Advice for Surviving New Environments

Go all in. 

Don't resist the change—embrace it however you can. You don't have to leave the old environments entirely behind, but put in an effort to fully experience the new one. I moved from the US to Germany. I go to church in German, I immediately signed up for an intensive beginner German language class. I changed my phone settings to military time, changed my calendar to Monday-first instead of Sunday-first. Fahrenheit is the last hold-out, but I switch often to gradually acclimate myself. 

Let yourself unfold. 

Don't get caught up in who you were in previous environments. Interact with this new environment and let it change you, let yourself emerge anew. I crave different foods in different places. As soon as we cross the border into Sweden, I start craving Max hamburgers. I never remember they exist until that exact moment. I never miss them while we're in Germany or the U.S. or anywhere else; in those places I have entirely different cravings. 

Acclimate yourself to the feeling of being in an unfamiliar environment. 

Every new environment is new, but the feeling of being in a new environment is increasingly more familiar to me. We've been to church in so many different countries and languages, and though they're usually Catholic churches—and thus follow roughly the same structure—every place has slight differences. I used to get severely embarrassed if we stood up or sat down at the wrong time. Now I don't even flinch. If I stood up and everyone else remained seating, whoops, guess I'll just sit back down. 

Let yourself feel whatever it is you feel. 

You will feel dumb. You will feel rude. You will feel antisocial. Even if you are doing your absolute best, you will mess up now and again. Feeling bad but pretending you don't won't do you any favors. If I mess up and feel embarrassed or stupid, I simply have to feel it completely—either in that moment, or cache it for later and cry it out to my boyfriend. Doesn't matter if objectively it "wasn't a big deal" and "no one noticed or cared;" irrelevant! If you feel bad, let yourself feel bad. Then pick yourself up and try again. 

Learn to take feedback gracefully. 

I used to take feedback pretty poorly. It hurt my feelings and my ego, and I always took it personally, no matter how hard I tried not to. At some point, this got old; and it couldn't last very long if I wanted to swim-not-sink in the half-dozen new contexts I dropped myself in at once: I moved to Germany, I began living with my boyfriend, I was in my first relationship period, I was learning how to cook, I was learning how to drive stick-shift. Every day I was doing something completely unfamiliar to me, and every piece of feedback I received chipped away at my aversion to it. It still bristles a bit, but now I'm much better at receiving feedback, which helps me adjust to new situations much faster. 

Let your experience soften you, not harden you. 

I've been in so many new situations and environments, doing my absolute best to behave normally and politely, and there are just so many ways I can mess up or not know what's going on or accidentally be a bit impolite. I could simply never know all the ways to behave until I learn them, often the somewhat-hard way. And now I have so much more empathy for anyone existing in a context foreign to them—in fact if anyone at all, ever, behaves in a way that seems strange to me, I assume I'm missing part of their context that makes their behavior make sense.