Discord-Side Chats PII: Blitzing for Education

Continuing my ongoing trend with these posts, I interviewed a friend of mine, Blitz, on why she decided to move back to the United States.

Just for some background on Blitz, she is a friend of mine for just about 5 years now. I met her when I was a senior in high school and me, her, and a group of my friends have been gaming online since. Of course some people have fallen off, or joined up, since then. But I’ve known her for ages.

She was born in Germany, then moved to the U.S. when she was young. She eventually moved to Italy and lived there for a few years before returning to the U.S. to pursue higher education.

Now that you know some background information about Blitz, let’s get into the real meat and potatoes of the interview.

We started out our interview similarly to my interview with Rishi, with some solid bantering, and then jumping into deeper topics. One topic that I spoke about with her was how being from a multicultural background affects her social and professional relationships.

Blitz said that she struggled with having a more open mindset than other American students when she returned to the U.S.. She ran into individuals that were non accepting of others based on religion or race that she hadn’t faced abroad. She claimed that it hasn’t affected any of her professional relationships, since many of her coworkers come from a similar multicultural background, and are similarly more open to diversity than an average workspace. This is common in her field since she works in essentially a digital office space.

It also doesn’t affect her personal communication, though Blitz stated “That may change when I start going out and meeting new people again! Haha.”

Blitz lived in Italy from her sophomore year in highschool until she graduated. Italy was a very different place from the home that she had just left. “Italy was very different from anything that I had experienced before… The people are very different with how they see time and society from how the U.S. or Germany do.” Italians were usually more lenient with being timely, whereas her experiences with Germany and the U.S. being timely mattered much more.

Blitz also pointed out that there was just so much more history when it came to Italy. Every step there felt important, felt like something big had happened there before she got there. America almost feels too new, too shiny, to share this feeling.

Blitz has moved around the world due to her father’s work. They started living in Germany, then moved across the U.S. a couple of times, after that Blitz ended up moving over to Italy and finishing up her high school education. Then she moved to the U.S., separate from her parents in order to pursue higher education.

She has accomplished what she intended to by moving back to the U.S., and is currently staying in the U.S. more out of convenience than anything else. She plans to move around the world eventually, since she works remote for work currently, and isn’t required to show up in person. She does feel like an American, but she definitely still has a lot of love for Germany, and still maintains her German citizenship.

Looking at Blitz’s story, as her friend, I do understand her struggle to communicate with people who are close minded. Though, that could partly be due to my own exposure to the internet, which definitely introduced fresh experiences to me and expanded my world view at a young age. When I met her and started conversing with her it felt like I was talking to someone who was also more open than the rest of my peers. I understand more of why we communicate so easily now that we have had this conversation.

A big thing to learn here is to keep an open mind in general, Blitz has moved around to 3 major countries in the world, and that’s gotta be a bit rough on close minded individuals.