#uwccr

It feels big.

"I'm nervous, but I'm more excited than I am nervous". -Sherman Alexie. 

I applied to UWC nearly a year ago, oblivious to what I would truly be facing in only 365 days. I thought it would be a brand new start for me, a way to get out of the smallness that was Costa Rica. I was wrong.

It started as a joke. Something to distract me from final exams and history essays, plainly something to look forward to. As the months slipped by I realized that it had taken more space in my mind than I had anticipated it would, I thought about it all the time, lied to my parents about how little I would care if I didn't get in. I made plans about what I would say when they didn't accept me, like an actor clapping when he didn't win the Oscar I practiced my congratulation speech for my fellow applicants. It wasn't until I'd gotten in that I realized I had no idea what to do.

I found myself saying goodbye to my bed last night. And my bathtub and my mirror. I know I'll see them again in no time, after all, I'm not even leaving the country. But somehow it feels like a premature ending of an era. I don't know how to leave my parents alone for I found that both my brother and I would be leaving the house during the same week. I'll miss the life I have now like nothing ever before.

But I'm hopeful. The next two years I hope will define me, show me who I'm supposed to be, what impression I'm destined to leave on the world. I want to die content with my legacy, I want the only proof that I existed to be bigger than who I am now.

I've had a simple epiphany in these few last minutes. I thought I was applying to this school for me, to become a better person and coincidentally meet better people. But I was once again wrong. I'm doing this for everyone else, for all the people that didn't get in, that didn't get to apply, I want to make them proud.

I've had a lot of time on my hands lately, which means I've had a lot of thinking to do. I think about my family, my home, how much I owe them that I will never be able to repay. I take this second to say thank you, something I don't do nearly enough.

I struggle to write something I won't regret in a year or two, to start less sentences with the word "I" and failing miserably. But the truth is that I'm learning. Learning how to grow up in a place that never felt 100% right, learning how to build homes over and over again.