“It was amazing!” “I changed so much as a person.” “I want to go back.” These are the usual refrains one hears about others’ abroad experiences. It’s heartening to hear so many people report back that their time overseas was momentous and substantive. It is also often a lie. I was one of the liars.

My abroad experience was terrible. It was the worst three months of my entire life. And it was an abroad experience before that set me up for disaster. During both events, I experienced chronic loneliness, a problem the “Indian Journal of Psychiatry” says is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Let us dive deeper.

For some, it’s allergies. For some, it’s mental illness. And for others, it’s low income. For me, it was all three, combined with high-functioning autism. This led to me sneezing, inadvertently raising the pitch of my voice and experiencing bouts of depression that would immobilize me for days. All of this was exacerbated by an inability to go out often because of a lack of funds. My own immaturities and mistakes and others’ lack of empathy coalesced into the awful time that I had.

Abroad, for many, is not the incredible, life-changing experience everyone says it is. In fact, it can be an isolating and painful time, during which one secludes themselves in their room, gets in their head, and causes themselves pain through afflictions like loneliness.

This is why I conducted interviews with three students. They had much to say about loneliness. “When you meet new people, everyone associates the two of you together, and so you find yourself in a very weird corner where you’re meeting new people but you’re just kind of lumped in with someone else, so it’s harder to be yourself…A lot of the people who were both of our friends, it felt like they were friends with us because of her, not me, so that could be really isolating.”

Loneliness was a complaint of two students interviewed. Both said that before they went abroad, no one had warned them about experiencing chronic isolation.

More positively, however, they also said a lot about having had good experiences. “That really helped in terms of the loneliness, because we spent so much time in studio here anyways that by the time we got over to [host country], it was just ‘We’re in studio, but in another country.’” “I was lucky enough to live in a flat with five others whom I grew very close to over my time.”

Abroad experiences are diverse. Yes, some people have an amazing time while in Uganda. But some people have a horrible time while in France. These experiences are equally valid.

Abroad not being amazing doesn’t mean you’re any less of a person. It doesn’t mean that you’re inadequate, less mature, less likable or less competent than the person who toured Europe for three months by luckily stumbling across a small group of friends. It means that during your time, you suffered. As with any suffering, you shouldn’t be ashamed of it.

I’ve started telling the truth about my experience. It creates awkward situations where people don’t know how to handle someone having had a bad time. That’s because no one wants to admit that they might’ve felt trapped, anxious, unexcited or even hurt by their time in a foreign country. But by beginning to tell the truth, we can make it easier for people to admit when things aren’t okay and when they are.