I'm 18 years old, and I have never traveled outside of the continental United States. I've lived my whole childhood from within the borders of my own country, and have never had the privilege of stepping beyond. Until next week, when I will be traveling to London, Paris, and Barcelona, my first international experience and possibly the greatest adventure of my life thus far. Considering it's been two and a half years since I first heard about and started planning for this trip, it's crazy to think that in a few days it will be here, and to say that I'm excited would be a severe understatement. Of course, being the travel lover that I am, you could take me up the road to Pilot Mountain and I'd be stoked about it, but this is different -- I'll be traveling to a foreign country for the first time, and this will mark a new and thrilling chapter in my life.

Actually, scratch that: I'd say it's more accurate to describe this occasion as dividing my life into two significant halves. The first half was my first 18 years, and my status quo, cookie cutter small-town life, in which the only place that really existed in my world was the community which I grew up in, and the places in the close, familiar proximity around me. The second half is the one that will have an incomparable, transformative effect on my life- where the bubble in which I exist will grow from my home of Forsyth County, from North Carolina, from the United States, and from everything I've ever been capable of knowing, into something bigger than I have the ability to fathom. My worldview will begin to grow from the distorted, narrow one that living life solely in the U.S. has fed me, into a much more broad and ever-changing view of not just my own culture but of the cultures of others.

I'm no longer at the point in my life where I can get any real cultural immersion or understanding from being constantly surrounded by my own people and lifestyle. I read about other countries in books and on the Internet, and see footage of people in faraway places on TV, but being stuck in the U.S. has greatly limited what I can take away from this information. I have lived in a small, tight box, and and I have had nothing to experience except cardboard. In my last couple of weeks as someone who has remained in one country their whole life, I can honestly say that I am sick of being firmly planted in my own country and community, and can't wait to escape into a whole new world of discovery and possibility. Call me cliché, but it's true. There is very little left for me to learn from the familiar, and the only way that I can continue to grow as a full and well-versed global citizen and individual is to step out from the box that I've spent my entire childhood confined in, and venture into the world that, until now, has only really existed to me in spiral-bound pages and pixelated screens. I'm thrilled to start on this journey of world discovery, because constantly looking from the outside in is just leaves me frustrated and hungering for much, much more.

If we're being honest, the 2-week trip that I'm about to go on will just barely scratch the surface of everything out there that there is for me to see and discover. But as far as I'm concerned, it's a teaser for what the rest of my life will have in store, because I know as certainly as I know that the sky is blue that experiencing new countries will become an insatiable addiction for me. I'm ready to leave my tiny, personal world and explore the complex, diverse world that's beyond because if I didn't step outside of the box, how would I ever understand that there's more to the world than just cardboard?