Finding My Rhythm: The Real Talk About Balancing Work and Studies as an International Student

I am writing this from my small apartment in Brugge, Belgium.

Outside my window, the rain falls quietly on the cobblestones, turning the historic streets into a slick grey mirror. The sky has been heavy all morning, the kind of overcast that makes the afternoon feel like twilight. On my desk, my tea has gone cold. My hands are slightly shaking as I type.

The quiet, grey skies of Brugge - where memories of home often drift back to me.

Yesterday, I called my mother in Nepal. It was supposed to be a normal call, the kind where we talk about family, weather, and small updates from home.

But then she mentioned a guest had come to our house.

It was Bikash’s uncle.

Bikash.

I had not heard that name in almost ten years. It felt like something sealed had opened.

I put down my cup. My heartbeat changed immediately.

“How is Bikash?” I asked. “Where is he now?”

“He is in Australia,” my mother said. “Studying engineering.”

I did not cry.

But something settled in my chest. Heavy. Familiar. Hard to name.

I closed my eyes, and his face came back clearly. The red eyes from studying beside a kerosene lamp. The torn shoes. The careful smile that never fully relaxed. The village returned with it. Smoke in the air. Cold floors. Wooden houses. Silence that felt too large for a child.

I remember the way the mountains seemed to press in on us, holding our small, fragile lives in a palm of earth and stone. It was a world that felt both endless and suffocatingly small.

Years ago, I had photos of him on my phone. Then, in London, it was stolen. In seconds, the images were gone. Not just pictures, but evidence of a moment that had existed.

I never grieved the device. I grieved what I didn’t realize those photos meant until they were gone. I realized then that I had been keeping them as a talisman, a way to prove to myself that I had truly come from there, and that I hadn't just dreamed a harsher, thinner life into existence.

Now only memory remains. Fading, but still here.

So I am writing it down.

Let me tell you the story.

Part 1: The Boy Who Had Already Lost Everything

Ten years ago, I went back to Nepal for a short visit. I was living in London at the time. Before Lisbon. Before Brugge.

I also come from a similar place.

A village. The same kind of environment Bikash grew up in.

Until I was sixteen, that was my entire world. Electricity wasn’t stable. Roads were rough. A hospital was far away. You don’t question it when you’re inside it because you don’t know anything else. You learn to walk without shoes, to work without light, and to accept hunger as a natural weather pattern of the day.

Even now, many children are still living like that. Some in worse conditions. My own village has changed only recently. Electricity came. A road was built. A small health post opened. Things I once thought were impossible.

That’s why this story doesn’t feel distant.

It feels close.

It feels like the ghost of who I used to be.

Bikash was a distant relative. I had never met him before that trip. He lived in a small village in the hills of Nepal. I don’t remember the name anymore, but I remember him clearly.

Twelve or thirteen years old. Thin. Quiet. Torn clothes. Shoes worn through.

But what stayed was his gaze. He looked at everything as if he was trying to memorize it before it disappeared.

I didn’t know his full story then.

No one told me.

Now I do.

And it stayed with me.

He lost his mother when he was seven. After that, nothing was stable. His father remarried, but the new stepmother never accepted him. There was no warmth in that house. Only the cold draft of indifference.

His father slowly fell apart after his wife’s death. Depression, then alcohol. In a place with no support, it didn’t stop. It just deepened. 

A flickering light in the dark; a small spark that defined so much of our childhood.

Years later, I heard his father had died suddenly. No hospital nearby. No proper care. Just gone.

I remember hearing it, feeling something, and then moving on with my life. I think back on that cold, callous efficiency of my own youth, the way I learned to compartmentalize death because, in the village, death was just another neighbor.

And I forgot.

That is the part I carry.

Not because I was cruel. But because I was focused on surviving my own life in London, Lisbon, and later Brugge. I was desperate to scrub the dust of the village off my skin and become someone else. His story didn’t disappear. I just stopped holding it because it reminded me too much of the scarcity I was trying to outrun.

I assumed his life would follow the usual path of boys like him. Work. Struggle. Survival.

I was wrong.

Part 2: The Boy Who Had Everything

In London, I also knew another boy.

Oliver.

He lived downstairs from my flat. Same age as Bikash.

Oliver had structure around him from the beginning. His own room. Laptop. iPad from early childhood. A planned education. Tutors when needed. A clear path drawn before he could even understand it.

I would watch him leave for school, his uniform pressed, his bag heavy with books he didn’t have to fight to obtain. His life was a paved road. Bikash’s was a narrow, unlit trail through the forest.

His school was well funded. His problems were small, contained, manageable.

Oliver was kind. Normal. He didn’t do anything wrong.

But he never had to fight for stability. He was never asked to carry the weight of a dying house on his shoulders.

One boy was given options before he knew what options were.

The other never even learned that options existed.

I don’t know where Oliver is now.

I never tried to find out.

That says something about distance. And something about me, too. It says that we are all, in the end, products of the luck we are born into, or the lack thereof.

Part 3: The Gap That Follows Me

In London, everything was accessible. Internet. Education. Travel. Opportunity.

In the village, children had none of that. Not even consistent light after sunset.

