my beloved friends and i back in my hometown, Kota Kinabalu
being away from my hometown, although merely few thousand kilometres away, it has never made me miss home more. i mean, who would ever expect the life of a foreign student to be so hard. and this is especially for an introverted person like me. when i joined a new college for a Cambridge A-level course a year ago, back in Malaysia, the first few days had been lonely. but as soon as i met new friends, things change completely. having friends can really change things. for one, i no longer had to be afraid that if i ever miss any important points given by our lecturers for an assignment. cause my friends are always around to lend a helping hand. compared to what I'm going through now, perhaps those few days which i had thought was the worst times of my life, are actually just appetizers to my three course meal of living it hard.
being here, i was not only unable to make new friends. even the chance to talk was almost entirely zero. what? as if having a lecture in a lecture theatre of more than hundreds of people are not enough. everyone had to look like strangers too. and most of all, they all look very unapproachable, already adapted to their own group of friends and not willing to readjust themselves to anymore changes via external force. maybe i have always been a paranoid person. but knowing that doesn't change the fact that I'm afraid of approaching random strangers and just strike a conversation like i actually belong there with them. and that's just because I'm scared at the mere thought of them shunning me out once they hear me speak to them. so, i have chosen to keep quiet and remain absolutely invisible rather than having to embarrass myself by speaking up, only to find that my way of communication has been barricaded by a language-based barrier.
being an international student, i have only been exposed to cases of exclusionary language whereby local students or foreign students from other countries alienated me by communicating in ways that as a Malaysian, i could never understand. therefore, in order to convince myself that i have made the right decision not to approach random strangers in campus just for the sake of commencing a conversation, i had begun to chant "silence is still a way of communication" as my mantra almost daily. or rather, whenever I'm still in the boundaries of the campus.
plus, i have always been happy staying within my comfort zone, playing everything safe. but the moment i stepped down of the airplane the first night I was here, everything that i have worked so hard all my life to build, had crumbled down in a matter of seconds. i realised that i was no longer in the safe boundary of my comfort zone. and just like last year, i was once again forced to step out of the comfort zone i had only just begun to be grown attached to. and now, everything new is forcing their way into shaping a new zone. a zone i had secretly hoped to be as good as the last. however, only time will tell...
5 comments:
meeting new friends in a different place is already difficult, what more to introverts like us. good luck to you. :)
lol at "silence is still a way of communication." i remember in my first organizational communication lecture, the lecturer told us "no feedback is also a kind of feedback."
on a more related note, i totally agree that it's hard for foreign students, especially college students to make friends. local students tend to have their own clique. and i don't think it's because there's a language barrier between us and them. it's just that we are not confident enough to speak up
i understand what you are going through. being an international student myself, i can feel most relatable to your situation now. it is true that it's hard to go through the first few months of life abroad with all the new environment and all the adapting that we are required to do. i think it is perhaps of the differences in culture that as foreigners, we'll never be able to understand somethings that the locals do or say or why they act the way they do. true, that silence is still part of a communication... like what the previous comment stated, "no feedback is also a kind of feedback." but sometimes, it is also because of silence, that miscommunication is created, thus, creating barriers in communication
i know how it feels to be in a new place and feel like you have no friends. i guess everyone is just comfortable with who they usually hang out with and refuse to make any adjustment to it. thats why its so difficult to make new friends when you are at a new surrounding. just try to speak up to them and not bother what they think of you because someone's gotta make the first move sometimes. only if you give them a chance to get to know you, by approaching them, can the barriers in communication be lifted.... and silence will no longer have its effects of causing miscommunication between yourself and the new people you meet there.
i think barriers in communication are caused by the difference in cultures. sometimes, moving to places with different cultures, will most of the time affect us especially through time. therefore, i think it usually takes time for the barriers in communication to be lifted because it takes time to adapt ourselves to the cultures; however, different cultures usually do not co-exist because different cultures overrides each other.... and once we are used to one culture, it is hard for us to change to another, while still keeping our old ones....
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