Pourquoi nous faisons ce que nous faisons

When you are studying abroad, seeing someone from home is like a mini-miracle. Finally, someone who speaks English and thinks it’s weird that French people don’t eat snacks and hate Muslims for no good reason and also likes to play “Gay or European?”!

It also, if you are me, allows you to levy an emotion-dump all over them about studying abroad. Erica and I came to the consensus that no, we don’t really like traveling all that much and we are ready to plant roots and just be somewhere already. And that staying out late on weekends kind of stresses us out. And that we can’t even remember what we said when we bullshitted our way through the “Why do you want to study in France?” essay question on our applications many long months ago.

It is such a weird thing to have to explain. One the one hand, it’s like HELLO, IT IS FRANCE. Why would a person not want to study there? I’ve been taking French since 7th grade, and I’m an upper-middle-class white coed. THIS IS MY DESTINY. But on the other hand, the actual experience so easily and often makes me want to cry or ball up or just stay away from everyone and listen to the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack and think about the Appalachians.

But, as Erica pointed out (borrowing from her mother, I think—because moms know everything about this, I am not kidding), even if you have the worst time, and you are miserable and lonely and homesick for three months, you will learn so much, just about yourself, about your resilience, about your god-damned-stick-to-it-iveness that you really can’t find out anywhere else. No, it requires a good dose of alienation and confusion and starvation, for some odd reason, and for that, we must go to France.

So thank you, whoever, for this mini-miracle and revelation, and thank you Erica for sharing your experience and your crème brûlée, and thank you France for not having eaten me alive just yet. I’ll make it.