It’s two o’ clock in the morning and I promised myself I’d begin repairing my shattered sleep schedule. There’s not a whole lot separating me, curled up in a bed in Rugby, and the sun, sea and debilitating stress of Nice. Not a whole lot indeed; in a few hours I’ll be on the right side of la manche with nowhere to live and one metric shit-tonne of opportunity.
I’ve decided to make a list of everything I’m anxious about so that this time next year I can look back with a smile because why on earth was I stressing.
- My French language makes me nervous.
I had to speak French on the phone a couple of days ago. Let me explain; chatting face-to-face in French worries me far less than the daunting realms telephone conversation. In real life, you can communicate your uncertainty about certain words or phrases with a raised eyebrow or a well-timed gurn, you can watch the mouth of your conversational partner to understand better what they’re saying and you can express yourself with more than words through body language and gestures. Pick up that little black rectangle to talk, however, and you can forget all that super useful stuff. Phoning a potential landlady of a charming villa on the top of a hill (unavailable, sadly), I stumbled on my words, mispronounced her name and often started sentences to find I didn’t know how to finish them. I was embarrassed and I knew I shouldn’t be. I know for a fact I’m better than that. I know for a fact I get a pass for being young and for being English – no-one expects a foreign speaker to be fluent. I know for a fact I’ll get better quicker than I expect. But it doesn’t stop me feeling sickeningly nervous. And what for? Who knows.
- I might come across like a dick.
My linguistic apprehension has led me to (as many nervous second-language speakers will echo) playing out potential conversations in my head in advance. This way, I have phrases, words and expressions on hand because – ha, I cheated, I’ve done this before. And in most of them, the imaginary person I’m chatting to misinterprets what I mean and I’m that English dick. Quel con! A lecturer at university said once that the French love Marks and Spencer’s shortbread. So as long as I’m armed to teeth with lovely sugary biscuits, I can appease myself out of any situation. Problem: solved…ish.
- I might be completely and utterly homeless forever and ever
Well, not quite. Let me tell you though, moving to a new country with no idea of where, or with who you’re going to live… it just doesn’t quite sit right with me. I’ll find a place – Nice has an abundance of gorgeous flats and apartments exclusively for students my age. But will I find the right place? Ideally, I really don’t want to end up living with: a) an asshole, b) any other assholes. And while the city is undeniably attractive, somewhere closer to the school in which I’ll be working in Cagnes-sur-Mer (15 minutes away) appeals far more to the part of me that doesn’t want to get up extra early in the morning to take trains to work. And that part of me is a pretty big chunk of Sam. We’re talking an easy 75%.
- What if… what if it’s not earth-shatteringly, life-alteringly amazing?
It’s funny, the number of times you hear best-year-of-your-life knitted optimistically through conversations of fast-approaching futures by family and friends. By this point I let it glide over me without paying it all much attention. If I didn’t, the pressure and expectation for the next ten or so months would have surmounted to something destructive. But there is a very real possibility (but not one I’m holding out for, mind you) that my year abroad won’t be completely amazing. It might just be good. I might come back and be like, “yeah, that was alright, not bad at all,” instead of positively epileptic with excitement like I’ve been led to believe. Don’t worry, future me, I’m going to do all I can to ensure the latter is reality, but I’m letting the cynical part of me (the other 25%) take over a few minutes.
Right now, at this very second, I’m so excited it makes me fidget. You know when you feel it, right in the bottom of your feet, and it climbs and spreads up through your knees and you just want to get up and explode with this delicious ball of energy. It makes your heart beat faster, your eyes sharpen and you can feel every fibre in your fingers pricked with fiery ambition. You almost buzz. But, yet again, you’re stuck in your surroundings – it’s early in the morning and what’re you really going to do? Like, right now, what are you really going to do? That’s right, watch another episode of The Office and fall asleep. But now, it feels like all that excitement has a place to go. It’s travelling with me to another country where I quite genuinely, for once, don’t know what’s going to happen. It feels a little like I did before university, taking pleasure in not knowing (and not wanting to know). Except in the same mix, that same excitement is joined by a very healthy kind of fear. The two together make me feel very strange. A good kind of strange. Maybe it’s lame, maybe it’s over the top, maybe it’s not even true – it’s just a year abroad, after all. But to me, it’s an open door out of an otherwise boring comfort zone, a chance to embrace something alien, an opportunity to break my bad habits and form new ones. Maybe I’ll stop being a lazy bastard.
Knowing myself as unfortunately as I do, the biggest challenge I might face is my dedication to writing this blog (ha! I knew I wouldn’t stop, classic me). I’ll update as frequently as my timetable and my motivation to do so will permit me. I’m still not quite sure who I’m writing this for. Or who’s going to read it.
See you in France. Allons-y!
Title of this post from Biffy Clyro’s “Modern Magic Formula”
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