Daily writing prompt.

What experiences in life helped you grow the most?

I would say that the experience of living in Stockholm, Sweden, helped me grow the most as a human. I was there from 2007 until 2009, and lived in a quiet city neighborhood called Gärdet. I had a Swedish personnummer and bank account, and attended the Swedish For Immigrants course. It was a very unique time in my life, and though there were good and bad moments, it helped shape my understanding of the world, and even gave me a broader insight to American culture when I returned home.

I was adopted as an infant while my parents were living in the Philippines, and I have had a passport ever since then. After my adoption, we moved to Bangkok, Thailand, and then a few years later, we moved again to the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where I grew up. My Mom lives in Mexico half the year, and I always wanted to experience life in a different country too, but I felt more drawn to Europe than anywhere else.

I gained a lot of confidence during my time in Sweden. I showed up not really knowing what to expect, and then immediately suffered from information overload. It was difficult to find new friends, and my first winter there was dark and depressing. Eventually though, I managed to build a social network through the game development community, and my days were a lot brighter and less overwhelming. Living and working in Sweden helped teach me how to persevere and adapt better with change.

When I came home to the United States, I was determined to go back to college and pursue a degree. The work that I did in Stockholm as a Quality Assurance Games Tester certainly helped prepare me for the Software Development industry, which I have been active in since 2013, although I am on a career break at the moment to help care for my Dad.

Living in a foreign country helped me grow the most by exposing me to a different culture and allowing me to gain a lot of perspective on my own mix of influences and personal observations. It has also made me feel more appreciation and gratitude towards my parents, both biological and adoptive. My biological parents were so poor that they didn’t have names or birthdays. When my biological Mom surrendered me, she could not have known what my fate would be, but she knew that I would have more opportunities in life without her influence. My adoptive parents were simply in the right place and going through the challenges of infertility, and were so overjoyed when their social workers matched them with a baby girl.

Today I am a proud naturalized American citizen, I graduated from college, and I worked as a Software Engineer and Software Engineering Manager for one of the largest Defense contractors in the world. I am very glad to have added the “Live in Sweden” chapter to my life story, and look forward to returning there very soon to see what has changed.