On Not Being Ready as Readiness Itself
Life lessons from my first time living abroad
Hello friends,
Thank you for being here and for sharing your presence and stories. You are welcome here.
Today, we are heading back to when I was nineteen years old. The year I moved abroad for the first time, to study in the South of France on an Erasmus university grant.1
The previous year, I had got through dreaded commercial and tax law exams by looking frequently at a picture of lavender fields, which I had torn from a travel magazine and hung on my wall.
This was why I had chosen a Law and French degree. It was the only thing I was sure about when I left school. The promised year in France, which would allow me to escape grey-clouded Scotland, meet Jean-Paul and Marie Claire from my French textbooks, finally, aller a la plage, jouer au tennis and live that dream.
Arriving in France, I had my first experience of culture shock. While it was beautiful, I couldn’t quite take it in. I felt disorientated. I tried to find my way into town, set up my new accommodation but I struggled with basic things.
On my first day, I asked a cleaning lady at my hall of residence to help me with a broken light bulb in my room. I worked up the courage to speak to her in French, only to realise, mid-conversation, that in all my study of fourteenth to twenty-first-century French literature, I had never learned the word for light bulb. She gruffly dismissed me, my light bulb remained broken, and so living, not in the image of lavender fields but in the reality of France, began.
When I returned to Scotland, I wrote an essay about this year abroad, which was published in an alumni journal. I was delighted about this recognition for an experience which had meant so much to me.
I wrote the essay in two parts. The first part described the challenge of adjusting to this new life. The struggles of asking for things like light bulbs (une ampoule - in case you were wondering), the difficulties of understanding law lectures and the unfamiliar exam systems. In the second part, I wrote about the growth, the new friends, the getting to know a culture through its everyday, the realisation of the dream.
After the essay was published, I received several letters from university alumni, sharing their learnings from living abroad.
One woman sent me multiple letters. In these letters, she told me, the university should not have chosen me to go to France. This opportunity, she wrote, should have been offered to another student. One who would have appreciated it.
These emails made me feel uncomfortable - as if I hadn’t properly valued the experience. Yes, I had written about the challenges of France, but I had also written about the positives. I had loved Erasmus, but I had also found it hard.
It had been a big deal for me to live abroad for a year. Was I ready? I had only left Scotland four times in my nineteen years, all on short trips, so, I think the answer was: no, I was not ready.
I didn’t know anyone who had gone to University in France. No one shared tips or resources to navigate this transition with grace. But is living with grace a requirement of trying something new?
Twenty years have passed since that trip. When I think back to that letter now, I think: What sort of grown woman tells a young girl that she should not have been given an opportunity?
In retrospect, I also think, I was exactly the sort of student who should have been chosen to study abroad. Because I found it hard. Because I had barely left Scotland and did not have the skills to negotiate living in another place. Because I needed to learn them.
That year in France changed my life trajectory. It ignited in me the idea that my life could be different. It showed me I could follow my dreams. And it helped me build the skills to go after that different life and those dreams.
It surrounded me with new people, other young Europeans who were not held back by the Glasgow idea of ‘staying in their place’, who instead thought going to Paris to find a job for the summer was a perfectly normal thing to do. Who thought applying for jobs in European Institutions was a pragmatic next step. Who thought about life in a much more expansive way than I had learned to.
That year also walked me through the motions of living in another country. Other foreign students helped me navigate the local bureaucracy. My French hallmates taught me social skills, letting me sit with them until I started to not just pretend to laugh at their jokes, but actually laugh at their jokes (they knew I had been faking).
I found my way around town, got the train to other towns and started to understand lectures, read books, follow along on the radio, learn French pop songs and pass my exams. Until I was able to navigate life in this foreign place, ask for things in this foreign language, negotiate my place there. All of which had felt almost impossible when I first arrived.
Twenty years and ten countries later. If you had told twenty-year-old me the way my life would span out, she would not have believed you. She wasn’t ready to believe you. Because working out France was already enough.
But this first leap, led step by step to other countries and other continents, which never would have been possible if that first door had not been opened.
If the university had assessed my savviness and experience as criteria for participating. If it had decided, because I did not know the world, that it was never going to be for me. If they had judged that I already needed to have the skills that this new experience was meant to teach me.
Because learning is not about readiness, it is about willingness.
It is not about grace, it is about grit.
That French town was a container for growth, and that growing showed me how to peel back a few layers of what had been a small world.
It was my first step in learning I could.
Walk with me:
Did you have an experience which changed the trajectory of your life?
Have you ever had your own version of my lavender field picture, which inspired you to make a change in your life?
In case you were wondering - I studied abroad on an Erasmus grant, an exchange programme for EU students. This was back when Scotland used to be part of the European Union. My Scottish University had a partnership with a law school called Aix-Marseille III in France. I will be forever grateful for this scheme.
This is such a beautifully articulated piece- thank you.
There is so much about my travelling life and living and working abroad that I appreciate retrospectively, more than I did at the actual time. There is so much that I am grateful that I have done (some which I am disbelieving that I've done!) that I am not sure I would want to do again.
The first thing I thought of when I read the letter you received was 'that lady clearly hasn't actually traveled' or if she has, has done so within a very sanitised framework. It seems to me that the shattering of what we *think* it's going to be like has to occur to make way for the reality of it- I guess like any relationship based on something real.
When I first came to New Zealand, I knew this was home. And yet, still it was hard. Loving something. somewhere or someone is full of complexities it turns out! But ultimately worth it in the end xx
Oh Catriona I love this! So evocative...and very timely, considering that I'm moving to France later this year. I hope to see the famous lavender fields too...
Glad to have found you here. Keep writing😍