When I was 17 years old and preparing to go on my first exchange to France with Rotary, we had six months of trainings. They told us about everything we might face during our year abroad: host family problems, culture shock, language barriers, and the struggle of coming back home when it was all over. In everything that they taught us, there was one piece of advice that has stuck with me through absolutely everything that I have gone through in the last four years.
“Nothing is good or bad, just different.”
We were told this by a woman who served on the exchange committee and was herself a former exchange student with Rotary. She said that when she was abroad in Japan, a country with a huge cultural difference compared to the US, she told herself this every day, through all of the highs and all of the lows. This piece of advice was simple, yet one of the most poignant things I’ve ever been told. I adopted this as my motto through my exchange in high school, the transition into college, and the ups and downs that came with the first years at UO. And now, as I sit here back in France, the advice that I was given four years ago has come full circle.
I’ve been in France for just over two months now, and it’s safe to say that there have been highs and there have been lows. On the highs side, I’ve gotten to be back in this wonderful country, speaking the language that I love, eating foods that I missed, and seeing so many beautiful sights. I’ve been able to reconnect with French friends and host families from my high school exchange, go back to my host town, and explore my new city, Paris. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portugal with my roommate Camryn, and spend time with Ellen, my other roommate who I met while on exchange before. As for the lows, the rainy, bleak, dark Parisian weather of January and February made it hard to even want to leave the house. My exchange program being so small that there are only two of us here has felt rather isolating and lonely, as the only people I really know are my two roommates. As this program is a direct exchange, the study abroad office at UO basically left everything up to me, so I’ve had to deal with everything logistical by myself, i.e. Visa, housing, metro card, phone plan, French bank account, etc. The French bureaucracy is also a beast to be conquered in itself, which has taken a lot out of me. But, I think the biggest thing that has been an adjustment to me has been just how different this exchange is versus my last, which is where the phrase “nothing is good or bad, just different” comes into play.
For the past three years since returning home from France, I have been romanticizing the idea of living there once again. I would daydream about how no matter what I was doing in France (for example, school, thesis research, etc.), I would feel exactly the same as I did when I was 18 and carefree, spending endless worry-free days with my exchange student friends. I wasn’t looking to repeat the experience, per se, but the emotion, the feeling that I had built up in my head to be the peak of my happiness. I’m now learning the reality that expectation doesn’t always equal reality. In fact, it rarely does. And even more, I’m learning that it is okay. I won’t lie and say that it has been easy to be living such a vastly different experience here than I did my first time around. This time I have been forced to deal with nearly everything on my own, which has been lonely at times, especially when I had the comfort and security of a host family to rely on last time. However, this experience is teaching me so much more than I could have ever imagined, and I am finding a strength within myself that I have never had before. With my time here over halfway finished, many things will soon be wrapping up, and it’s time to really make the most out of the beautiful, challenging different experience I am living.
On y va vers le futur!
