Tomorrow will mark this as the longest
period of time I have ever been away from home. Well, not exactly –
I haven't counted the days, but last summer I spent about six weeks
away from home, and tomorrow I have lived in France for six weeks. If
at any moment after tomorrow I feel homesick, I feel like that's
justifiable. Up until now, it's been like summer vacation except for
the knowledge that I wouldn't be coming home after six weeks.
So far, at least, my own patterns of
homesickness and culture shock have not even remotely followed the
pattern explained to me by the CIEE orientation folks. They say month
1 is the “honeymoon month,” where everything is new and exciting
and you don't even have time to feel homesick about it. Around month
2 or 3, you get the culture shock blues – some little thing starts
to irritate you to no end (like Nate's example of the low water
pressure in Spanish showers) and you get frustrated and angry and
homesick. One or two difficult months later, you acclimate, and start
really thinking of your new country as home. Then several months
later, when you go back to the US, you have to go through to same
process all over again – reverse culture shock. Again, I'm only 6
weeks in, so I can't really speak for this whole process, but month 1
was definitely not my honeymoon month. As much as I preach about
change and adventure being the spice of life, I am not very good at
adapting quickly to new circumstances. Moreover, I'm a perfectionist,
and so where everyone else looks at me and says “wow, she's doing
great, for an exchange student! Good language skills, getting good
grades, and making friends. Impressive!” I look at myself and say
“well, I guess we're coming along. But you really need to work on
getting over your shyness, making more friends, and participating
more in class. Stop being so afraid all the time.” Month one was
difficult for me. Especially the first two weeks, every morning I
would wake up to my iPod alarm, the same one I used at home, and it
would take me a minute to figure out where I was (California? Nope,
I'm not in a hammock. Minnesota? Nope, I'm not in a tent. Band trip?
Nope, I'm not in a hotel. OH FRIG I'M IN FRANCE HOLY GOD WHAT DID I
DOOO). And when I realized where I was, I felt that depressing
heart-in-stomach dread feeling you get when you have to brace
yourself for something unpleasant or scary. It wasn't really
unpleasant, but scary, yes. I was scared every time I opened my mouth
to say something in French, wanting so badly to make friends with
everyone, sound intelligent and likeable, and succeed in Being Me,
but in another language.
Yes, living in another country
definitely teaches you about yourself. I honestly did not realize how
much of an anxiety-case I am. For one thing, in the Silicon Valley I
think we train all of our kids to be anxious and have
inferiority-complexes. Every time we get a B on a test, we can hardly
sleep for worrying that we'll get a B, or, even worse, a C in the
class, which will destroy our chances to go to Berkeley and have a
brilliant intellectual future. The pressure to be perfect is hardly
noticeable when you live there, because it seems normal. And upon
moving to a much more relaxed environment, it at first appeared to me
that everyone here must simply be exceptionally lazy; it is only more
recently that it has dawned on me how THIS is normal, and the
competitive atmosphere of the Silicon Valley is not at all.
So month 1 was difficult for little
anxious me. But every day I got more comfortable with my host family,
with the language, with my role here in general. Every day, I felt a
little less dread in the pit of my stomach when I woke up and
realized where I was. Eventually, I stopped thinking I must be in
California or Minnesota when I woke up, which made the whole process
much easier. Certainly there are bad days and good days, days when I
wonder what the heck I was thinking when I decided to come here, and
days when I thank my perseverance in arguing with my high school from
the bottom of my heart. But as a general trend, just like the stock
market (viewed zoomed-out enough), it has gotten continuously better.
I've definitely been waiting for a few
BANG moments. You know, the moment when I realize that I actually
live in France. Or the moment when I first feel so homesick I cry.
Neither one of them has happened, and I've come to realize that they
probably won't. Days before I left Sunnyvale, I said it hadn't hit me
yet that I was leaving. As my plane was landing in Paris, I said it
hadn't hit me yet that we were in France. After a week, I started to
have little moments of realization, like every time I see a cow and I
say to myself, “teehee! I live in France!” Or any time I have a
cultural surprise moment, really. But I've never had one defining
moment where my brain, like my facebook status, changes from “living
in Sunnyvale” to “living in Bois de Céné.”
