It’s been a month. A whole month since I have finished my last exam on the 24th of may 2010. Seems like it was yesterday, like I just stepped out of the airplane onto the Maltese soil taking a deep breath, filling up my lungs with the humid salty holiday air. But that’s just a feeling, a very misleading one indeed. I’m on the plane back to the beloved UK – the country I’ve spent the last two years of my life in, the country I cannot imagine life without anymore. Two years have zoomed by, and what have they left? Any kind of mark in my mind or heart? Oh yes they have. These have been the two toughest, most emotional and sometimes depressing years of my life, but I’m only turning 18.
Yes, I’m turning 18 in two days. Never could have possibly imagined that this day would come by this fast. Unbelievable. I still remember sitting on an airplane with my mother by my side (as back then I always traveled with at least one of my parents since I was around 10), gazing into the illuminator and thinking: “when will I finally be 13? I wish I was already 13 so that I could go on dates with boys and go out with my friends.” I even through a coin in the fountain in Rome (our destination) wishing the years would pass by quickly. Now I’m 18, leaving the age of 13 far behind in the past. Indeed, the years did go by quickly just as I wished for, however did things change that much?
It’s a very debatable topic. Things have changed, I have changed, and people have changed. Definitely they have, but what impact did this or does it have on me? A very significant one as I personally feel it. Some might say I changed in a better way some in a worse but I believe there is no such thing as changing in a certain direction. If you change you simply change and that is it. It is not in the competence of individuals to judge and evaluate whether I have become a better or worse person as that is extremely biased. Yes I have changed in my action and my thoughts however isn’t that what part of growing up is? Re-evaluation and self-questioning/doubting is what makes you work on yourself in order to change. I have lived in four countries, experienced hundreds of cultures and met thousands of people from all around the world – how could I possibly not have changed? You start changing from the very first second of your existence when you “pop-out” from your mother’s womb, and continue this process until the very end when your heart stops beating and the whole body seizes to function. This process will not stop once I turn 18. Nothing will stop.