So Thanksgiving is around the corner, and a large percentage of students who are from the U.S. are planning to spend time with their families, if they don’t already live close to home and see their parents often enough.

Enter international students. We’re probably planning on visiting a friend’s home, or planning to travel a little bit or to glamorously get caught up on school work. Exciting.

I’ve spent some of the past few columns cracking down on some of the annoying things we as international students do. At certain points, I may have been downright mean. But, not today. Today, I’d like to paint a rough sketch about what it is like to feel lost and alone surrounded by a sea of people that sometimes are nothing more than white noise.

When phone calls don’t make the cut, we Skype with our families through flaky Internet connections with drowsy red eyes, painting incomplete pictures of the lives we lead several time zones away. As a rule, we avoid mentioning the mundane but ever-so-present issues we face. It makes little sense to burden our families with problems they can’t solve.

A significant portion of these conversations is spent in ensuring the other party can hear you audibly and in stretched-out, awkward goodbyes. We’ll miss the warm hugs from our siblings and parents. We’ll tell ourselves we’re glad we’re at least free from being embarrassed by our families being too mushy in front of friends. We hang up, sometimes hating ourselves for our incapacity to be there for our family members who seem like they could use our help, and go to bed distracted by the humdrum routine we might find ourselves in.

We wake up and battle a system alien to us, forming new bonds and friendships with people we meet. It is a wonderful life. One that few people can say they’ve led; one that makes us look like glamorous, well-travelled explorers on Facebook. One that makes us envy our suitemates after they show up weekend after weekend with home-cooked food.

So we’ll show up to class and try and figure out this Rubik’s cube of alien cultures, education, tuition and careers, hoping the blocks will fall in place sooner, rather than later. And we’ll do it with a smile, for despite everything, life still smiles down on us.