I talked to Trevor the first week I was on REU here. Well talked is not an exact description of what was I doing. I complained to Trevor about how much I missed everyone and how lonely I was here. He said: Lonely is a part of REU! You will get to learn about yourself. No large group of friends to cloud your thoughts, just you. I was skeptic about it. I learned all I needed in 3 days I was away from Michigan. All I wanted was just for this REU to be over, so I could go back to my friends. Now it has been almost three weeks. And these three weeks have been great. I sure do miss everyone a lot, but I did learn a lot about myself, my ex-relationship with Shane and my friends.
First and I think most important thing I learned was that I am my own person, or I may have just remembered it. (I guess all girls say something like that after break up, haha). But seriously, up until May 25th, everything I was doing, I was doing with Shane, unless he hated it, like shopping. I wouldn't even do anything unless I talked to him before. It wasn't that he would have a problem with me doing my own thing, it was that I didn't want to do it. Here it is all different. I get to do things that I want to do, pretty much when I want to do them. I have tried a lot of things that I would have never tried back in MI. I fell in love with rock climbing, went into caves and took a fitness class. I started RUNNING. Seriously Anya and running never got along before. I ran 5.5 miles! I guess I could have been running with Shane back in MI, but I always felt like I would slow him down or disrupt his experience in some way. Here it is just me and my ipod. And yea it took me an hour to run those 5.5 miles, but I did it.
Second was that I am not as shy as I always thought myself to be. I met a bunch of new people just couple weeks ago and maybe it is just that we live together, but I did feel comfortable about them from day two. Amazingly enough it took me almost a semester to start feeling comfortable around my friends from home (Trevor, Anjan, Todd, Courtney, Shawn).
Third is that I love my friends from home. They have been very supportive during my first couple weeks, which would have been so much harder without them. I have enjoyed so much our long phone/chat conversations, because I felt like I was participating in some way in their lives, while I had them to tell about my adventures here. I miss all of them a lot and my friends, and Simba are the reason why I still want to go back to MI, from all this fun here.
Those of you who know me well, probably know that I am extremely self-conscious. I always have something wrong with my body, my hair, my face whatever. But I think I found the way around it. I started to work out, so now I feel like I look better every day and I decided that it is time for me to start getting haircuts regularly. I have been quite satisfied with the way I looked in the past couple weeks and I am extremely happy about it. (I know it is not about the outside and the true beauty is on the inside, but outside is important as well).
I believe those are the important things I learned for now,
Thank you, Trevor,
Have a good day, whoever reads it.
