Some experiences change you, and I have a feeling I’ll be telling this story for the rest of my life. It is genuinely insane, and I’m not even sure how to feel about the whole thing. Just last week it felt like I was unpacking all of my things and meeting my roommates for the first time, and now I’m all packed up, waiting to leave for the airport. But I do have to admit I am ready to be home. Being abroad for an internship is an amazing experience that I hope everyone gets the opportunity to do, but being so far away for so long can start to take a toll on you. I was starting to feel it this last week since the only thing I had on the schedule was the flight back to Greencastle, Pennsylvania. I began to get tired and look forward to being back home and sleeping in my own bed. I was looking forward to waking up in the morning to my dog climbing over me after my parents decided I slept in for too long; looking forward to the mental reset of sitting on the couch at night with my family to watch a movie. I was getting excited to put in a long hot day of landscaping just to come home and talk to my friends about everything going on in life over a game of poker. But honestly, the only thing that I really miss about home is the people. My youth group leader used to tell me that he could pack his whole life into a single Sudan, at least until he got married and had his son, and I understand that more than ever. Sometimes the people around you are all that you need in your life to truly feel whole and at home.

I wish I could say everyone understood that, but often people define their lives in strange ways. For example, I take pride in being a Christian; I love everything that comes with it. I love the community, the job, the practice, and most of all the love and compassion within a church community. But if I asked others to become Christian, they might look at me like I have 3 heads, which kind of bothered me for a while. Why would someone not want that for themselves? Why would someone not want to be a part of something so fulfilling, something I hold a lot of my success in.

I didn’t start to think about it until I got the prompt for this week’s blog post, which urged me to talk about the different ways people define success, whether it is personally or through an industry point of view. Now, in the United States, throughout the field of healthcare, and many other fields, a lot of employers will look at your education and degrees to define how successful a student you are. They then use that information to predict how successful an employee you could become, which turns into those same people comparing your yearly ‘output’ to company standards to define your own success. This happens all over the field of healthcare and keeps its theme in Ireland as well. So, for a lot of people, their success is derived from the validation of everyone around them.

Now there are a lot of subtle differences between the US and Ireland when it comes to defining success, and most of it comes from the people, not the industry. Working at St. John of God’s can be a challenge. No day is the same, pay isn’t great, and catering to the needs of people with severe ID while attempting to orient them into an independent lifestyle is no joke. But for some reason, the employees there stay. Not because they have nowhere else to go, but because they love it. They love the work, the environment, and the impact they have on the people around them. And that’s what I think success is all about. Not meeting company standards, not your credibility, not the money, but the people. The people you share laughs with; the people you cry with, and the people that make you smile. That’s what success should be.