I’m so scared I’m never going to live abroad again. All traveling I’ve done in my life has led up to this point: Costa Rica, Italy, India, the Galapagos, Ecuador…has all been leading up to this. Each an experience that has brought me here, to living abroad for half a year of my life. 

Leaving France is horridly bittersweet. Maybe even the most bittersweet feeling I’ve ever had. 

A girl Anna who I just in the past couple of weeks have known, posted this in her blog. It is amazingly well written first of all, but more importantly it does the task of summarizing my experience here better than anything I could ever attempt to write. So Santé, Grenoble. Santé France. Santé to the next chapter in my life. 

“How do I describe, exactly, how life here is? I can give you snapshots: walking down the wind-tunnel side street near my house, cursing as my umbrella turns inside out no matter which direction I make it face. Gagging as I maneuver my way through yet another group of men on the tram who really just can’t find 3 seconds in the morning to put on deodorant (or maybe they just don’t know what deodorant is – which is perfectly plausible). Nearly crying with laughter as I sprint around the perimeter of a deserted dark square with my best friends, for no other reason but to sprint, and feel the cool city wind on our faces, and collapse, winded and gleeful, to cry “Santé!”, clinking together our 1€ wine bottles.

But I think I speak for everyone here in Grenoble, that I can’t ever really make someone else understand what it is to spend every moment here, wide-eyed and tongue-twisted in this busy little city in the heart of the Alps. And as the days tick down to our departures on Thursday morning, I can’t help but want to freeze this all, so that we all do remember what it was like to sprawl out in Parc Paul Mistral on a hot Friday afternoon, and eat kebabs at Notre-Dame as the tram clunks on by, and grudgingly shell out 10 euros at the discotheque to end up having one of the best nights of your life.

So that’s why I’ve made this little montage. So everyone back home can know – and no one here in Grenoble will ever forget – what it means to be young and in France.”

“I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day! I spoke with Lisa intermittently and she was very reminiscent of the past. Growing up you two may not have always seen eye to eye, but at the end of the day, she adores you and is thankful for everything you have sacrificed for her. Now, if she can be half the mother, and hero, you have been for her, I think she will be able to comfortably rest at night. She may not tell you this, but you are inspiration to us all. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your family. Goodnight Jerri!” 

-Rusty’s Mother’s Day message to my momma 

My roommate Sabreen and her friend Mariana went to Paris for the weekend. They’re traumatized, quite frankly. They described in awestruck and slightly terrified tones their weekend—full of gays and beggars and brashness and what Mariana described as “you call that fashion?!” It’s kind of adorable, listening to their complete and total dumbfounded-ness. Neither one of them is fully ready to discuss the weekend, although they vehemently agreed they loved it. The biggest cities they’ve ever been to other than Paris? Orlando. Parts of Dallas. A little bit of LA. In no way were they ready for what the city the size of Paris offers, both positively and negatively. 

The part that makes me feel stupid though, is that to me Sabreen and Mariana are so exotic. Beautiful Arabic girls from totally different families and countries, but such similar cultures. Their stories and lives are my culture shock—which is hard for me to admit. I typically pride myself on my openness to culture and eagerness to push my limits. These girls who I consider so different from me at the end of the day, know less than I do. Have experienced less than I have. Who I am to judge them for being frightened of Paris? Who I am I to view them and their lives, their cultures, as foreign? They are American girls exactly my age in the same year of college as I am, with families and siblings and religion, who experience the same losses and loves as I do. I’ve been acting so above them, trying to be Sabreen’s stand in guardian, trying to protect her from the scary things life offers—when maybe I should have been learning from her this entire time. 

I HAAAAAAVE A BOOOOOOYFRIEEEEEEND 

In the past I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to deal with Rusty and I’s emotions. It’s one thing to gauge how someone reacts to things, it’s an entirely different thing to put that person’s reactions with yours and adapt to make them compatible. 

Rusty and I are both extremely emotional people, and we deal with our emotions in shockingly similar ways. We shut down outwardly: our emotions, feelings, thoughts and all desire to communicate. Inwardly, we mope. Big time mopers. Embarrassingly big time mopers. The challenging thing between us is that I typically respond in the same way he’s feeling. When he mopes, I mope. When he shuts down, I shut down. On the other hand, when I shut down, he mopes. When I mope, he shuts down. There are many examples of this throughout our relationship, and for my sake when I re-read this later, here are some examples. 

1. The month of March. I am having an absurdly hard time dealing with how much I miss him. I shut down completely to protect myself. Stupid Lisa habits. He mopes because me doing this makes the distance and our communication substantially harder. Then I mope because he’s moping. And then he shuts down because I start to mope. Nice cycle. 

2. Dealing with the emotional consequences of kissing other people. I make a comment that (while I still think is completely justified, albeit harsh..fucking typical Lisa again) upsets him. He shuts down. I shut down. Communication shuts down. Then he mopes because I’ve shut down, which causes me to mope. Again, nice cycle. 

For a long time (until last night, actually) I was really uncomfortable with this. This was not a problem of love or passion or life ideas or anything else, it was a problem of simple relationship problem solving. Which is rather important. Anyways, I was mulling over this last night when I had a “light-switch ON” moment. We may be similar in our emotions, but we don’t have to be similar in our reactions. Why was I so cowardly feeding off of his emotional reactions? Why could I not take a step outside of myself and examine what he needs in those circumstances? Clearly what I was doing was not working. Clearly the vicious cycle we were working with was unhealthy, and right now, unhealthy is not what we need. 

And this is what happened. I mulled and mulled and then God—yep, the big man upstairs—said quite bluntly: “You know Lisa, I’ve put you through all of this shit in life to make you strong. All of the trials you’ve experienced have been for a reason. Look at yourself. I made you strong. Now show me you are.” 

He’s right (well of course, he is God after all). I am emotionally stronger than most people I know, or as Rusty says “really, really down to earth”. I am more than capable of being strong for us, being strong for him. I am more than capable of shouldering our weight. So now it’s time to prove it. Prove to myself and more importantly Rusty, that our vicious cycle of bullshit emotions is just that—bullshit, and is fixable. So very fixable. I just needed the realization that it was. The clarity to see what the problem was. I’ve been fixing people’s problems my whole life. Now it’s time to fix mine. 

I don’t think any of this makes sense, but fuck it. It does to me.