A foreign experience

I looked down at my feet hitting the bricks, moving to the beat of the hip hop song in the middle of an urban park in the south and was transported back to 2002, a 20 year old version of me.  The experience wasn't the same in 2002 but the feeling was exactly how I remember it, like these were parallel experiences.

And it wasn't really about one exact moment in either case.  It was a moment that represented a larger time when my life just felt so foreign to me that I wondered how I had ended up there.

In 2002, my eyes kept glancing down at my feet hitting the brick and cobblestone of the sidewalks in Valladolid, Spain.  My every waking moment and even many of my dreams were in another language so much so that when I called my parents random Spanish words would flow out and they had to keep asking me what I meant.  And my nights were spent wandering those streets after a late dinner, anything to get out of the small home of my host family.  It was an unfamiliar schedule, an imperfect language, a culture I didn't fully understand, and me constantly stepping out of my comfort zone as I tried to experience everything.  It all felt so foreign from who I believed myself to be.  And it literally was a foreign country and experience.

Today's feeling of a foreign experience was more metaphorical, although there are still parts of the southern culture and even occasional phrases I don't fully understand.  And I definitely have been constantly stepping out of my comfort zone as I allow myself to break the artificial limits I created and truly lean into who I might become.  And the feeling of everything being so foreign was just as strong.