19 Dec Self care as an exchange student

A lot of things change in your life when you go on exchange, a lot of new people and places enter your life and if you’re a kinda sensitive person life myself, that can be challenging. I’ve already talked about the whole “sharing a room” experience, but there is a lot more too it.

At the beginning, when I was here, I felt like I really really had to go to all of the social events, both because I wanted to meet people but also because I didn’t want to be the only one not socializing. But after a while I was just so drained, because I don’t fare very well with being around people all of the time.

I’m quite introverted and need a lot of “recovery” time after being social and back home I am used to having that time. Here, however, it was different. And after a while with parties and school starting and homework, I just started to feel a bit burned out.

I started not going to all of the IEEC events, not because I did not want to spend time with people but because I had to prioritize spending some time just by myself. That felt good, but then this creeping fear that I was missing out on everything crept up on me. I was struggling with that for a while, actually being happy with not being overly social while at the same time feeling like I ought to be making more out of my exchange experience.

About halfway through my stay here that changed because I realized that the exchange experience is going to be different for everyone, and if being social and going out wasn’t making me happy, then that was not what I needed to do.

I found quite a lot of peace with that and with that knowledge I was able to consciously choose, when I wanted to go out and be social and then prioritize that, while also not feeling guilty for all of the times where I didn’t wan’t that.

A lot of TGIT Thursdays for me was spend at home in my bed watching Netflix, because that was what I really needed to do. In the end, no exchange experience is going to be the same, and you really need to do what makes this time amazing for you