The gap between those two worlds is not theoretical.

It is physical.

Immediate.

Real.

And when you’ve lived inside both, your mind stops trying to hold them together. It separates them just to function. You develop a sort of double-vision, where you exist in the abundance of the West while your heart remains tethered to the scarcity of the East.

London becomes one reality.

Nepal becomes another.

But they were never separate.

They exist together in people like me.

Because I come from that same village reality. I didn’t study poverty. I lived it. That was normal to me once. I remember the taste of the air when the harvest was good, and the sour, biting taste of it when it wasn't.

Twenty years ago, dreaming of a future I hadn't yet imagined. Nepal, 2006.

And that is why it never feels like a distant story.

It feels like memory.

It feels like the bedrock beneath everything I have built since.

Part 4: The Phone Call That Broke Me

My mother doesn’t know I write this. She doesn’t know what her words did.

She only said something simple.

Bikash’s uncle visited.

When she asked about him, he smiled.

“He is in Australia,” she said. “Studying engineering.”

That was it.

But everything shifted. 

I saw him again. The boy under the kerosene light. The boy with torn shoes. The boy I had quietly written off without realizing it. I realized that while I was busy judging his future based on his present, he was busy outgrowing his own circumstances.

And in that moment, I understood something uncomfortable.

I hadn’t just forgotten him.

I had stopped believing he could leave that place. I had decided his fate for him, just as easily as I had decided my own.

He did leave.

And that truth landed heavier than sadness. It wasn’t just sorrow. It was a sense of being wrong.

It stayed quiet inside me, but it didn’t leave. It sits in the room with me now, here in Brugge, watching the rain.

Part 5: Where Is Oliver Now?

I don’t know.

I never looked.

He could be successful. Or struggling. Or somewhere in between.

That is the reality of privilege. It doesn’t guarantee direction. It only opens doors. It gives you the luxury of getting lost, the luxury of being unsure.

But what happens after that is still human. Still uncertain.

And Bikash’s story doesn’t erase that. It only reminds me that starting points matter more than we like to admit. It reminds me that some people have to move mountains just to stand on flat ground.

For every one who gets out, many don’t.

And I was close enough to see both sides, but not close enough to act. I was a bystander to two lives, drifting between them without ever truly touching either.

Part 6: What This Story Did to Me

I have lived across countries. Different systems. Different levels of comfort. I’ve seen both scarcity and abundance.

The clearest thing I learned is simple:

You cannot judge a child’s future by their current reality.

Hard work matters.

But it is never the whole story.

Luck. Timing. Geography. Chance encounters. They all shape outcomes more than we admit. We like to believe in the "self-made" narrative because it makes us feel safe. It makes us feel like we earned our success and others earned their struggle. But that is a lie we tell to sleep at night.

I tried to ignore that gap for years. I told myself it wasn’t my responsibility. That I couldn’t change anything anyway.

Then one phone call brought everything back.

And I realized something else.

This isn’t about guilt.

Guilt doesn’t change anything.

It’s about awareness. About remembering that the gap is still there, still shaping lives right now. It is about acknowledging that for every Bikash who finds his way to Australia, there are ten others still sitting in the dark, waiting for a light that might never come.

Because I lived inside it once too.

Part 7: The Only Happiness

Later that evening, the rain in Brugge slowed. A small strip of sunlight broke through the clouds.

I thought about Bikash again.

Not the suffering.

Not the past.

Just him.

Alive.

Studying.

Moving forward.

And I felt something simple.

Relief.

Not because the world is fair. It isn’t.

Not because I helped.

I didn’t.

But because sometimes, a story breaks its expected ending.

A boy survives what should have ended him. He defies the geography of his birth.

That is enough for a moment of light. It is enough to keep me going, to keep me writing, and to keep me believing that even from the smallest, darkest places, a path can be cleared.

The current reality - balancing studies, work, and the weight of my own story.

Conclusion: Two Boys, One Reality

Ten years ago, I met two boys. One had everything. One had almost nothing.

Yesterday, I learned the boy with almost nothing is now an engineer in Australia.

The other boy is somewhere I don’t know.

And I didn’t look for him.

I lost the photos, but not the memory. And somehow, that memory feels weightier now than the images ever did.

Bikash survived.

And in a world like this, that is rare enough to stay with you. It is a reminder that we are all just one turn of events away from a completely different life.

Lesson

If this story taught me anything, it is that we should be careful about the conclusions we draw from someone else's beginning.

A child's circumstances are not their destiny. Poverty is not a measure of potential, and privilege is not a guarantee of success. Hard work matters, but so do opportunity, timing, kindness, and the people who choose to believe in us.

Most importantly, never assume you know how someone else's story will end. Sometimes the quietest child, carrying the heaviest burden, writes the most extraordinary ending.

And if we can do anything, it is this: treat people with dignity, create opportunities where we can, and never underestimate what hope, perseverance, and one chance can change.

​If this story touched you, I invite you to read another reflection on how we choose to spend our most valuable currency - our presence: They Raised Me With Time. I Am Raising My Children With Distraction.

With love ❤️

-BITTY

BRUGGE, BELGIUM 🇧🇪

O7 - 07 - 2026