Where Did My Excitement Go?
PGS: Policy Task Force on U.S.-China Relations
Tasmiah, one of the Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares her experience abroad during the May 2025 travel period. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
For the past few weeks, everyone’s been asking me, “Taz, are you excited for Italy?” and of course I’d respond “Yes!” but everytime I responded, it felt more like an automatic exchange. The kind where someone asks “How are you?” and you respond “Good!” without even thinking about it.
Truth be told, I haven’t been that excited for my trip. For the past few weeks, the madness that is the end of the school year has been really bogging me down. All the stress and chaos surrounding finals, moveout, and summer internships has been clouding my brain to the point where I haven’t had much space to even think about my trip, let alone be excited for it.
However, I recently got an unexpected reminder that helped me shift my perspective. I have this personal tradition where I write emails to myself and schedule them to be delivered two years in the future. A few days ago, one of those messages landed in my inbox. It was a note from senior year high school Taz. She was getting ready for graduation at the time, and in the email, she talked about how excited she was to go to college, to travel, and to study abroad one day.
Reading that email felt like the first sunny morning after a week of rain. It cleared the clouds of my stress and gave me a very important reminder: I’m living out the life that younger versions of me dreamed of living.
I forgot how excited I used to get in high school, fantasizing about the day that I would get to hop on a plane to go study abroad. Now, I’m gearing up to go on my second PGS trip, and I’m not even appreciating it as much as I should. Somewhere along the way, I got so caught up in worrying about the future that I forgot to appreciate the present—a present that younger me couldn’t wait to experience. That realization grounded me more than anything else could have.
After reading that email, I made a conscious effort to not let all my anxieties take over and to be more grateful for the opportunities I have right now. I started to find joy in the little things: planning the trip, bookmarking places I wanted to visit, prepping TikToks, and curating my outfits. Those moments helped me reconnect to the excitement I’d been missing.
The night before I left, I packed my bags and felt that same feeling I used to get before the first day of school—when your outfit is laid out at the foot of your bed, and you’re so excited that you can’t sleep. That feeling came back, and it made me so happy.
Now I’m sitting at the airport, surrounded by the friends I’ve made in this class, and I genuinely can’t wait for what the next week holds. If someone were to ask me now, “Taz, are you excited for Italy?” I’d still say yes—but this time, I’d really mean it 🙂
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