When I joined Erasmus I knew - I knew there were going to be irreversible changes inside myself, yet I didn't know their grandeur. I came hoping I'd find more people like me, hoping the horizon would open into dozens of layers so I could see a different sunset than the one I've been seeing for the last years. I came wondering if this fitted me - if I was the right kind of person to do this. 

The other day someone said "Erasmus improved my self esteem" and without even thinking I nodded. Because it did. Physically, yes, maybe because people here look more natural, because I've slept on the same bed with pratically 4 strangers, because I've sweated on the mountains and my perfectly straigthened hair got wet too quick on rainy days: basically, you develop a familiarity with these people that you don't really get to have with most everyone back home, unless they're relatively close friends. 

But there's more than that: somehow, it also improved the way I see myself, or made me hate myself less sometimes. I can't say I hate myself now, cause I know what that truly means and it certainly isn't this. But this didn't make me "like" it either. It's a bit less, or a bit more, I'm not sure, than that, it's a step towards a strange direction, one of a kind of peace you estabilish within yourself that doesn't exactly mean you improved but it also means you are closer to it in a very natural, strange way.

I also discovered that I didn't find people like me. For sure I found people with similar interests, similar travel bucket lists, similar adventurous and random spirit, but this experience so far made me realize I have some kind of an incomparable wanderlust to the people I have really met so far in my life. From frustation, to my ocd kicking in when trying to organize a trip to finally sort of making peace with it all and truly going with the flow, I understood that there is something inside me that I suspected was there; and now I am sure. And it is both good and bad, because I gradually feel like I know a little more of myself, and I can freely express it because I feel it so strongly but it also is such a lonely journey that only distances myself further from everyone else. 

When I go back, I won't be the same person. I would have found things and grown out things inside during this time. And now they are there, and I'm not sure what to do with them, but it's such a big world of possibilities. 

There are still two months and a half ahead. My anxiety needs to calm down. I must breathe. I can't wait to find out more, and have more adventures. 

Photo credits to Tommaso and his digital camera, because the analog's pics weren't developed yet.