Fellow life wanderer

It is not only me. I guess we are all over the world. A friend of mine living abroad is another perfect example.

I'm still under the jet lag effect. Well, it sucks. I didn't sleep one day, then in the following I overslept and despite that I was sleep all day, and then, when it was time to sleep again I could confortable do it. Seriously, it felt awesome! But!! It lasted less than one hour. I woke up full of energy. Fortunatly, due to the time difference I have people available on skype at that time, so I have someone to spend my energy with. And then, a few hours later, I slept again, this time till 1PM. 

And now I'm writing this. Not that I want to write about the jet lag, I just felt I need to clear all this out.

Living abroad, full of advantages, but also full of not-so-advantages.

On the good side...

→ Language skills, japanese and english (english because I read a lot and restarted watching american tv series), skyrocketed. Though I must admit that I feel my japanese was a lot better some time ago. 

→ Your people skills improve. I might come off as an introvert in Japan, because I don't go out much and my main activities are introvert-ish, but I was VERY MUCH pleasantly surprised when this year, coming back home, people just felt good talking to me. And people want to talk and be with me. Friends I haven't talked to for years, inviting me to go out. I was surprised because if some time ago I would probably feel anxious, now I was just confortable. When I go out with japanese people, I don't know if it's me, or if it's them, but I can't be very comfortable, I mean, I talk a lot yes, but I don't talk like I'd like too. I talk always with the concern of the possibility of being judged or disrespecting the japanese culture. Also, japanese people don't show a lot of emotion, and that makes me a little uncomfortable because I'm always afraid of asking things they might not want to respond and I don't want to make them feel uncomfortable. 

I noticed that portuguese people are extremely expressive (facial expressions, stares, tone of voice), myself included and now having the same behaviour from the other side makes it a little hard to guess what's on their mind. Contrastingly, I like this japanese feature, it show immense politeness, I just would like to break the wall more easily. 

→ Self-awareness! This is great, but it can also be a burden at times though you will have the premise that you can "fix" whatever's wrong with you, because you now know why, and only the period between acknowledging and finding a solution sucks. 

Reading books helped me a lot, as I'm not tired of saying. What's good about self awareness is that you know yourself better, you know where your heart is, you know what you are feeling, you know whether you like it or not, you know what you want and not want to do. Trust me, when your sense of self is inexistant, you can't do those fluently...

→ Self-reliance. You have many times when you depend on no one but yourself. This is perhaps the reason I don't go out much here. I am independent but I like to be within a group, community makes me stronger and happier, it brings the best of me to the surface, In Portugal I'm the wittiest and the most charming person you'll ever know (I miss that). Being alone makes me overthink everything. Yes, you become more self reliant abroad, and that's great, but life is not to be lived alone. If you are confident of yourself and you know you have people there for you you become more self-reliant, but when those people are not present, why bother? 

The disadvantages are:

→ Loneliness. Becoming self-aware made me realize how lonely I feel, specially after coming back from Portugal. My family, pets and friends are not here. And they make all the difference. The.The silence in the first morning after I came back was just terrifying. You feel alone when you can't be yourself 100%. If I knew that even with japanese friends I could be myself, I'd have a lot of friends. It's just that living in a different language makes you use different parts of your brain and you don't have immediate access to them, you need to be aware of that and try to make those traits come to the surface.

Living abroad allowed me to observe life much more attentively, and to appreciate the little things. I realized how beautiful human emotions are.