4 Lessons I Learned Living Alone in a Foreign Country

Solitude doesn’t have to equal loneliness. While being alone can feel uncomfortable at first, it offers the opportunity to tune out distractions and rediscover yourself.

I left my home country in July of 2014 to go to India for my civil engineering undergraduate degree. I finished my course in 2018 but stayed an extra year and a half until January 1st, 2020 to “find myself.”

The first 3 years were easy since I had gone with my sister but when her 3-year course was done and she left India, the number of people I knew started shrinking very fast.

By the beginning of 2019, all my friends had left and returned to their home states and I was left with a few “Hi friends.”

With no family and friends and the fact that I was now no longer part of the university meant that there was no way, I was going to rely on the university for anything.

Gone were the hostel days and all that comfy stuff that comes with being within university walls.

I had to rent for the first time in my life from people who did not understand my language and with very little use of the English language. (A lot of them where I lived preferred speaking in Tamil or Hindi).

I walked and searched for apartments where many people were not willing to rent out their apartments to me because I was an African and those that were willing to rent theirs to me always charged me triple or quadruple the normal amount.

The best deal I got was someone who charged me double and that was the best feeling ever.

I thought that my lessons were done and it would be smooth sailing from then on but those 1.5 years gave me the most valuable lessons many of which had been re-reoccurring themes in my previous 3.5 years.

These are 5 of those lessons.

Having options is not always the best way to solve your problems.

Options are great. Knowing that if one plan fails, you have another plan and then another feels good. For me, it used to give me comfort to the point at which I never had to lose sleep over my problems.

When I was on my own though, without any options apart from only one plan and sometimes no plan at all, it taught me how to really never lose sleep over problems. There were several times I went 9 to 10 days without food at a time and the first time that happened, I almost lost my mind.

I had paid all the rent but did not have any money left for food and so I used to only boil water and drink that with a teaspoon of sugar.

The first time was not great. It was painful. I got dizzy most of the time and the feeling of hunger was so intense that it even ceased to exist and when I started eating food after that long, it was very painful for my throat.

Going through those days of hunger with a fear that I would starve to death any minute was one of my biggest fears but the first time I got to the other end without starving, it made me realize that it was fine by me to go a few days without food which would buy me time to work on my freelance projects to make money.

This helped me avoid getting into extreme debt. This was important to me because I was paying Rs.21000~$300/month in rent alone and my only stable income stream was Rs.3000~ $50/month. The rest of the money always came from rare freelance projects but it was always just enough to cover rent and a few days of food.

This was the case for most of my first 9 months of renting and when that time was done, I was the one who received Rs. 21000 back from my landlord as a refund of my security deposit. He was so grateful that I had been the “best” tenant he had ever had.

Many people who had cheaper rent prices than me and had so many friends and family in the area had accrued so much debt in rent alone.

They had options and this somehow made them complacent.

Safe choices that rely on other people should always take second place.

Risky options that involve betting on yourself should come first.

Safe options always give you a soft cushion to fall onto when things go wrong but they come at a price most often one that takes a toll on your overall happiness.

For most people, betting on yourself is considered a risky option. The impractical, irresponsible, crazy, and so on option.

When it came to me, I tested both(mostly because I had no choice, to be honest). My safe option landed me a Rs.3000 job but it involved me working for 10 hours a day. It was during my safe option days that I had the most hunger stretch periods.

When I decided to bet on myself and quit that job to focus full time on freelancing, I started noticing a lot of changes. I had only one hunger stretch which lasted about 5 days or so.

There is power untold in the human will and the best way to unlock it is not by meditation or yoga. At least in my experience, I have found that those things are good but the answer to unlocking that power is betting on yourself.

Your WILL can never let you down, trust me. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, genius, talent, and so on are unlocked only when you bet on yourself.

You can never let yourself down. Other people can and will let you down sometimes but not you. Most especially if whatever you want is something considered as great or nearly impossible, there is only one person that you can bet on to get it for you. YOU.

When it comes to issues of your self-development, you should always bet on yourself or at least have some level of betting on yourself. This is something that you should not assign to a safe option.

People do not hate you.

Most often than not, they are afraid of what they don’t know.

You will notice that what you consider hate can quickly be transmuted into love and what you thought of as love quickly turned into hate. Love and hate are varying degrees of the same thing.

What seems like hate is not absolute but it's mostly circumstances that make us interpret certain interactions as hate or love.

But this does not mean that someone who hates you cannot do harm to you. They certainly can. This is just to say that reasons why they hate you can be and often are transmuted into reasons why they love you.

