowed my fear of starting again and falling on my face to stop me from making the move that, now over a year later, I can recognize as the single best decision in my life. And…actually? I did fall on my face. Not through any fault of my own, but because life lifed. My start to living abroad was incredibly difficult, until it wasn’t — until it was absolutely incredible and deserves better words here to describe it than I may ever find to do it justice. 

I think people typically just fear change. Making a move seems really scary until you do it. “Moving to Europe for a year” felt huge before I decided to do it. Then when I got there…it was just life. It was just me in another place. Difficult? Yes. But in a way, no more difficult than the dissatisfaction I felt before moving. The fear that making a move may somehow ruin your life suggests finality. Like, “if I do this, that’s it.” But that’s not it. There’s always a way to undo, pivot, adjust. 

If I had moved to Spain and hated it, I could have moved back at any time. And guess what? Chicago would have been waiting for me. Every time I go home, I see that nothing has really changed. Yes, people’s lives developed and new constructions were going up, but that happens anyways — whether I’m in their same city or not. Change is unavoidable, but Chicago will always be Chicago, and I’ll always know what to expect. But the key is, I don’t know what to expect in a new place. That’s great — because it means I’m growing. 

My favorite things in life have been utterly unexpected. My best friend was once an unknown girl I randomly sat next to at a social gathering. My favorite city in the world was once just a place my sister was studying abroad. My favorite recreational field was once just a place my roommate’s boyfriend said he went for a run. My favorite pastry was once just something I saw in a random bakery in the window. The things that touch our lives the most can’t be planned. They’re not until suddenly they are. They just show up, and then we are forever changed. 

When you always know what to expect — when you always drive the same roads, sit in the same coffee shops, talk to the same 20 people every week — you don’t get to really learn more about yourself. Sure, at some point settling down is a beautiful thing that provides us stability and allows us to begin establishing roots — but let that be an informed decision that you make for yourself, not just the place your parents got the papers to go to from Ellis Island or that your great grandfather got a job transfer to 70 years ago and suddenly the rest of your family line stayed there. 

The secret is: you can always go back. If that’s your Vienna, Vienna waits for you. Chicago’s not going anywhere. Home is home, even after time apart. But let yourself go out there and experience the world — and, more importantly, experience yourself through knowing the world. 

I’ve had my fair share of disappointment, pain, and rejection in life, but what came out of every single one of those moments was me learning about myself. I learned what my true preferences are, who I love being, and what kind of lifestyle I really see for myself. The contrast of the discomfort I felt made excruciatingly clear what my true standards were. 

And maybe that standard for you is your hometown, but let that be an informed decision. I know people who went away to college to another state, moved to Spain, and still very happily moved back to their hometown — and that’s their experience. While leaving Chicago taught me that I actually don’t prefer Chicago, leaving New York City, for example, may teach you that you actually do prefer New York City. 

My only advice is to give it a fair shot. Leaving home will hurt because it will tear open your muscle fibers and ask you to grow, but when the muscles repair, you will become so much stronger. Don’t take leaving home and feeling pain as a prophecy that only your hometown is “safe,” but rather as a challenge to rise up and become a bigger version of yourself. 

We can always shrink back — until we can’t. I think leaving home is one of those experiences that catalyzed a person so deeply and gives so much perspective that a person can never become who they were before they left home. Maybe you’ll go back to the same place, but you won’t be the same person. 

If there is a voice inside of you that wants something more for yourself, go out and see what the world has for you. No decision is irreversible. You can always go back home and it’ll always look the same — just maybe with a couple new Aldi supermarkets up and around. 

Leaving home is not about renouncing your hometown, but rather giving yourself the opportunity to form into something that only other places could shape. Before I made the decision to move to Spain, I looked around me and said, “Surely there’s more to life than this.” And there was — much, much more. More to life and more to me. Let yourself see what else life has got for you and what else you are meant to become — your hometown will always wait for you.