Making big decisions in life.

At some point when I was little, I came to the conclusion that people were not listening to me and I felt that in my family it was more of everyone for themselves. Thus at a young age, I started to make decisions for myself. Maybe you can imagine that this did not turn out always great.

Fast forward, at the end of high school, I had to make a choice where to study. An interesting process was happening in my mind at the time. I knew I want to leave my parents' place and go to study in a different city. I also did not know what the hell I want to study so I went with copying my mother's path, which was Marketing and Communication. I had no idea what it is but it seemed OK at the time.

Looking at this now, I see that I was trying to make a decision for myself while taking an already made decision from my mother. Which is not really making a decision for yourself to my mind. It is more of I am choosing a walked path because I have no idea which path to take.

This leads to me applying for a Dutch university and flying off to the other side of Europe to live alone and start my "adult life". At the time it was very easy for me to do all these things. Pack my bags, unpack, shop for groceries, etc. I did not sit down to think or absorb. I was just moving. And I did that for about 2 years. Just moving and having a breakdown where I cry alone in a room every now and then.

In my mind, I was living the dream and I liked it. I did not want to go back to my home country, I wanted to stay in the Netherlands and create the life I always wanted. Some of my Bulgarian classmates at the time returned to their homes and quit foreign life. I could not understand them for the life of me. Why would they want to go back? What is better there than here?

This is me in 2014, in my first weeks in the Netherlands

After about 2 years of the "freedom" feeling, I started to understand why people were going back. These 2 years, I was wearing the "pink glasses" which made everything look great and much better than what I was used to.

I don't know what made me take the "pink glasses" off. Maybe it was the numbers on my bank account that I did not understand, the feeling that I am missing out on important information because I don't speak the native language, or was I entering a close to "quarter-life crisis"?