After spending the last three months in Europe, I’m finally back in the United States. It’s strange not spending every Thursday night figuring out where I’m flying next or every weekend wandering through a new city. For months, my life revolved around planning the next adventure, catching trains, navigating airports, and saying yes to experiences I never imagined having. Now that I’m home, I’m still planning things (that’s just who I am) but it feels entirely different.
The strangest part of coming home isn’t missing the travel itself. It’s realizing how quickly your idea of “normal” can change.
One of the first things I caught myself wondering was whether Walmart had free bathrooms. Then I was genuinely confused about whether I could fill up a water bottle from the sink. These are tiny, almost ridiculous moments, but they reminded me how completely I had adapted to living somewhere else. Three months was long enough for Europe to start feeling ordinary, and somehow, home became the unfamiliar place.
Looking back, my time abroad almost feels like a dream that didn’t really happen. Everything was so different from life in the United States that it’s hard to believe it was my reality for an entire summer. Sometimes I scroll through my camera roll and wonder if I actually stood on those streets, caught those trains, or watched those sunsets. It feels like another version of my life that I somehow stepped into for a little while before returning home.
What surprised me most, though, was the phrase everyone says when you come back: “Welcome back to real life.”
I know exactly what they mean. Vacation ends. Classes start again. Work resumes. Responsibilities return.
But here’s the funny thing: for the people who live in those cities, that is real life. Taking the metro through Milan, grabbing pastries in Lisbon, or walking along the river in Budapest wasn’t a vacation for them. It was Tuesday. Real life isn’t one specific place: it’s simply wherever you’ve built your routine.
That realization made me question what I want my own “real life” to look like.
Of course, there are practical realities. Traveling isn’t free, even if you’re careful with your budget. There are careers to build, bills to pay, and responsibilities that don’t disappear just because you love exploring new places. The challenge isn’t choosing between travel and real life: it’s figuring out how to build a life that leaves room for both.
More than anything, studying abroad changed my perspective on myself. Living in another country forced me to become more independent, more confident, and more willing to embrace uncertainty. When you’re dropped into a place where everything from the language to the grocery stores to the transportation system is unfamiliar, you quickly learn that you’re capable of far more than you thought.
Before studying abroad, it’s easy to feel like you’re living inside the boundaries you’ve always known. You fall into routines, surround yourself with familiar places, and rarely question whether life could look different. Stepping outside of that environment showed me just how much of the world (and of myself) I had yet to discover.
That’s why, if you’re ever given the opportunity to study abroad, I hope you take it.
Not because you’ll collect passport stamps or beautiful photos, but because you’ll come home seeing the world (and yourself) a little differently. You may even find yourself standing in Walmart, wondering whether the bathrooms are free, and realizing that somewhere along the way, your definition of normal quietly changed.