Confessions of a Gata gringa

Over the weekend I completed the first of 12 months living in Chile! At this point, maybe 1% of my experience has been written down, sent in an email to a select few.
​This means, you and I have a lot of catching up to do!

The objective for this post is to establish who this website is for and to make a confession. (If you’re looking for something that’s more rosy and rambunctious in typical Ryan fashion, something that’s all smiles, maybe come back for a later post.) So… La Gata Gringa has two purposes; the first is to have a raw unedited diary and the second is to share my experience. Naturally, these two purposes are at odds with each other. It requires 2 spoonfuls of vulnerability to serve the former while the latter binds my hands into what is socially acceptable. My biggest fear has always been that someone I love will see past the smiles-- that I will accidentally reveal my depression, my twisted roots, my anxiety, my anger, my negativity, my lonely-- and that they will denounce me out of exhaustion. After all, you love me for my energy and enthusiasm, right? My fear has made me a perfectionist in self-expression. Therefore, I confess to you that this desire for perfection is what has prevented me from writing in the last month.  

But I am reclaiming the site!!! I’ve chosen to cast aside my insecurities! I’m diving into the deep! My fear is just a lonely lie.

My new goal is to type out (however brief) what I did each day with its successes and failures, frustrations and friendly faces.  Then every 2 weeks I will release a summary, like a tldr version of the important events and emotions. This summary will also be an exercise in consistency; as I become more assimilated into chilean culture, as my English neurons start to fail me, as I fall further down the rabbit hole, I increasingly need an anchor, a reminder, of who is me. We start now. 

Thank you for being supportive :)  

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