The False Art of Anticipation

Looking out the airplane window: By Greg Wilson

While studying abroad is inevitably a different experience for everyone, I feel that my experience has been particularly strange. I guess it originates from my childhood. I grew up in New Jersey, in an average suburban town, with an unreligious Jewish family. We always traveled over the holidays because there wasn’t much to celebrate. When I traveled to Disney World or California, it was an escape from a place where I was clearly an outsider. I always anticipated these trips for that reason.

As I got older, my family situation became different. It was strained. I started to recognize things that I didn’t like about the religion and culture I was raised in and would no longer accept religion and culture as excuses for negative actions. I was now an outsider in both my community and my family. When I was 13, I started taking French and fell in love with the language. Suddenly, something felt like it fit. The way the language sounded, the way the culture embraced la laicite, the way they savored life. Everything the French did from birth, I wanted to make my own.

So I decided that as soon as I could I would make my grand escape to Paris. I would run away and become someone new. I would be the person I desperately wanted to be. I anticipated being that person. For the next 7 years, the anticipation continued as I planned my escape to this kind of alternate reality. I dreamt of escaping my Jewish mother’s guilt and my father’s expectations.

Seven years later, I was on a plane to France. I was prepared to begin a new chapter of my life. I was ready to finally feel like a free-willed adult. Still, my parents were not. As I looked out the plane window, my anticipation was no longer wrought with excitement, but tarnished with bittersweet fear. I knew that I could never escape my mother despite time changes and sheer distance. I knew that I could never erase where I was from. I knew that my father would always have expectations for me that I could never meet. So as I sit here after 4 weeks in France, I can’t help but feel that I came here for the wrong reasons, but that I need to stay here for the right ones. I think that it is time for me to use travel and my studies here to learn what makes me happy and fulfilled, not to escape the things that don’t.

L’Amitié,

Sam

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