Heartbreak in Lhasa

Many things come with traveling and living abroad. Being away from your loved ones and what you are comfortable with, new settings, new cuisine, new customs, and new stresses. And undoubtedly has a personal crisis of sorts, whether it be family, injury, or homesickness. And I had such a crisis which was completely unexpected (as they usually are). I always felt that when you study abroad you have the opportunity to be whoever you want to be in the new place, whether it's reinventing yourself or being an extreme version of your personality at home. And what happened to me was a kind of combination of the two. For the purposes of this entry I'll call what happened a "personal loss," because the person I once knew, the one I loved dearly, you could say is now gone. We gave all the promises people could give and seemingly things were going to be fine but they weren't. Sadly and most difficult for myself is that I still see this person, a ghost of her former self, lost in this new setting, wondering and looking for happiness in all the wrong places. I always say you should do what makes you happy but sometimes that seems like the hardest thing to do in the world.