Describe the first time you did something new

I want to describe the first time I flew somewhere completely on my own, which was for a summer exchange programme when I was nineteen, heading off to a country I'd never visited without a single person I knew waiting at the other end. It was a fairly long flight, with one connection in a city I didn't know either, and I remember feeling almost embarrassed at how nervous I was about something that, objectively, millions of people do every single day without a second thought. This was around ten years ago now, right before everything shifted online and got slightly more forgiving for anxious first-timers, so there was more genuine uncertainty involved — printed boarding passes, actual paper maps, that sort of thing. Nobody was with me, which was rather the point of the whole exercise, though I do remember an older woman in the seat next to me on the first leg who noticed I was on edge and talked me through the connection without my really asking her to. How I felt at the time shifted constantly — terrified before takeoff, oddly calm once we were actually in the air, then anxious all over again navigating an unfamiliar airport in a language I only half spoke. Looking back, that flight taught me something about my own capability that no amount of being told I was independent ever really had, which is probably why, of all my travel memories, it's the one that's stayed the clearest.