There’s a particular kind of fog that settles over a life when you’ve been living it long enough. Not a bad fog necessarily. Just the fog of familiarity - the way things stop being choices and start being ‘just how things are.’ The way the water stops being water and starts being the thing you swim in without noticing.
I lived in that fog for a long time. I didn’t know it was fog. I thought it was air.
And then we moved to France, and someone turned off the white noise.
I want to be careful here, because this is not that post. Not the one where an American moves abroad and returns with a list of everything wrong with the country she left. I have no interest in writing that post and you have no interest in reading it, and also it would be lazy and reductive and mostly untrue.
America is genuinely, specifically wonderful in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until I left. The optimism - that American conviction that things can be better and you can make them so - I miss it. The friendliness, the maximizing of holidays, the elaborate birthday parties, the shooting for the stars, the efficient systems, the great websites, the health consciousness, the sheer relentless ambition of the whole place. These are not small things. These are things other countries look at and genuinely admire.
But.
There are also things I didn’t know were American until I left. Things I thought were just human. Things I thought were just life. Things I thought everyone did because I had never once lived somewhere that didn’t do them.
That’s what this post is about.
The apologizing.
I noticed this one first, and I noticed it because France cured me of it quickly - not subtly, but through the social feedback of watching French people’s faces when I did it.
I apologize for everything. I apologized for asking questions. For taking up space in a conversation. For needing something. For existing, essentially, in the vicinity of another person who might conceivably be inconvenienced by my existence. I said sorry the way other people say ‘um’ - reflexively, constantly, as punctuation.
France does not do this. France considers excessive apologizing mildly suspicious, like you’re admitting fault for something before anyone has accused you of anything. The French state what they need, ask what they want to ask, and move on without performing remorse for the basic act of having needs.
I have been working on this for months. I am getting better. I still apologize when I drop things, which I’ve decided is acceptable because dropping things is genuinely my fault.
The yes.
America runs on yes. Yes I can help. Yes I’m available. Yes I’ll be there. Yes I can take that on. Yes no problem. Yes of course. Yes definitely. Yes yes yes.
I said yes to things I didn’t want to do for so long that I stopped being able to tell the difference between the things I wanted and the things I was pretending to want because the alternative was the discomfort of saying no.
France says no. Easily, cleanly, without the elaborate architecture of excuse and apology and alternative offering that Americans construct around a refusal. The French ‘Non’ is not rude. It’s just honest. And watching people deliver it with complete equanimity - no guilt, no fuss, no three-paragraph explanation - was one of the more revolutionary things this country has shown me.
I wrote a whole post about this. It’s worth reading if you’re a chronic yes person, which, if you’re American, statistically you probably are.
The rest of this post - the healthcare, the school lunches, the silence, what Europeans actually notice about us, and what I want to say clearly before I finish - is below for paid subscribers.
If you’ve been reading along and considering whether to join, this is a good moment. What comes next is the part I most wanted to write.
