Personal Narrative: Moving To The United States

What happens is not the first matter of concern. How you react to the event is the key to future success. Events and the environment are not ours to control. Reactions can be, however, easily changed by our efforts. I learned this from one failure I experienced which I would never want to repeat again. The last year of my stay in the United States, I became depressed. I did not have friends that I could laugh heartily with. I did not do well in my classes. Although I pushed myself to do so, I did not want to go to school. I wanted to stay at home and be alone. Everyone else’s life looked bright and perfect. I blamed the environment for this situation. Living in a foreign country is what this is all about, I thought. I wanted to

I begged my parents to make my moving day three months early. As soon as my parents accepted my request after long discussions, I picked up my phone, e-mailed my friends to tell them that I was coming back, and discussed on what day we could meet up. I was very excited about the whole new life I could make in Japan and imagined how it would be every night in my head. When I moved back to and went to school in Japan, however, the situation did not change at all. I went back to school I used to go before moving to the United States, and I was glad to see familiar faces of my classmates. I first felt that I finally came home and this was the place I belonged to. However, my best friend and I were placed in different classes. Having experienced a depression, I had became withdrawn and afraid to talk to new people. Again, I did not have friends while my best friends seemed to enjoy hanging out with her new classmates. Same cycle began. I missed my Japanese friends when I was in the United States but now missed my friends in the United States when I was in Japan. I was used to be taught in English so could not understand what the teachers are talking about in Japanese. The problem had to be solved but language, which I thought was the cause of it, did not seem to be related. I took a time to think through. As I started to calmly analyze the issue I was facing, I realized that it was me who was not trying hard enough to change. It was not because I couldn 't speak English that I didn 't have many friends. It was because I resisted talking to them myself. It was not because I couldn 't understand English that I got bad grades on biology class. It was because I didn 't study hard enough. I began to see all possibilities that I could have done to change my life better. One failure is that I did not work hard enough to change the situation and the other is that I escaped from