 It's easy to see this as like a trip, but it's really like a long-term moment for me. Deep for like, it's like 8 in the morning. So that's probably like someone sitting in bed like life is good. So he wrote out a hundred fortune cookies. So now I have fortunes in my raincoat pocket from my father for daily use I guess. Saying goodbye as an adult is really awkward because you're sort of at this point in life where like, it's not camp. You can't write each other letters and cry. You know, you have to compose yourself a little more when you grow up, which one could argue is maybe not the best thing. But it's just, that's what growing up is. That everybody you meet, you know, you can't really break down and cry and tell them how much they mean to you because that would just be a little, a little off-putting. There's only two times I cry on camera and one of them I was like deeply unhinged in the middle of the pandemic. And the second one was this night in April and I pulled out my camera and I don't really like to talk very much in the dorm. So it was like a silent little moment, but I knew that I really wanted to capture it because it was just, I'm going to cry. It was, oh my God, why am I going to cry? In like 2019, I started originally planning this trip and my dad was like cleaning out his office one day or something. I don't even know how, but he, he gave me this journal, this one right here. He gave it to me and he was like, hey, you know, you should use this for your study abroad. Like just, he was trying to get rid of it. You know, like it wasn't like a very sentimental moment. But the pandemic hit and I had gotten this before then and I was like, sort of say, I had saved this. I put this, I'd shelved it literally like the strip and I put it on a shelf and I was like, okay, I'm going to save this for when I go abroad. And I just remember like looking at it for months on my, the shelf in my room. And it started off as like a positive little affirmation for myself, like, oh, you know, one day it's going to be full of memories and of your study abroad. Like everything's going to work out. And then the months went on and then it became a year and I still didn't know if I was maybe going to come here. And then it was like practically over a year that I didn't know that this trip was going to happen. But I had been planning it for so long. I gave up. I gave up one day in the middle of the pandemic and I wrote a journal entry because I was like, it's so stupid that I'm hanging onto this journal because it's just, it's going to waste away on the shelf. I'm never going to go. Oh, this is literally what the first sentence of this journal says. I thought I was going to save this journal for Scotland, but I can't take it anymore. Yeah, so in February of 2021, I gave up. But yeah, then I, then everything started to work out. And I got here and I started writing everything down that happened to me. Things that are not for public consumption. They are just for me. And this March, I finished the journal. Yeah, I pulled out my camera and I just, I started crying because it was like when I started this, you could not have convinced me that day that I would have been there. And for me this year, like study abroad, it can be this very like, oh, you know, studying abroad, like all you do is, you know, travel and like eat good food and, you know, go to museums and like wear cute outfits. And like that's for like two, like for the couple weeks here and there. Like yeah, that is what it is. That is not what this journal is full of. This journal is full of people. People that maybe I met for a night. I mean, literally some of, sometimes the people that I met this year, I was so deeply broken before I came here. Like I can't, I can't even explain it. And I think a lot of us cannot explain it and we just didn't. Like I know that I've had conversations with people post this year. And I think at the beginning of the year, everybody was just sort of like, you know what, let's just not talk about it. Let's just keep plowing through and like keep our blinders on from what just happened in 2020, that bad stuff and keep moving forward. But like every single time that a person was nice to me, said something that like resonated, I wrote it down. I did. I wrote down a lot of wisdom from pretty much strangers in this journal. And that is, that has been the best part of this year. Like I, I just, I would give up all of my travel experiences, all those things to go back and talk to those people again. Even if it was just, you know, for a night, like some of the things that I talked about with practically strangers. Like, like it's so weird. Like some of the things they said like changed my life. And how do you, you can't say that to somebody. So that's why I'm making a video about it. I wrote about what it is like to say goodbye on Study Broad. This is literally what I wrote about saying goodbye. We had that awkward moment where you're like, oh, you know, if you're ever in blank city, come, come visit me. And you both know it probably won't happen that way. Who knows? Maybe it will. That would be great. Fantastic. But that's just not how life is a lot of the time. And that's okay. I'm so grateful anyway. Really, truly, I'm grateful for all of it. And I have to leave tonight. And it's not like this big epic goodbye. My goodbyes were all very simple. And here I am where I started. Literally. My journal is full.