There is nothing harder than parting with my loved ones, knowing I won’t see them for another year. This is my experience at the end of every summer break, when we return to the US. And I am only one of many children of immigrants, who have the same experience as me.

  I grew up in Turkey, and never in my wildest dreams did I think I would move to Houston at 10 years old. Learning about the news of our move, I was nervous, excited, and scared all at once. I had wanted to take a trip to the United States my whole life, and now we were moving there. As a kid from Western Asia, I had grown up with very high expectations for this country where everyone had freedom and prosperity! Along with all the benefits of having moved, there were also aspects of moving that I wasn’t quite prepared for. 

  Being fully Turkish, I had lived a short drive away from all my family my whole life. My whole social circle, and support system was in Turkey, and it was challenging to build another one. Especially with a time difference of 9 hours, it was hard for me to keep in touch with the majority of my childhood friends. I had made new friends in Houston, but it was not quite the same since we had so many cultural differences. Our differences added to our friendships, but not having people around me from my culture also made me feel less like myself. Since some of my thoughts and beliefs were things my friends couldn’t relate to, I stopped sharing them as much. It was also hard to keep in touch with family. As a teenager and my hobbies, and preferences change very often, and even my closest relatives don’t know me as well as they used to. Though the fact that I couldn’t stay as close with family members should make sense, being continents away from them, it was something I never could’ve imagined. 

  From many viewpoints, I think it has been vital to the trajectory of my life to have spent some of my teenage years in another country. But each time I have to say good-bye to my grandparents, each time I part with my friends, there's a part of me that wishes things would’ve gone differently. That we would’ve stayed.