Change. It can be scary whether it’s trying a new food, talking to someone you haven’t met before or going somewhere you’ve never been. Trust me, I get it. I’m pretty shy myself, and this summer I’m doing something I never thought I would do: I’m hopping on a plane and flying to Great Britain! Honestly, when I was first introduced to the idea, I thought “that’s crazy, who’s really going to spend weeks away from their friends and a family in a different country with an entirely different family?” Never in my wildest dreams did I think the answer to that question would be me.

The more I thought about it, the more real the idea started to become. It sort of manifested in my head and I couldn’t get it out, and I don’t really want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m scared out of my mind. I’m going to an entirely new place, staying with a family that I don’t know and on top of that I’m not going to see the people I love for weeks. I’ve never been gone from home for more than two weeks at a time and I’m really nervous about all the things that could go wrong. But there’s also this voice in my head that’s telling me that I need to stop being scared and remember why I wanted to do this in the first place. I want to step out of my comfort zone and experience something new. Traveling wasn’t really something I thought much about until a year or two ago when I spent a lot of my summer traveling the country to see my family. I fell in love with the feeling of being somewhere new and inviting, that feeling of being completely lost and not wanting to have it any other way. That same sense of adventure is exactly why I’m not as scared to go somewhere new. I’m more excited than anything else, and I think this feeling that I love so much is something that everyone should experience.

Now I’m not so naive as to think that adventure is for everyone, because it’s not, but I think that you have to try it for yourself before you really know. The first time I got on a plane, which was only a few years ago, I was terrified. Here I was, walking into this giant contraption, a stranger sharing my row, with nowhere to go if we started to go down. Of course I’d seen the movies where planes crash, and everyone dies. No survivors. I tried to hide my fear as best as I could and once the plane took off and my heart had risen out of my stomach, I couldn’t believe how happy I felt. I was flying like all the heroes in the movies I had seen as a little kid, and I was flying to a new land, somewhere I had never been before. When I made it off the plane, a part of me was disappointed that my time in the sky had come to an end, but another part of me was invigorated by how familiar, but also so different, the airport alone was. I went from cold Chicago to bright and sunny California in a matter of hours. Palm trees, the likes of which I had never seen before, were all around me, and that feeling surfaced, it took over all of my senses in a matter of seconds.

That feeling right  there that I can’t find the words to describe, that is why everyone should travel, just once, to somewhere new. Everyone should have the privilege to experience being somewhere different because it’s a feeling that I can’t explain, but only someone themselves can experience.