Where to start when you don't know where to go.

8. WHY DID I DO THIS WITH MYSELF?

The way I learned how to speak English, the comfort zone, and the situations that life poses to us, resilience, and how to overcome challenges.

In Louisiana's winter, the temperature reaches minus five degrees Celsius. This ended up freezing my brain and causing the monsters created in my mind to speak louder than usual.

Each day that passed by reinforced the belief that I was unable to learn the language, that I was not capable or intelligent; in other words, I was not enough.

This belief confirmed my weakness and increased the disappointment of those who had believed in me. I had thrown myself into the pan with hot oil to pop like popcorn, and it obviously was hurting.

One of the few things that comforted me was knowing that the school bus had a stop four hundred meters from the door where I lived.

I was lonely, didn't speak the language, was living far from everything, had no contact with neighbors and friends because no one had the patience to talk to the foreigner who, besides being ashamed, did not say a word.

Evil thoughts dominated me, plagued me as the monsters grew on my mind:

— I should have listened to my mother; she was right ... What a stupid idea to think that living in another country is fun? Sincerely, I don't know if I want to stay here anymore. I can't take it; I shouldn't have paid attention to my imagination or those crazy dreams.

You know, following dreams is getting out of the comfort zone, and it hurts because it requires effort. The fact is that we must always choose a type of pain: stand still or do something.

I chose to do something to develop myself, and go everyday through a bearable pain of the learning process.

Whenever someone approached me, my first reaction was an uncontrollable will to translate what was being said. This technique delayed the entire conversation, as I searched for the meaning of just one word while losing all the rest of the context.

In my life, until that moment, I was living inside a safe box and go for the easiest and most comfortable solution, but at the same time, I used to feel like a scam, a fraud and then everything just got worse and worse.

The dictionary, which had become my best friend, did not fit with reality. Conversations always ended long before I started understanding what was going on, and with that, I felt isolated.

According to the saying, "in a winning team, players shouldn't be moved." I think this should be rethought. Why does everything have to be the way it has always been? Is that something right?

The news only exists because someone who's considered crazy decided to change the pattern. Therefore, we must rethink and understand why we do what we always do in the same way, traditionally.

It is part of the comfort zone, the fear of trying something different; after all, the old habit also works; the problem is that we don't ask ourselves if it is the most effective. With that, we make sure that everything remains as it always has been.

I continued using the traditional method with English learning, memorizing tables and rules, and faithful to the dictionary to know the translation. However, each day I was disappointed and frustrated seeing my thoughts going from bad to worse.

Why did I punish myself so much for doing this?

In that American neighborhood, there was no bus, except for the school bus. It looked like a ghost town, the sky darkened at four in the afternoon, and you couldn't even see a living soul walking through the neighborhood.

I cried while coming home after school. The days passed by, and the feeling was of inexplicable loneliness, alternating between thoughts of incapacity and doubt that increased my low self-esteem. I was a fraud, and I was deadly convinced of it.