Similarly, tears are almost never for
one well-defined reason. I have now broke down in tears exactly once,
after my first month here. Certainly it was from homesickness, but it
was triggered by hours of working on my French homework –
understanding a bunch of old guys' sexist literature and then writing
a properly feminist essay on them. I mentioned earlier my secret
Silicon Valley anxiety that I never before realized was unusual. Even
though I know I'm getting
better grades than my friends, my host siblings, and, well, pretty
much everyone, even though I know
that as an exchange student I'm not expected to do everything
perfectly, I have this fear that if I am not perfect, something will
go wrong and I won't get my diploma, hence, will not go to college.
This fear is more legitimate than it sounds – there is ONE person
who is in charge of whether or not I earn my diploma. She knows
nothing about how school works in France, and is also one of the
flakiest individuals I have ever met. Therefore, if she sees that I
earned, for example, a 12 in French, she might decide to take 12/20 =
60% = D- which does not earn me the credit I need for my diploma.
Obviously this would be ridiculous – a 12 is really more like a B
than a D- – but she doesn't know that, and has no one except me to
tell her otherwise. So I cried, because what if I do everything I can
to do well in school, but still don't get perfect grades and don't
end up with a diploma? I'm not French and can't write a feminist
essay in French that will earn me a perfect score of 20, that would
be interpreted as an A back home – I should be grateful that I
earned twice as many points as some of my classmates.
This
reminds me very much of a ski trip about 7 years ago, just after my
grandmother died. My brother Alex and I almost never fought, even as
younger children, but we got into a screaming match while we were
sledding, because I hadn't packed his warm winter socks and his feet
were cold. Obviously this argument wasn't about me forgetting his
socks – it was about how we were both tired and cold, but mostly
about missing Grandma. So, yes, I'm worried about getting my diploma,
and have the Silicon Valley school anxiety bug. And yes, it was also
about being homesick. But tears are seldom for one clear reason, and
therefore I will never have The Moment when I first cry from
homesickness.
Just a
quick note – I pretty much never cry, so I'd like to officially
blame the Silicon Valley for the anxiety that got me two weeks ago.
It wasn't me. Also don't make fun of me, and no pity comments. K thx.
So,
six weeks. I finally live here, I guess. I have a weekly routine that
is reassuringly consistent, sometimes seeming so cyclical that I get
mixed up week-to-week. On Thursdays when I go to frisbee, or on
Fridays when I get a ride home from the neighbors, or all the very
repetitive events that happen exactly once per week sort of get mixed
up in my head, until at frisbee I ask myself, “wait, didn't last
Thursday just happen yesterday?”
After 3 or 4 weeks, time seemed to speed up until now it's going
quite quickly. I have a routine, I have friends, I have a sport, I
even (sort of) have a job. And I am doing just fine.
Last
summer, my six weeks away from home consisted (roughly) of four weeks
of French camp, half a week of chilling in Minnesota with my good
friend Solange and her family, a week at my family's cabin in
Wisconsin, and half a week of college touring and other shenanigans
(CU Boulder on the way home from Wisconsin). It felt a lot shorter
than this six weeks, mostly because my six weeks in France came with
an expiration date in June instead of now – it's a milestone, and
not an end. But either in Minnesota or in France, six weeks is
actually a really short period of time. And already I'm 15% done with
my year abroad, a figure which is almost frightening. It makes me
feel like I must not
waste time, or imagine that I can do things slowly – because before
I know it, I'll be on a plane home, and I don't want to regret not
making really good friends, or not pursuing the things I wanted to
pursue.
May I
have no fear, and may I be able to logically analyze social
situations. When I want to add to a conversation, may I remember that
people only hate Americans in my imagination (well, and in the media
and stuff) so that I may have the courage to speak up and thus put
into the open more of the personality that has been in hiding since I
came here. May I remember that everyone else is as self-absorbed as I
am – they are not judging me, they are instead wondering how I
judge them. May I have the confidence to make friends and try new
things and really live in my new country, instead of just biding my
time until I go home. My I have the ability to turn off my anxiety
and my ego, and just
do the best I can.
And
lastly, dear Dice of the Universe, can I pretty please have my
diploma, too? I promise I'm working hard.
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