If you’re lucky enough to get one, a holiday abroad isn’t something to look forward to simply because it’s time off, when we get to set aside the obligations of everyday life and just be somewhere else for a while.
The physical space it creates brings perspective. Extracting yourself from your environment generates a sort of space for playfulness and imagination that our habitual devotion to routine and sameness can make very difficult. When we go to the same places, see the same people and do the same things, it gets harder to imagine the ways our life could be different. Sometimes physically stepping away is necessary for the head to follow suit.
So yes, a break is a good thing in its own right, but it’s also important to render us a bit surprising to ourselves. The version of you who takes the sweaty-windowed bus to work every morning won’t cut it in a southern French village as you’re facing a mildly hostile woman over the counter in a boulangerie, working up the courage to say “croissant” with the appropriate accent while your Irish friends and family mince about in your head going “Oooooh! ‘Kwossong’, is it? ‘Kwassun’. You complete eejit.”
But they’re not there, so you say it anyway, and the lady behind the counter corrects your pronunciation contemptuously, and gives you your kwassaun, and you leave the boulangerie in your little cotton top that you bought especially for this holiday and which unbeknownst to you declares to everyone in the village that you’re absolutely foreign, and yet you feel a bit continental and interesting and alive. You think “Maura from the school gate could never”, and you eat the croissant by yourself with nobody talking to you or asking you for anything, and it’s bliss. Part of you wonders how different your life might be if this were where you lived, and how it would change you. You think, “Who could I be here?”
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The version of you who sits sedately through a staff meeting and makes a dry point about weekend cover simply isn’t appropriate to bring to an Italian wedding feast or a Floridian water park or a Melbourne cafe or a nightclub in Frankfurt. Whatever you’re having yourself.
Out of your comfort zone, you discover new elements of yourself, and with a prickle of thrilling anxiety, you encounter your own potential to be different. Maybe there’s a version of you who lives this kind of life in this kind of place. Maybe you could be teaching French children how to say “croissant” in Irish (“breakfast roll”), or making the coffee in the Melbourne cafe, or telling everyone in your Frankfurt law firm that you saw the boss in that nightclub with Uta from HR, and they weren’t exactly conducting an exit interview.
Emigration is kind of like a holiday, except it isn’t at all. It can be challenging, lonely and culturally alienating at times. It also has many benefits, and one of these is that the unspoken question lingering in all of us who leave our home country by choice– “Who could I be here?” – receives a concrete answer.
It’s true that wherever you go, there you are, but it’s also true that the culture and physical environment you live in, as well as the network of people around you, make some versions of you feel more possible than others. When you don’t have the opportunity, it’s easy to decide there’s no version of you who would ever confidently order a croissant in appalling French and then eat it alone in the street in a fake Breton top from Penneys like a feral seagull.
We have to choose to facilitate change. An addict has very little chance of recovery if they continue to hang around other active addicts. It’s just too difficult to remake yourself without breaking the old routes and habits that enabled the behaviour you now want to stop. A smart kid with a lot of potential probably won’t realise it if they grow up in an unsupportive family environment. All that curious, vital energy will be rerouted to something else, or shamed into atrophy.
A person whose new year’s resolution was to bench press a hundred kilos by next year probably has a better chance of achieving that goal living in a place where gyms are plentiful and cheap to access, and it doesn’t rain 200 days a year or get dark at four in the afternoon.
I spent years shaming myself about my disinclination and indiscipline about fitness when I lived at home. Since moving to Australia, I’ve realised that while I did of course need to work through my self-consciousness, disinclination and enjoyment of a good book on the couch in order to actually get to the gym regularly, the reality is that learning good fitness habits has just been so much easier here in Australia. The world around me is structured to make it easier, less physically uncomfortable, and a more positive experience. So has getting up early in the morning – a vast blue sky outside the window invites you out.
A problem that I struggled with for years in one environment became much simpler to deal with in the other. The thing I felt negatively about somehow became a source of pleasure. There are different versions of yourself in the French village, the Irish town, the Australian city. You lose by leaving home, and you gain. You just change. Sometimes this is something emigrants mourn, and sometimes it’s the very thing they leave in search of. If you move to France though, you still need to say “croissant” incorrectly when you visit home, or you’ll simply never live it down. “I’ll have a ‘krossant’ please. Thanks very much.”
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