Reflection 1
On Growth and Being Torn Away
Bergen is where I bloomed.
It’s strange to say that about a city wrapped in mist and rain, but it’s true. Beneath gray skies and beside green mountains, I became someone I hadn’t met before. Someone I had buried beneath grades and pressure and performance for so many years. In Norway, I let go of the obsession with being “good enough.” I stopped running and started being. I danced again. I laughed from my belly. I drew, not for a grade, but because something beautiful moved through me and asked to be put on paper.
There was space. There was quiet. There was time. Not to achieve but to live.
It’s not that everything was easy. Learning the language was hard. Feeling out of place was hard. But even in those moments, I was living in alignment with my values, my spirit, my pace. I wasn’t just surviving; I was growing. The kind of growth that doesn’t come from climbing ladders but from finally getting to breathe.
Leaving was a choice, and the right one, for now. But it still broke something open in me. Because I am not sure how to be whole without Norway. I don’t know how to carry all that I found there into a life that now feels too tight, too rushed, too full of pressure again. I miss it in ways I don’t know how to describe. Not just the mountains or the language or the culture, but the me I got to be there.
And I fear I lost her again when I left.