A thousand pieces
Believe me when I tell you to always follow your dreams, no matter what. Isn’t it better to have them shattered into a thousand pieces rather than living one more second not knowing what wondrous life you might have had?
My dreams led me to go live on my own right after graduating from high school, nineteen years old. I moved from a small island in the Caribbean, Aruba, to the Netherlands, and like most of my fellow high school graduates, we make the jump in hope of finding a better future. You don’t think too much about it, you don’t realize you’ll be living a 10-hour flight away from everything you’ve ever known. And I’ll admit I was grossly unprepared, but at the time I believed everything made sense — It’s just life and I was ready to live.
For most of us, it was a culture shock, we ended up in an entirely different world. Here in Aruba, we speak Papiamento, in the Netherlands, they speak Dutch. Here in Aruba, the total population numbers about a hundred thousand people, in the Netherlands most cities are way bigger than that.
There’s Trains, bikes, cows, grasslands, dikes, and it’s flat. No white sandy beaches bordering tropical blue oceans to enjoy the sunset next to all-year-long; nor are there any luscious palm trees with the wind rustling through their leaves. Even the dancing is different, no more loud bachata music while wearing boardshorts and bikinis.
And when winter comes around we islander folk are in trouble. Suddenly wearing gloves, scarfs, a beanie, and about five layers of clothing. I still remember how pink my own cheeks got during my first winter year, still unaccustomed to the freezing temperatures.
But that’s exactly the reason why I’ll tell you to go live somewhere else. Those new experiences, the new memories you’ll create, they’re stimulating in every way. The neuroplasticity of our brain allows the neurons to change their behavior which ensures that we’ll adapt to these new external stimuli.
Moving to another country alters your way of thinking, and so much more.
Even when things don’t work out the way you expected them to, it’s still worth experiencing. When you open yourself up to the possibility of failure, you won’t ever fail. You’ll wake up one day realizing it’s all in your head because in life there are no wrong choices — You just need to live it.
For myself, despite all the frustration, despite not everything going as planned, I don’t ever doubt for a second everything didn’t happen exactly the way it was supposed to, even when it didn’t seem that way.
Because it’s okay, I survived, and when you break into a thousand pieces, you’ll puzzle your way back whole again, just like I did. And nowadays I can say my journey has delivered in every way imaginable; if given the chance to do it over — I would. Without a moment’s doubt.
