What I Learned About Moving Away

It was October 1998 when an infant was born in New Delhi, India to a relatively unwealthy family. Two years later, this family made a migration from India to the opposite side of the planet, in the United States. The young infant alongside this family was no other than myself, which meant that I was going to grow up in a society much unlike that of which my parents and ancestors grew up in, a culture that I did not easily fit in socially, mentally, and even physically. Even though my foreign background has caused much of a struggle throughout my life, it did allow me to learn a few but critical lessons that I simply cannot thrive without.
The first essential lesson I learned struck me just as my background was exposed to my earliest classmates.

Being the single figure of Indian descent in most of my classes, I looked, talked, and acted very differently from my peers, a perfect recipe for harassment. I was constantly told that my strange identity made me incapable of achieving my goals, the biggest of which was to finish elementary school with a top grade average award. Although I was consistently discouraged towards doing so, I still achieved it because I realized one simple thing: I am the only person that can determine whether or not I reach my goals. Nobody else can.