The end of September closes my 9th month here in Spain. Now that the majority of my time here has passed I've been doing some reflecting.
Coming to Spain and studying here has been fun but harder than I expected. I always try to be positive like thinking that progress is inevitable as long as I keep making an effort, and I have and I'll continue to keep on trying, but the truth is it has been difficult...and progress, I feel, has been really slow for me.
I thought I was a strong dancer when I left California but I've sort of had to start learning everything all over again. And now I feel like my dancing is really sloppy. I realized this in my 1st three months here that my technique and my style needed a lot of cleaning up - and changing old bad habits can be a struggle. Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm doing things the new way or the old way. I'm not sure my improvement is even noticeable yet. I'm not down-in-the-dumps or anything, I've definitely fixed some things - like my turns/my footwork technique - but I feel like I'm at the beginning stages of learning again and the road ahead seems so long.
As for learning a new language, this has been even harder. I also came up against something in the process I hadn't expected; the fact that my identity is so attached to my ability to communicate. I'm a people-person and without my ability to talk freely, like my jokes and my tidbits of information, I didn't feel like me. My identity, what I like about myself and what I want to share with others, doesn't come across without being able to speak the same language. I like making connections with people, I like exchanging ideas, but without being able to speak spanish here, those things got sort of lost. Which is how I felt most of the time here. So I would always default back to English, the language I was most comfortable with. And now I'm left with only 3 months left and I still feel my ability to speak spanish is not as good as I had hoped it would be.
My self confidence and my ability to push myself in uncomfortable situations has really been tested while I've been here. For some reason, when I thought of myself living in Spain before I left, I didn't imagine it would be like this. I didn't expect that it would shake me up inside so much. I imagined that I would grow and leave Spain after a year feeling really confident. But instead I think I've been humbled. But that's growing too - it's just different than what I expected a year ago when I started my planning.
Officially only 3 months left until I return home, and I have a lot of work to do.
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