Studying abroad is an exercise in logistics, ego, and the recalibration of who you think you are.
In Lady Bird, the pink-haired heroine declares she wants to go “where culture is,” as if culture were a gated community somewhere beyond Sacramento. The moment is played for irony. However, I thought I understood the urgency. I graduated around the same time the film came out. When I told my mother I wanted to study abroad, I wasn’t leaping out of a moving car, but the drama could be described as comparable. I was certain that staying in Manila—a city that is, socially, an undisputed fishbowl—meant stagnation.
Like Saoirse Ronan’s character, I chose a progressive liberal arts college on the States’ East Coast. It had a rigorous writing program and a stormy reputation for grassroots activism. I imagined I would be remade there, that I would become sharper, braver, more articulate. There, I would sip coffee by a dorm window while red and orange leaves fell outside, a private montage scored by self-improvement and a hefty enrollment deposit. There were moments like that. Fall did arrive on cue. Snow did as well. I had my solitary and cinematic Gilmore Girls scenes in the idyllic suburban diner and my main character moments on the Metro North platform.
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What I did not anticipate was how little transformation resembles a montage.
Moving abroad doesn’t sand down your worst instincts, nor does it delete insecurity or grant you a new personality. It amplifies what’s already there. The competitiveness of a cutthroat writing workshop doesn’t feel romantic when you’re the one whose work is dismantled. Activism isn’t an aesthetic spectacle when you’re learning the vocabulary in real time, careful not to misstep. You don’t automatically become the most interesting version of yourself simply because you’ve crossed an ocean.
I also underestimated how provisional plans are. Before leaving, there are high school friends you swear will remain constants. You designate each other emergency contacts and schedule weekly visits in group chats. For some, that continuity holds. For many, it thins. Time zones complicate intimacy and new routines crowd out old rituals. You build a new life, and building requires space. Sometimes, that space is made by shedding what once felt nonnegotiable.
I had thought I was leaving my past behind, that this was the point. To outgrow, to detach, to begin cleanly. But distance has a way of clarifying attachment. The food you dismissed as ordinary becomes specific and irreplaceable. The language rhythms you took for granted surface in your speech. You find yourself defending the very place you were so eager to escape. Reinvention and homesickness coexist; they are not opposites but twins.
There’s also the quieter grief of being unknown. Abroad, no one has context for your childhood, your family’s traditions, the shorthand that once made you legible. You can curate yourself more freely, but you’re also unmoored. Back home, you’re the one who left. Abroad, you’re the one from elsewhere. The in-between becomes permanent.
If I had known anything, I wish it had been this.
Moving abroad is less about becoming someone new and more about negotiating who you already are in unfamiliar terrain. It’s administrative as much as it’s romantic. Becoming secure involves visa paperwork, on-campus jobs, internship applications, currency conversions, budgeting allowance, and learning how to describe your country without turning it into a caricature. It’s thrilling and dull in unequal measure.
The girl who wanted to go “where culture is” assumed culture was singular and elsewhere. The one who eventually boarded the plane learned that culture is portable, that it lives in habits, in taste, in memory. You carry it, even when you’re trying to put it down.
