I recently received an e-mail from my junior friend, Kirsten, after her first week abroad in France. The subject line read simply: "Aaaaahhhhhhh." She liked her host family, she loved her program director, the students were great?but she wanted to cry.
Kirsten reported shaking so uncontrollably that she had no appetite for croissants and fresh apricot confiture. Her return in May seemed like an eternity too hard to face. "Well," I thought, "if she can't revel in French pastry, something is certainly wrong." Or is it?
Poor Kirsten. She'd met me for lunch mid-December with a notepad and pen, eagerly scribbling away while I relived the glory days of my own semester in Grenoble, France. I realize now that I'd completely forgotten my first month?when the cab driver charged me ten euros for a trip that should have cost six. When I had to convince a French physician who spoke absolutely no English that oui, I was aware of my chronic heart murmur and non merci, I did not need to be rushed to a cardiologist. Think up a hand gesture for that one. But those are merely logistical frustrations.
The more troubling emotion is the inexplicable unhappiness. Despite the sidewalk cafés, the wine with dinner and the glorious sunsets over the Alps, you feel utterly alone. Neither Kirsten nor I could pinpoint the exact source of our anxiety. But I think I can now.
By my junior fall, I knew how to "do Bowdoin." I'd chosen my major; I preferred the sixth floor of the stacks when writing papers over five pages; and I frequented Moulton for lunch, but Thorne for breakfast and dinner. Such rhythms are a testament to true acclimation, but they are also dangerous. They unconsciously infect the mind, leaving us cripplingly afraid to try new things.
Fortunately, going abroad is the best medicine. You are forced to confront the New at every turn. Everything from going to the bank to taking a shower to changing your class schedule can become a stressful activity. Upon arrival in Grenoble, all comforting validations were brutally ripped from my person.
Even the cultural and academic norms with which I had grown up were no longer viable. When I wrote my first dissertation, I almost tore up my first draft in frustration when my French professor told me that my structure wasn't complex enough, wasn't fluid enough, wasn't French enough. "Well, I'm not French," I wanted to tell him. "And this essay would have been just fine at Bowdoin."
It took me a full month to realize that to move forward, I would have to erase myself, to cleanse my being of all my calcified traditions. The result was a terrifyingly blank slate. Truths at the root of my existence were, in France, no longer truths. I had no object, word or idea by which to define myself. I felt something of Emerson's "transparent eyeball," a passage that I had read my sophomore year but had not understood until now. Yes, Kirsten. This rebirth just might make one shed a few tears.
In her e-mail, Kirsten pleaded for advice. But I cannot give her a miracle cure. The remedy is an intense mental exercise of living moment by moment, adding one detail at a time to your tabula rasa. You slowly rewrite your life with only individual words, then with sentences and finally paragraphs. I began to establish new rhythms. They were trivial at first, like buying bread from the same boulangerie, but they soon became grander, like earning a place on the Université de Grenoble fencing team.
One day I woke up, ate breakfast, went to literature class, lunched with a French friend, sat in on a film screening, bolted to fencing practice and came home just in time to read my 7-year-old host brother his bedtime story. Uneventful, you say. But it was the most empowering day of my life. I had successfully established my own niche elsewhere?far from family, friends, Bowdoin and all of the previous identities that I had taken for granted.
So, Kirsten, I don't think anything is wrong at all. Your distress is right on schedule. And the exercise of rewriting yourself in a foreign language will leave you with an education that you can't get in the classroom. And it will not be the last time you will feel lost in transition.
With graduation nearing, I know that this self-effacing metamorphosis is imminent yet again. This time, I am no longer so afraid. A newfound confidence in my own plasticity has assuaged many of my apprehensions. As I prepare to leave the college that I have come to call "home," I can't help thinking that my first miserable month in France may have been one of my most valuable experiences abroad.
Meredith Steck is a member of the Class of 2009.