As a 6 year old girl, I absolutely never wanted to sleep. I was always afraid that I was going to miss out on something great. I would sneak around and watch late night shows on television, or try to stay up with all the adults when we had visitors. I always wanted to have fun with the world after dark. Looking at these adolescent decisions now, I don’t think it helped with my now chronic, unwilling insomniatic lifestyle. One particular night was different though. I craved nothing more than to just fall asleep and finish off the night that mentally decimated me. I felt lost. Unsure of why this was happening to me, baffled with how my life was going to change so suddenly, now that I’d be leaving everything that I had come to know. It physically pained me with excruciating burning sensations to close my eyes due to the swelling from the excessive wiping of my tears.
I lay there, looking around my bedroom with the little gleam of light my window was able to provide for me, even though the bars on my window blocked most of the light. I saw bare, empty walls where there once was disney posters, world maps, pictures, and decorations that expressed my personality and who I was as a child. Now the emptiness in the room was all that was able to describe me. I was empty. I felt this way because I emptied myself in my homeland that I would be leaving in less than 4 hours.

As my parents and I trudged down the airport, trying to make our flight, all that was running through my mind was the fact that I was leaving everything I had ever known. I was moving to a different country where I didn’t know simple things such as, the national fish, the national flower, the national anthem, or even if they had any of these things. My mind was in shambles. I found no good in what my family had forced upon me and I didn’t plan on finding anything good about it. I believed that if I rebelled against everything my parents were trying to do, I would win.

I’ve never been afraid of airplanes, but today I was horrified. The Delta fight slowly started to move down the runway. The lights of the runway lighting up the dark sky. As I looked out the window, I noticed the aircraft and I were the same. We both were a bit shaky and both making weird noises, (mine was whining and crying while the plane’s noise was unknown, questionable and not very comforting). I felt the plane shoot off down the runway and before I could comprehend what was happening. Soon we were in the sky. Everything that I ever knew was now out of my reach, and soon after that, out of my sight.
After watching me suffer for hours at home, the car ride to the airport, and the bumpy take off on the airplane, my mother couldn’t see me cry anymore. She held me and reassured me that this move is what is best for our family. She explained to me with tears in her eyes, that the Bahamas was no good for a child like me to grow up in.

She attempted to comfort me by saying, “There’s so much potential for you Kel. America has always been known as the ‘Land of opportunities’, so your father and I want you to have those opportunities that the Bahamas can’t provide you.”

I retaliated her statement by saying, “I don’t care. Taking me away from everything that I grew up with is very mean and I will never forgive you and dad.”

She replied with, “You’ll thank us later Kel.”

That last statement made me beyond angry and I refused to talk the rest of the flight to Atlanta for our layover, or the flight to Michigan. It wasn’t until I recently returned to the Bahamas, did I realize that my parents were right. Crime has become atrocious, expenses are increasing, and the ways of life down there have gone down the drain. I couldn’t be happier that I left.

As the turbulent filled flight, flew to my new home, I became nauseous. A bigger sized man was snoring next to me, was very inconsiderate when it came to my personal space. His head kept falling on my shoulder and he proceeded to snore loudly into my ear. (This man was sadly my father.)

We got to Uncle Danny’s house who we would be living with a little over a year, until we were able to get ourselves together in the new country. I had a Mayflower moment when we pulled into the driveway. I walked around the house that was almost three times the size of my home in the Bahamas. I looked out the window and took in something I failed to realize while I was in my fit of rage against my parents; I saw the beautiful colors the leaves displayed. I had never seen such a thing in person, only on television. It truly took my breath away. I ran onto our porch and I stood there and watched. I listened to the wind and the leaves as they carried on a small concert for me. Looking back on how I had acted throughout the day, I now realize how extremely childish I was when it came to new things. I now think situations like these are amazing and give me potential life long experiences and memories.

I laid in my new bed, (if you call a mattress plopped on the ground with bedding on it a bed…)  and pondered what level of crazy I had broke the surface of, for doubting my parent’s decision to make me move to such an exotic place.

As I walked out of the bedroom into the kitchen where my parents were, cooking breakfast with my uncle, I went up to them both and gave them a hug.

“What was that for?” my mom asked me in confusion.

“It’s my way of saying thank you.” I happily replied.

Getting out of your comfort zone and making changes in your life whether little or big, can be one of two things. It can destroy you, or it could be a new adventure in the making. Which one it turns out to be entirely depends on how you see it mentally, and how you handle it.