i get by with a little help...

So yesterday marked a month since I returned to the US of A and in the past week I've been thinking a lot about the experience. It's something I think about a lot anyway because it's very much a part of me at this point, but I mean that I recently started thinking even more about it. I have already said before that my study abroad experience - though incredible and something I am extremely glad I did - was pretty tough for me being so far away from the people I love aka you who still read this blog despite how long I've been back.

When I was in those moods of missing people a lot while in Cape Town, I was thankfully still able to talk to some people due to the miracles of technology. Without being able to talk to my closest friends, I think I would've had even more trouble getting through my study abroad experience. There's no way I'm going to let "what if _____ happened differently" take over my thinking, what happened has already happened and there's no changing it. Instead I am making sure to look back on all those months in Africa positively and considering what it did for me as a person. I learned a lot about myself in those months and I also learned a bit about the world, or at least the corner of it where I was.

Besides those people who helped me (and I am thankful for them to an extent that they can't necessarily appreciate) I had something else to help me through the days. Since I got to college, my mom has bought me a daily calendar every year, usually one with inspirational quotes. This year the calendar is called "Believing in Ourselves" and has quotes from famous women everywhere. Well I took the days that I would be in South Africa with me from the day I arrived in Cape Town (the same day as my 21st birthday if you recall) until June 13th, the day of my return to America. I don't remember when this brainwave hit me, but I decided that the quotes that I really liked, I would tape onto my door and see just how much of it I could cover before I left. As I packed up my stuff during those last few days, I took them all off my door (not before taking a picture ) and I wanted to share those quotes that got me through the hardest times with you. Enjoy.

• January 28 (first day) - "What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself." ~Anna Jameson
• "My father said there were two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better." ~Marlo Thomas
• "The greatest science in the world, in heaven and on earth, is love." ~Mother Teresa
• "Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open." ~Rose Wilder Lane
• "Character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs." ~ Joan Didion
• "I still believe in Hope--mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas." ~Molly Ivins
• "There is no greater calling than service to others. And there is no better way to have your blessings multiply." ~Oprah Winfrey
• "We are each of us angels with only one wing, to fly we need only embrace each other." ~Jessamyn West
• "Feeling insecure is good for you. It forces you to do something better, drives you to use all your talents." ~Helen Gurley Brown
• "We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark." ~Whoopi Goldberg
• "Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit, and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these." ~Susan B. Anthony
• "I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it--how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free." ~Georgia O'Keeffe
• "Everything that happens to you if a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth." ~Iyanla Vanzant
• "Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself, and never mind the rest." ~Beatrix Potter
• "Our response to an event is more important than the event itself." ~Angeles Arrien
• "A No. 2 pencil and a dream can take you anywhere." ~Joyce A. Meyers
• "I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love...There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heats our soul, energizes our spirit, and supplies passion to our lives." ~Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
• "To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth...is potentially to have everything." ~Joan Didion
• "Just watch, all you men. I'll show you what a woman can do...I'll go across the country, I'll race to the moon...I'll never look back." ~Edna Gardner Whyte
• "I think happiness is what makes you pretty. Period. Happy people are beautiful. They become like a mirror and they reflect that happiness." ~Drew Barrymore
• "The boughs of no two trees ever have the same arrangement. Nature always produces individual; she never produces classes." ~Lydia Maria Child
• "Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied." ~Eudora Welty
• "I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred--that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness pure and incorrupt...If we let our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover, no true friend." ~Harriet Beecher Stowe
• "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences." ~Susan B. Anthony
• "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." ~Marie Curie
• "A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, 'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?'" ~Betty Friedan
• "Be gentle to all and stern with yourself." ~St. Teresa of Avila
• "You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose." ~Jo Coudert
• "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." ~Marianne Williamson
• "Love never reasons but profusely gives: gives like a thoughtless prodigal its all, and trembles lest it has done too little." ~Hannah Moore
• "Every day the path to your own spirituality starts with clarifying who you are and what you want. Not just things--things are easy. I mean the stuff that really matters. Life isn't just about what you can have; it's about what you have to give. What kind of person do you want to be?" ~Oprah Winfrey
• "God stirs up our comfortable nests, and pushes us over the edge of them, and we are forced to use our wings to save ourselves from fatal falling. Read your trials in this light, and see if your wings are being developed." ~Hannah Whitehall Smith
• "The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now." ~Angelina Jolie
• "Insane people are always sure that they're fine. It's only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy." ~Nora Ephron
• "When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out." ~Elizabeth Bowen
• "There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in." ~Kay Boyle
• "If ambition doesn't hurt you, you haven't got it." ~Kathleen Norris
• "Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience." ~Victoria Holt
• "One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful for the gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me." ~Wilma Mankiller
• "The truth about your own life is not always easy to accept and sometimes hasn't even occurred to you." ~Anna Quindlen
• "Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim." ~Nora Ephron
• "The good is the greatest rival of the best." ~Nellie L. McClung
• "What I spent, is gone; what I kept, I lost; but what I gave away will be mine forever." ~Ethel Percy Andrus
• "We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light." ~Mary Dunbar
• "Don't tolerate me as different. Accept me as part of the spectrum of normalcy." ~Ann Northrop
• "In each of us there are places we have never gone. Only by pressing the limits do you ever find them" ~Dr. Joyce Brothers
• "The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return." ~Maria Edgeworth
• "Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze." ~Elinor Glyn
• "If your head tells you one thing and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart." ~Marilyn vos Savant
• "The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities." ~Adrienne Rich
• "One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory." ~Rita Mae Brown
• "You either have to be first, best, or different." ~Loretta Lynn
• "To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine love; to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart--this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal." ~Mary Baker Eddy
• "You should always know when you're shifting gears in life. You should leave your era; it should never leave you." ~Leontyne Price
• "The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have." ~Anna Quindlen
• "Being doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake." ~Maria Beynon Ray
• "I have learned not to worry about love, but to honor its coming with all my heart." ~Alice Walker
• June 12 (last day in Cape Town) - "When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power." ~Phyllis Bottome
• June 13 (return home) - "The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction." ~Rachel Carson

There was one last quote that I actually gave away to a friend before we left because it said something about how "people make the place" which is undoubtedly true. The people I did meet and befriend in Africa made the place for me and now being home, the people I have here make this the place for me to be. I could be happy anywhere in the world as long as I am with the ones I love, I'm certain of that now.

And so to all of you people who helped me through my study abroad experience, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I could not have done it without you. It is strange to think that the next group of CIEE kids going to Cape Town are -at this moment - almost there and will be arriving in the next 24 hours to begin an adventure I have already gone through. However, I know that for right now, I am where I belong.