This week has been a strange one and for the majority of it I have been in a funk. My emotions have run across the board to the point where I wanted to call the whole trip over. My calendar with its marked off days, weeks, and months became a lifeline, a countdown, a prayer.
I have avoided looking too closely at the cause of this rut, feeling objectivity impossible in light of my unstable changes in mood. But tonight, whether through by actual clarity or the sort of clarity that can only come after a little too much beer, I finally think I've located the source of my inquietude.
When I first came here I was just an American - an American in France, an American student in a French university, an American student brushing his teeth. But now I don't feel that anymore. It's not that I'm somehow no longer American or anything so extreme. It's just that now in the streets, on campus, and in the dorm I am approached and spoken to in French. And when people find out I'm foreign I almost never pegged as an American.
Now I just feel caught between two cultures, a part of both but belonging to neither. And at the same time I feel that I am at a point where I can make a choice about which culture I ultimately live in. I could just as easily carve a life for myself here in France as in the United States. But which do I want? Which is to be my path?
Every day my mind screams out for America when I wait for the tram at Rector Schmit, surrounded by polished French people and their fluid language. But all I want to see are the rough edges of Americans and hear the broken syllables and heavy Southern accents. When I get back, I know my mind will call out for the opposite.
What I have now is the moment and little else.
I have avoided looking too closely at the cause of this rut, feeling objectivity impossible in light of my unstable changes in mood. But tonight, whether through by actual clarity or the sort of clarity that can only come after a little too much beer, I finally think I've located the source of my inquietude.
When I first came here I was just an American - an American in France, an American student in a French university, an American student brushing his teeth. But now I don't feel that anymore. It's not that I'm somehow no longer American or anything so extreme. It's just that now in the streets, on campus, and in the dorm I am approached and spoken to in French. And when people find out I'm foreign I almost never pegged as an American.
Now I just feel caught between two cultures, a part of both but belonging to neither. And at the same time I feel that I am at a point where I can make a choice about which culture I ultimately live in. I could just as easily carve a life for myself here in France as in the United States. But which do I want? Which is to be my path?
Every day my mind screams out for America when I wait for the tram at Rector Schmit, surrounded by polished French people and their fluid language. But all I want to see are the rough edges of Americans and hear the broken syllables and heavy Southern accents. When I get back, I know my mind will call out for the opposite.
What I have now is the moment and little else.
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