Getting the F*** Out is Only the First Step

I come from a long line of leavers. My great grandparents left Elphin in Ireland before the Irish Civil War started and settled in New York. My parents left New York for Texas before I was born. So, it’s no surprise that I’ve chosen to leave America. 

People leave for a million reasons. My great-grandmother left to earn enough money to go home to Ireland and buy property like her aunt Annie Higgins did. My father wanted to thaw out a bit. I’m voting with my feet. Others are fleeing persecution or running toward opportunity or reconnecting with their ancestry or enjoying retirement. 

Everyone has their reasons, but not everyone has options.

Once, sipping an espresso on a terrace in Italy, listening to finches chirp in the golden evening light, my father wondered aloud why his grandparents chose to freeze in upstate New York when Italy was so much closer. I can tell you why: language. My great-grandmother spoke Irish and English, but my great-grandfather just knew English. Even if you were willing to brave the ocean, that left only a handful of places you could go to seek opportunity: the UK, Canada, America, Australia. They picked the path of least resistance, and I can’t say I blame those who do.

But I haven’t had to pick the path of least resistance, because I have more languages than they did. I’ve had the benefit of being able to consider where I’ll fit best, where I’ll thrive best. That’s part of how we ended up in France, in a village of about 600, where very few people speak English. Our language abilities have directly translated into options for us, but that isn’t always the case for people who choose to live in France. Last week, I got a message in a local Facebook group from an anglophone expat requesting help finding a local plumber who speaks English. Possibly the only thing worse than having a plumbing crisis is not being able to communicate effectively with the one person who can help you out of it. 

When I was in college, one of my favorite professors told a story about moving to Germany to do research and stumbling horribly through her first meeting with a bank to open an account. She sat, wide-eyed, as the banker asked her a million questions, and she froze. I remember her laughing, remembering how she offered to quote some Goethe for the puzzled banker, just to prove that she could actually do something in German.

For us, and for people who have committed to integrating into another country, language skill isn’t a hobby and can’t be measured in streaks on an app. It’s measured in a million daily successes and failures, misunderstandings and opportunities.  It’s measured in emotion: frustration and joy, and everything in between. And although it’s hard to quantify precisely, it also has a monetary  cost. 

We tend to think that the decision to leave is the most important one, but it’s often only the first of many important decisions. These decisions feel smaller, but their importance compounds over time. These are the decisions that either keep you safely sealed within the comfort of your native language or push you through the discomfort that is necessary to integrate. 

Those small decisions that keep us from integrating feel great—at first. The comfort of our native language helps soothe homesickness. We seem to think we’ll get to doing the hard work some other time, eventually. Yet, as more time passes, integration actually gets harder, not easier. We prove to ourselves that we don’t have to integrate, that it isn’t so bad, that we can get by. We also amplify the magnitude of the task, beginning to believe that we just can’t do it.  

At times, we make the decision to integrate actively; at times, that decision gets made for us. Whether we have chosen this more difficult path or had it chosen for us, it is vastly more rewarding. 

I know all that from experience. 

Years after we first started settling in to France, we were having dinner one summer night with a large group of  business acquaintances. I hadn’t had much of an opportunity to speak to these people, but we’d known them for years through business. I remember them smiling to one another over dinner as we chatted. Eventually, one looked directly at me and said, “You’re actually a lot of fun. We all just thought you were an asshole.” My anxiety about speaking French was doing the speaking for me, and it wasn’t going well.  

I had been doing what I thought I needed to do. I took and even taught classes. I read in French. I followed the French news, watched French films and television. I was, in my estimation, doing the work. But I wasn’t speaking French. When time would come to have a conversation, I’d let my husband field it with his Tarzan French—silently annotating his grammatical errors and cataloguing the gaps in his vocabulary. 

I wasn’t doing the real work, the messy uncomfortable part where I had to speak to someone in real time, make mistakes in real time, function under pressure, and sort through my anxiety and confusion. I was doing the work that felt easy and safe, and because of that, I wasn’t integrating. 

Speaking-first language education works precisely because you don’t need grammar tables and mnemonic devices to function effectively in French. You don’t need a pat on the back from a digital owl, assuring you that you’ve collected enough gems. You need practice in real time listening  and responding—sometimes well, sometimes poorly—to real people, using real French. In short, you need to fail upward. 

Last summer, we went to a live cabaret show in the nearby town. It was the sort of show that anyone might be able to enjoy with amazing dance numbers, magic acts, singing, and a live band. A few years ago, I’d have just tuned out most of the banter between the emcees and waited for the next musical number to start, swirling my glass of wine impatiently. But that night, I caught myself laughing along with the crowd while one of the hosts rattled off a joke about Desireless’ classic 80s song, “Voyage, Voyage.”  

Doing the difficult work of language integration doesn’t make life easy, but it does open up a whole new world of possibility that is broader and richer than you could ever imagine.