by Sadie Bijlsma (UC Santa Barbara)
The Promise of Eternal Beauty
On the Isle of Skye in Scotland, there is a river that is rumored to have been enchanted by fairies. According to Scottish folklore, if you dip your face into the waters under the Sligachan Bridge for seven seconds, you will emerge eternally beautiful.
Despite the 40 degree weather and the promise that the river was ice cold, I’m not one to knock anything until I try it.
Even if the river didn’t change how other people saw me, I was interested in a way to change how I saw myself.
The Baggage I Carried Abroad
I don’t think it’s any secret that college students often struggle with mental health – we can feel anxious, depressed, burnt out, and be extremely hard on ourselves when we ought to be lending ourselves a bit more patience and understanding. Suffice to say, as I excitedly boarded the plane from LAX to Glasgow, Scotland last fall, I was carrying more baggage than just my oversized checked bag.
In my head, I had all sorts of (unfounded) stories about myself that I believed to be true: I don’t make friends easily, I don’t stay out late, I will never understand a subway system, I’ll be miserable when the weather dips below freezing, nobody will want to date me, I couldn’t do stand-up comedy, I’ll never end up in a club that exclusively plays emo rock music.
Some ideas were certainly more frivolous than others, but in my mind they had been taken as fact – or at least they had remained unchallenged.
But something I knew immediately upon my arrival was how quickly the semester would pass by – people who study abroad for a year still say it wasn’t enough time, so how could my short 14-week stint at the University of Glasgow feel like any time at all? In the blink of an eye, I would be back in lecture at Pollock Theater at UCSB rather than Pollok Country Park on Glasgow’s south side.
Freedom to Rewrite My Story
I began to think of my life in Scotland as life on Creative Mode, or, for those of us who didn’t spend hours of our childhoods on Minecraft, a life where I can exist with no consequences.
In California, these stories I told myself had become habitual narratives that my day-to-day UCSB experiences would cue. An invite to a party would cue me to fear talking to new people. Everything at home felt deeply consequential because I live there. The people I talk to at a party could certainly pop up in life again. Survival mode. Lasting consequences for everything I say and do.
That is not to say I went about my Glaswegian life recklessly – every day and every person I met was precious to me. But the temporary nature of my semester abroad gave me freedom to systematically disprove the narratives I carried about myself. It became an experiment.
If I show up at the pub, strike up a conversation with a stranger, and be totally myself, will they want to grab a coffee with me by the end of the night? More often than not, the answer was yes! After three months in Glasgow, I had seven very close friends, and showed myself that I am not bad at making friends, it can actually be quite easy, and it’s something I can get better at over time.
Proving Myself Wrong
When our brains are presented with an idea, they try to look for evidence to prove that that idea is true, often ignoring any evidence that might suggest the contrary.
If we have negative thoughts about ourselves, we begin to believe them to be true because we want to be right in our thoughts. Taking the time to recognize these thoughts and using my time abroad to prove myself wrong was the most transformative, rewarding, and, frankly, fun experience of my life. So many of the ideas I thought about myself were imposing limits on what I thought was possible for me, they became self-fulfilling prophecies – I didn’t think anyone would want to go on a date with me so I didn’t try. But in Scotland, I sucked it up, downloaded Hinge, and had an amazing time on a couple of dates, and ended up learning chess in the process.
It is challenging to live beyond what you think you’re capable of, and I won’t pretend that it was always easy, or even successful. I still haven’t done stand-up comedy, but in the process of trying I met some of the funniest people and laughed so hard I didn’t feel the need to do my ab workout the next day. And I’m just a bit closer to maybe giving it a shot, and I think that’s what counts.
Ultimately, I’m proud to be able to say I can make friends easily. I stayed out so late the morning birds were chirping when I went to bed. The London Underground was no problem for me. The right clothes kept me warm and happy, even when it surprisingly snowed! People want to date me. And somehow, even against my will, I did end up at an emo rock club, but that’s a story for another day.
What I Brought Home
Beyond external experiences like exploring as much as you can, dipping your face in enchanted, freezing rivers, and learning a language (or, in my case, thick Glaswegian accents), making the most of your time abroad can also be an internal, introspective process that changes how you think not just about your place in the world, but your sense of self.
The waters of the Sligachan river may not have given me a completely new bone structure, but they did inspire me to adopt new ideas about myself, and those have eternally altered my life.
Learn more about the self-discoveries UC students make while studying abroad:
- Angelina learned about culture, politics, and society during four months in Paris, leading to self-discovery she never expected.
- Anna discovered what it meant to her to be Asian American while studying abroad in Hong Kong.
- Keren, Annika, and Mercedes share all the ways that study abroad tests and strengthens your personal identity.
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