In France, all public schools begin on the same day. Back-to-school is called “rentrée,” and there’s a bustle in kids’ steps, a festive jauntiness in every parents’ stride. Last Monday, children burst back into their classrooms, greeting old friends, making new ones, or perhaps making their very first friends.
It was a beautiful week for classes to begin, but I felt strangely bereft from the general cheeriness that resonated throughout the city. Periodically, emotional waves rose up and knocked me into nostalgia for my own former days as a high school or college student—which is when I realized how uncomfortably far away that felt. And for the entire week, I tussled with my understanding of my age and age as it manifests in our presentation of ourselves versus the private covenants we hold with ourselves.
I’ve never had any “be this by this age” goals, partially because up until I graduated college, I never had any qualms with who I was or where my general trajectory seemed to be heading. However, in the aftermath of realizing how important it is to challenge who I am and recognize that my trajectory is mine alone to claim (realizations I’m not sure I would have had if I hadn’t chosen to travel post-grad), I also realized I do in fact have a “be this by this age” personality.
What this means in my everyday life as a millennial expat living abroad is something I’m parsing through slowly, largely because there is no blueprint for someone moving to France with minimal-to-no transferable skill set in the native language but a perfectionistic propensity. There are common themes—language-assistant-turned-English-teacher, au-pair-turned-nanny, university-degree-turned-job-offer—but these merely ruffle my sail in a breezy, “thank u, next” kind of way.
So, I struck upon a compromise with myself, identified a gray area where previously I would have only seen a blank void between black and white, and enrolled in a semester-long intensive French course through an accredited language school here in Strasbourg. I gave myself a rentrée without the pressure of an official rentrée; my first day is tomorrow, where, yes, my French will continue to improve and I’ll probably meet new friends, but it’s also the beginning of a new investment in myself, of learning to see myself as someone with multiple facets worth cultivating. In my own particular, neurotic style, I am in fact mine to create.
