Fear of missing out

Originally published on https://uosstudyingabroad.wordpress.com/

There’s so much pressure when it comes to doing a year abroad. Other peers seems to be having the best time of their life travelling around the world, going to parties, making so many new friends, it can be so easy to feel left out and as if you are wasting these moments if you’re not actively doing something every second. But I think everyone feels this way, at one point or another.

The truth is, being abroad is hard. Most international students will be in countries where they have no family of friends and are essentially alone. You don’t have a physical support system if something goes wrong, and navigating a country with an entirely different culture and language can be both daunting and exhausting.

Everyone around you speaks the language better, they are always travelling with their new group of friends, while you are just…there, asking yourself if you’re the only one who feels this way, why you’re finding it hard to integrate and meet new people, why you seem the only person who gets assigned pages and pages of essays and why planning a simple weekend abroad is impossible and expensive.

I’m especially guilty of feeling this way. I’m always reminded by others that they are always doing something, so I panic, in the name of not wanting to feel left out and spend so many of my free moments feeling guilty and like I’m wasting time.

One thing I would say that is important to keep in mind, and that I try to remind myself, is that what you see of other people is only what they are willing to show you. Just because you don’t see someone going through the same struggles that come with studying abroad doesn’t mean they aren’t experiences the same. It’s ok to feel homesick and not enjoy your time abroad 24/7, not to have a lot of friends or people you know and spend your weekends relaxing at home or in your host city rather than on a plane flying somewhere.

I personally only left Switzerland once, to go to Evian, a French city, across the lake from Lausanne. All my other trips have been day trips around the country. I know some people, but I know myself and I’m the type of person to only have one or two close friends over a big friendship group, and that is what I’ve done here. There have been times where I would count down the days until I got to go home to my family, and so many more that my friend and I spent looking at our classmates’ Instagram stories saying, ‘oh look, X is abroad, again’.

But as I’m writing this now, a little less than a month left here in Lausanne, I realise that while I enjoyed my time here and the things I got to experience, I wish I hadn’t spent so much time worrying over what others were doing and whether the way they were experiencing this year was the correct ‘way’. A year abroad can be another year, there is no right or wrong way to experience it.