When I turned 16, my parents sent me on the exchange of a lifetime. For years, I had bothered them desperately, begging them to allow me to travel and see the world with my very own eyes. I guess that after having dealt with relentless years of my nagging, my parents finally had to give in. You see, I lived in a small town called Huntsville, in northern Ontario. I had never ventured beyond there, for the first 16 years of my life, and oh, how I ached to leave.
I remember first learning about Canada's neighboring countries when I was in the first grade. America deeply fascinated my young, 6-year-old self, oh, how it did so. And, by the time I reached the 5th grade, I knew every country and its capital, in the whole, entire world. I loved to show off to my peers during the geographical knowledge standoffs that our teacher Mrs. Bauer held every Monday during the 5th period. I won every single time. In fact, my winning streak became so consistent that Mrs. Bauer told me that I had to sit out of the game and that I could not play in it anymore. She told me that I was not an equal opponent to the rest of the class, and this filled me with anger. I wondered how I would ever be able to prove my academic worthiness to my fellow classmates again.
That night, I spout a seemingly endless amount of hurtful comments about Mrs. Bauer, at the dinner table, while my parents tuned me out as they usually did during most of our family dinners. Looking back on my life now, I realize that I was a brat and a terrible daughter, but if I hadn't grown up this way I would have never experienced the things that I did–which I treasure more than anything else in the world. So, I'll start here, at the beginning of my journey into my new life. On October 17th, 2015, the day I turned 16 years old, my once mediocre life had done a perpendicular rotation from what it initially was, facing me towards a new perspective of the world I lived in.
