After
a few initial months in Philly you may find yourself thinking about how your
new American life is. In the first two or three weeks of your stay, it might
have still felt like being on vacation. Everything was completely new and very
exciting. While you were going around the city to run all the necessary errands
related to the documents, house contracts, bills, etc. you also had an
opportunity to discover new sites and what’s more, to discover them from a
resident, not a tourist, point of view.
Then, of course, you were still busy organizing
your new home or trying to figure out in what store you could find that exact
thing which, on the other hand, you knew very well where to find in your home
country. You were still busy exploring. I don’t mean saying that you will stop
exploring at the certain point because you won’t. However you will get to the
point when you won’t feel like on vacation any longer. You will start adjusting
to your new life, running into your new routine of daily events. You will start
realizing that your life is shaping slowly into something definite and it’s
losing its initially blurry form. You still have a lot to do in terms of having
your documents done or finding a job and a lot to discover around the city and
the country but this is the moment you realize that you stopped being a
complete allien and you turned to be a … hold on… who? A stranger in someone
else’s country? A wife that simply followed her husband to his new job
adventure? A full-time mother and housewife? Many questions may arouse and
flood into your mind and you might as well start panicking… But this is exactly
the moment you should take a deep breath and rethink about the stream of events
in the last few months. This is the time you can rewind the events in your mind
and make a sort of assesment. Getting over your past few months may help you
realize the steps you have done to get where you are. There were a plenty of
things to arrange and to get used to at the beginning. Now that you got all the
things settled you can see all your little (or huge) personal successes and
victories. It is extremely useful to keep track of all personal victories that
occurred in the first months in your life in Philadelphia as it is a very
self-rewarding way of recollecting the memories. You will be proud of yourself
and motivated at the same time to undertake new adventures and to grasp new
opportunities.
Did you come to Philly without being able to
pronounce a single word in English and now you have new friends you can easily
have a fluent conversation with? Did you only stay at home your first days
being afraid of the big city or being shy when interacting with people who
spoke different language and now you ride your bike downtown or have dinner
with your neighbors? Were you once used to taking something out of the freezer,
putting it to the microwave and calling it dinner while now you share your new
recepies with your girlfriends AND it all tastes delicious? Was it always so
hard for you to imagine yourself being a mom, running your household and
many other things at the same time while now it is becoming a reality?
These are all huge personal victories and important
changes in your life that might have not happened that rapidly in your home
country. So just stop and rethink. Hold this moment and think about all new
things that came into your life and all new things that are still about to
come. Clear up your memories, maybe write them down in a diary so you could see
the passages you have been going through recently. Enjoy the changes and stay
open to everything new coming into your life...I am sure that you will only be
able feel a great satisfaction and awareness for who you have become... :)