In My Own Words

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If the words weren’t in my own handwriting, I’d swear they were written by someone else. Of course I remembered the semester I spent abroad in college, even before I rediscovered the travel journal I had kept during my time in France. Even 17 years later, I can vividly recall the intense homesickness I felt at first. I can still feel the throbbing headaches from straining to understand a language I’d studied for years, but had never been immersed in daily. I can even remember the smell of the lavender shampoo I used.

But paging through my journal all these years later, it’s not the descriptions of the glittering Mediterranean or the salade Niçoise that catch my attention. It’s not even the then-shocking scandals involving my classmates. (My Dutch roommate was having an affair with her professor! The married couple from Canada wasn’t really married! I used a lot of exclamation points back then.) Rather, what strikes me is how brave I was. How I forged ahead even though just doing my laundry seemed like an insurmountable challenge at first.

Let me back up. I was a sophomore in college, doing everything my parents and teachers expected me to. And I was miserable. I had spent my entire life to date, it seemed, learning about things rather than actually doing anything. I was bored, unhappy, restless.

When my friend Sandra suggested studying abroad, I said, “Yes! Let’s do it!” Our hip, young French teacher was always regaling us with stories of his cosmopolitan life beyond America. We wanted a taste for ourselves. Sandra and I decided that we didn’t want to be surrounded by other Americans. Where was the fun in that? We didn’t want to go to Paris, either. Too cliché. The more exotic, real-life experiences we had, the better—on a student budget, of course.

Soon, I was enrolled in an exchange program to La Rochelle, a historic port city on the west coast of France. I’d live with a French family and study at a local language school for a few months before moving on to the South of France.

Then Sandra dropped out. Her parents weren’t interested in funding a trip abroad when there was a degree to earn and bills to pay.

That could have been the end of it for me, too. I had my parents’ blessing, but at 19, I was shy and introverted. No one would peg me as the type to travel solo to a foreign country. I was too insecure even to go to a movie alone. I certainly never thought I’d do anything so out of character.

And yet, I did. In the winter of 1994, I packed up the brand-new luggage I’d gotten for my high school graduation and set off for France.