In my first year, a girl I had a crush on talked to everyone but me. I used to think that she hated me but in truth, she was scared of me. We are now very close friends after another friend of mine told me this and I made efforts to make her less afraid of me.

Many years later, I found myself in another “hate” circumstance.

There was a landlord I wanted to rent a house from. I had gone with my Indian friend who had better command of Hindi and when they spoke, he (the landlord) agreed thinking that it was my friend(Vikram) who needed the room.

When Vikram told him that I was the one going to stay there, he quickly said no while backing away as if pushing off an omen. I was embarrassed and sad that someone would treat me this way without ever knowing even my name.

Many months later as he was talking to the other landlord that I had rented from, he was told that I was one of the best and most trustworthy people to rent an apartment to. He came to my room and started apologizing for how he had treated me several months earlier and explained that he was scared of foreigners because he thought it would be too much responsibility to rent out a room to us.

Initially, I had branded him as racist. Even though his apology did not change what I thought of him then, it taught me not to be too hard on people that hate me.

I had countless experiences that qualify as racist but in most cases, people were totally unaware that what they were doing or saying to me was racist and over time, I learned to educate them if possible or just let them be.

It gave me an overall appreciation for humanity and an understanding that people regardless of age will do dumb stuff. You just have to tread carefully and not be too harsh in judgment so as not to fall victim to any violent expression of someone’s ignorance.

When making money, pennies will come before the bills.

Have you ever seen people who seem to make money easily? For example, some people can make $10,000 in a day while others will struggle to make $1000 in a year.

For me, this is more of a belief than a fact. I do not have statistical evidence but rather an observation in my own life that has formed this belief. It may be wrong but it’s a lesson that aids my growth and has served me well so I felt it would be wrong not to add it.

In early 2020, Shelby Church made a video on how much money you could make from Medium. She interviewed medium writers and decided to give it a try herself.

Within a month, she had made more than $5000 from one article that took her an hour to write.

For her, it seemed easy that she could do this and make that much.

Even though that was great money for her in terms of CPMs compared to youtube, she did not become a full-time writer.

Other people followed her though. Including me lol. Many of us never made more than $2 in our fast months. But many still made more than $100.

This had been something I had been observing several years before and it was not the first time this was happening.

Whereas some people can seem to make money easily, I learned that they all got there by a continuous process. First, they earned very little(which I have called pennies) and then they started making it “big”(which I have called bills). The whole journey filled with work to get them from pennies to bills.

I have seen so many medium writers post articles about how they made thousands of dollars in a given month. Truth is most of the advice is the same and I have seen so many people applying it to the dot and still not making thousands. (Speaking from experience).

My own experience with Medium has been “slow” so far.

In my first month, I wrote about 31 articles and made $1.40.

In my second month, I wrote 20 articles and made $6.20

In my third month, I wrote 7 and made $5.70

In my fourth month, I wrote 10 and made $7.79

Do you see any pattern there?

Yes, I understand that these are not great and when you subtract all the tax and fees, I have made about $4.58 for the entire time on medium.

One would say that I am one of the failing writers on medium but I choose to focus on growth. At one time, I could not make even $5 with all the writing I did. But now with a third of the writing, I can make almost twice my former impossible $5.

And another thing I know is that these growths are not linear but rather exponential.

This has also taught me a few things.

1. Do not try to go for the bills before you learn to make and keep the pennies. Like in walking, you will first crawl, walk, and then run. Patience and persistence.

2. Focus on your own growth and seek ways to improve that rather than envy other people’s growth.

3. Money is energy. It ebbs and flows in proportion to how well you attune yourself to it. The higher the abundance you think exists, the more of it you’ll get. Attuning yourself is not some mystical practice that you should do but rather the work you need to put in. The more you put in, the more firm your beliefs will get in the fact that there is an abundance of money and you deserve some of that.

This belief is stronger in some people and weaker in others depending on several life circumstances but it can always be transformed. This is why someone can start blogging today and make more money in a month compared to someone who has been at it for 1 year plus and more.

But anyone can improve their attunement to it if they are not yet there through doing work which in turn reinforces those beliefs of abundance.

I don't want to go any further lest I turn spiritual here.

Therefore, do not waste your time in envy and self-pity and just get yourself to where you desire through doing the work you need to do.

These are my lessons and as much as they may help some people, they won’t help everyone. If they make you curious, however, try to implement them in your own life and see which ones serve you if any.