On Highs and Lows

I remember when I studied abroad I thought something was wrong with me because I had so many great moments but an equal amount of not-so-great moments. Especially in the beginning, it felt like I was experiencing the highest of highs one minute (pub crawls with the study group in Prague! Paragliding over the Alps in Luzern!) and then the lowest of lows another (having mountains of homework to do and no time! Trying to cook in a shared kitchen of 16 people and not having any real cooking utensils!). It was a weird sensation because I felt like I wasn’t really doing a good job at living abroad if I couldn’t have some sort of stasis.

Now that I am living abroad once again, though in a very different way and under very different circumstances, I feel really similarly. Especially when I first arrived, when confinement was first announced for the second time, and when I got back from visiting home over Christmas. I’d be so sad and missing home one moment, on the verge of tears and ready to wake my mom up at 4 am her time, and then some small thing would happen (I would get a warm baguette, the sky would be blue, I understood what my teachers were talking about), and all of a sudden my love affair with France would resume at its normal pace.

I find myself sometimes worrying if this is normal, much like I did abroad. It seems odd to me that I can go to such extremes in such a short amount of time. It happens occasionally back home in America, but I think part of the reason it doesn’t all the time is that I’m in more of a routine and I’m more used to everyday life. In France there are always little surprises (sometimes not so good ones). I think it’s all about navigating abroad.

Moreover, I think we are living in such uncertain and, dare I say it, unprecedented times that I learned in quarantine last March to really appreciate the little things. I think that translates here to finding happiness in fairly ordinary things for France and recognizing that my time living here is super limited and I should enjoy it while I can. It was a hard transition coming back after two awesome weeks in America. I felt a lot of doubt and really thought about throwing in the towel. I still feel a lot of doubt because all French people talk about is the possibility of a third confinement. But I do feel better equipped emotionally to get through the last part of the program.

The highs and lows I experience now also do feel really different from abroad. I was going through my abroad Instagram account and rereading some of my captions. I think something I wasn’t as good at four years ago was really trying to process the lows. I was always moving and so I think I kept making the same mistakes. I didn’t really think about the moments where I was unhappy, I didn’t cry all that much, and I was tired all the time. Now I do really try to sit through the lows, even if it means crying for a bit, and try to feel all the feelings. Not that I’ve ever been one to bottle much up, but being abroad in 2017 I was always on the go and rarely had time to process and unpack everything (literally and figuratively. hah).

I also look back on abroad and think about the highs and about how while I tried to make it look all shiny on Instagram, deep down I wasn’t truly happy. I was trying hard in a lot of ways to have a typical American abroad experience (despite having a normal, challenging Colgate workload and an internship). I was explaining my weekly schedule to one of my friends here in Avignon, and saying it all out loud made me realize how insane it kind of was. Now I feel as though I’m being more honest, open, and vulnerable about my highs and lows. I guess a lot of that could be maturity, but also this general trend I’m seeing on social media if people being more open.

Anyway, all this to say that I still feel weird having such extreme highs and extreme lows, but writing it out makes me feel less like something is wrong with me. I also decided to list some of the good and some of the bad as an insight. Looking back though, the bad doesn’t seem all that bad. But the good still seems really good!

Some highs from this week:

raclette party with my friends (including Emma who I hadn’t seen since October!)
buying coloring books and a map of France to color in as activities to do with our six PM curfew
getting some delicious Chinese food from the food market that I had wanted to try since October
a spéculos crêpe
an awesome burger that really cured my Sunday hangover
a beautiful Thursday in L’Isle complete with some great market finds, trying a new bakery, and meeting a 3.5 month old chocolate lab puppy
a run with no direction wherein I discovered some new-to-me corners of Avignon
the soldes starting
being clued in enough on the news to shoot the shit with local shop-owners
Biden getting inaugurated and getting right to work!

Some lows from this week:

six PM curfew
dark streets at night as I walk home after my bus gets in at 6:20 PM
creepy man following us while we were trying to get home
French bureaucracy (on today’s episode - the copy of my birth certificate they received wasn’t legible enough so they asked for another. all communicated via snail mail)
feeling far from America on a historic day and not being able to celebrate with a big party (to be fair I couldn’t do this in America either)
seeing how so many people on my social media feed are either traveling to Florida for warmth or mountains for skiing and realizing the ski resorts probably won’t open at all here
staring at law school statistics
the looming specter of another confinement that is all people (especially my teachers) talk about