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Coming Out of a Protected Shell
Coming Out of a Protected Shell
- by Sobia Aslam
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A friend told me a few days before I was to leave for USA that it will not hit me that I will be going so far away till I am sitting in the airplane, ready to take off. How right he was. I used to get an overwhelming feeling, a strange twist at the pit of my stomach during the last few days before I was to leave but the actual finality of it did not hit me till I was sitting in the plane, looking around me and thinking 'this is it!'. I don't think at that point there was a single cell in my body, which didn't want to go back, to take one last look at my family, to hug them once more. I did not want to go to America at that single moment and yet I knew that I had to take the final step and not look back, no matter how much I wanted to.
People assured my parents I was just going for a year and that they need not worry
because time has an uncanny ability to pass by in a flash. Yet, despite the assurances, I
know it was a very difficult decision for them to let go of me, send me to a land so
foreign and so different from Pakistan. Leaving them was one of the hardest things I have
done so far and it is now that I am on my own that I realize what all my parents have
done for me and what all I took for granted, thinking I would always have it.
I didn't have a first impression of USA because I had been here before, but never alone
and never as a student. Things seemed very different with this new air of surprisingly
unwanted independence. I craved for the first few days to go back to my protected shell,
to not live alone in my apartment, to not have to do everything on my own, make my own
decisions and try to find my own way around the campus of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Laundry and cooking was never a big deal back home, I didn't have
to clean my room, I didn't even have to drive if I didn't want to.here I don't have a
choice and I know that if I don't do it, no one will. I realize now that the protective
covering that most children in Pakistan have only takes three or four days to wear off
when you have to clean your own bathroom and do your own grocery shopping.
America will, if nothing else, instill in me the ability to make decisions independently of
anyone, and will teach me to go out and just do whatever it is that I want to do because
no one will stop and do it for me...I am the one who has to take the steps forward, slowly
and cautiously at first and boldly and confidently as time goes on.
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