The Beginning
The last three weeks have been an absolute whirlwind.
On September 22, I landed at Marseille-Provence Airport with two well overweight suitcases in tow. I was unsure of many things, the most pressing being where the airport exit was located. Poking my head out into light gray mist, I felt a light dusting of rain cover the tip of my nose and the metal of the suitcase I pushed in front of me—a rude awakening indeed. Having travelled many times to France in the past, I wasn’t prepared for the heavy sense of estrangement and pure dread I felt. Swallowing tears, I managed to find my apartment and carry my 120 pounds of luggage up three flights of stairs. At the end of the night, all I had left in me was a sigh of relief that I had access to a hot shower and a warm bed to sleep in.
As a 2023-2024 Fulbright ETA France fellow, I have been placed as a high school English Teaching Assistant at Lycée Victor Hugo in the southern metropolis of Marseille. Knowing that I am prone to feeling overwhelmed, I decided to find housing in the nearby city of Aix-en-Provence, a bustling university town where many of my friends have previously studied abroad.
My initial discomfort did not dissipate in my first few days in Aix. I was genuinely surprised. I am no stranger to travel nor even to prolonged stays abroad, especially in Francophone countries. I felt too scared to leave my apartment, scared to have to speak French if I left my safe haven. When I did go out to get groceries and to eat, I would whisper sentences under my breath and still slip up when it was my time to speak. It was quite the depressing exercise in depersonalization—I felt so far from the person who spent a year on her own in Morocco at age 18. In my diary, I lamented over feeling no connection with the place I was in. I realized that being alone exacerbated these feelings.
Luckily, after my first week teaching, I felt just a little bit more at ease, not fully relaxed, but enough to be able to move about my daily life with a manageable dose of anxiety. As I had previously predicted, my inner feeling of alienation fed off the intense loneliness I felt at the beginning of my journey. Pulling myself away from endless episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in bed, I became fast friends with my professeure référante, Lucile. Once I felt comfortable enough to lean on her, life became much easier. When I felt stuck or uncomfortable, I knew I had someone to count on and share my experiences with. This sense of camaraderie turned my surroundings into what felt a little more like home than before. The key to feeling at home in France is building community, something I will continue to explore as I continue on in my journey.
As I leave Marseille to visit friends in England, I feel a bit as though I’m leaving a comfortable routine, an optimistic sign for the future.
