Not having a friendly face for 4,000 miles was the least of Ella Ferns’ concerns when she arrived at Residence Candia, a 3-star hotel-turned-student apartment in residential Rome.
Growing up in a military family prepared her for this moment. Adapting to someone else’s stomping grounds came naturally, and Ferns’ survival strategy to chameleon into a different version of herself on cue had undeniable success. But when Ferns left home yet again to study abroad in Rome, something was different. Packing her bags for her 12th move in 20 years, Ferns made a choice. This time, she would try being herself on for size and, to her avail and slight surprise, find good faith friendships where she least expected and the courage to fly away home over the most uncharted waters yet: her future.
Starting fresh at a new school and making friends with kids who knew each other from the sandbox would turn most young people’s stomachs upside down. But Ferns is not most people. She was less than two years old the first time her family settled in someone else’s suburbia and quickly became accustomed to a constant cycle of new faces and places, giving her the chance to try on different versions of herself and decide who would fit in best in her new environment.
“I had the opportunity to kind of change if I didn’t like how things went the last time, or what I was like last time,” Ferns said. “It was a whole opportunity for me to try something new, and it was a whole progression to find who I really was and who I wanted to be.”
As she decorated new bedrooms and settled into different friend groups, Ferns knew in the back of her mind that soon enough, she would pack her bags and find a new place to call home. The constant uprooting discouraged her from pursuing long-term friendships and shifted her priorities to having the most fun possible wherever she was. And for a while, the lack of deep connections was okay. The constant change made her quite adaptable, and no matter where she was, Ferns was often the friendliest and most in vogue person in the room.
But eventually, she saw through herself.
“I was social, but not like someone that was fully, truly me,” Ferns said. “I was always looking to impress people.”
As the day of her move to Rome drew near, Ferns, or “Fernsy,” as her friends call her, decided that when she arrived in the Eternal City, she would let her guard down and be herself. After two decades of trying on different versions of herself, packing authenticity in her carry-on bag brought people and places she could not have anticipated.
“Going abroad was the first time I didn’t feel the need to reinvent myself,” Ferns said. “I took the opportunity to go abroad, be myself, and really just take myself away from the college pressures and the social pressures, I should say, of just being someone that everyone else expected me to be and who they thought I was. I felt like it was the first time that I could truly just be myself.”
Were the friends she made abroad in the kinds of social circles she usually entertained? Not exactly. But the best part, Ferns said, was the gamble of living with a random roommate and finding friendships that felt meant to be, rather than expected.
“It just was so natural, so genuine,” Ferns said. “And this was, I feel like, actually the first time I’ve had actual, genuine, good people in my life that I wasn’t trying so hard to become friends with in the first place. The only word I use all the time is just genuine. It wasn’t complicated. It was beautiful. It was amazing. And I tell my parents all the time that if it weren’t for [those friends], I would have had a whole different experience.”
With her paradigm shift in interpersonal relationships came newfound confidence and the discovery that trusting her gut, even when it’s challenging, pays off in the end. Around halfway through her time abroad, an idea kept nagging at her. Flight school. But she had a life at college in America, friends, roommates, functions. She couldn’t just leave it behind because she lacked interest in her marketing degree. But the recent amplification of her intuition nagged her to entertain the idea. She threw it out to her new friends, expecting to hear it was a terrible idea.
To her surprise, however, they encouraged her. And, after a few more months of contemplation and international phone calls with her parents, she decided that when her semester ended, she would not be going back to school.
Life post-abroad was a challenging adjustment period. Moving back to Hershey, Pennsylvania, home to milk chocolate, dairy farms and little else, was a culture shock, and living with her parents again felt reminiscent of who she was in high school. But her adaptability prevailed as she fulfilled her need for socialization with coworkers at her new serving job, some multiple decades her senior, but connections nonetheless.
And after months of flights around Europe, Ferns finally found herself in the pilot’s seat. Flight school, Ferns said, has been awesome. Flying with a private instructor two to three times a week in between serving shifts, Ferns will soon be ready to take her instrument and commercial license exams. She is working towards a career as a commercial pilot for airlines like Delta or Southwest and hopes to one day fly the friends and family that encouraged her to take off in the first place. Though taking the airway less traveled hasn’t been easy, when she’s in the sky, all the sacrifices feel worth it.
“I mean, it’s just amazing,” Ferns said. “[Flying] reminds me every time why I made the decisions that I did.”
