True life

This email was written by Jaymee Martin (a fellow Andorra Fulbright ETA this year and my closest friend here) to the ETA that will take her place next year. I share it with y'all on this blog because it is straight truth. I think this is why my blog has been so silent for the past few months. It's difficult to write hard truths without sounding negative and so instead of writing about this Andorran "adventure" which has felt at times like more of an Andorran aimless wander I was silent. Jaymee was able to perfectly articulate and sum-up the core of this Aventura en Andorra.

"Before anything else, here is the one thing that I really really want to emphasize. I have a theory that this is the single most important take-away lesson from the Fulbright. A couple of us have a sort-of inside joke wherein we refer to something called the "Fulbright Personality": slightly (or more than slightly) perfectionistic, typically "together" all the time and hesitant to lose control, highly organized, holds high standards for one's self, not accustomed to NOT excelling at something, etc. I mean, this is the reason you got this. (Side note- I think one reason I was an alternate is because I seem to be the LEAST like this of all the girls here, and my closest friend is the second least.) Here is the kicker of the Fulbright Andorra experience: it is impossible to not fail here somehow. Fulbright Personalities are not used to failure, and in fact, maybe we cannot even really handle it. But what I've learned is that you will fail here somehow: whether it be thinking you're a pro teacher and "got this" then going into the classroom and realizing that handling 10+ classes of a dozen or so Andorran teenagers for a year with no training and no accountability and no motivating factors and virtually no materials is impossible to pull off; or maybe you will realize that your language abilities aren't as good as you thought and that fulanito learned Catalan faster than you; or maybe you will feel constantly compared to the Lectora before you (I was called "Cathe" at least once a week for probably the first 7 months); maybe you'll have a great time here then get to the end of it and realize that you have no idea what you're doing with your life; or perhaps just that you'll be faced with the raw fact that the AMAZING EPIC FULBRIGHT ADVENTURE is actually no different from real life with hurdles and challenges and difficult parts and is not at all what you expected. I think that the more you become okay with the ways this failure manifests-- the more you learn how to handle it with self-acceptance and move through it and realize that you are still awesome and that it's okay to not be perfect all the time-- the more this experience will teach you. That is what I've been finding, anyway."