One Thing I’ve Learned from Every Place I’ve Lived: Paris, France (Ep. 4)
Somewhere in the beginning of 2024, I had the idea for this theme. I’ve lived in quite a few cities in the last 10 years, some of them dreams fulfilled and others happy accidents. Most of these places were my homes for a year or more, while a couple of them ended up being just a few months. But each one was meaningful in its own unique way and has left me with lifelong memories—good, bad, monumental, uneventful—and lessons learned.
In this series, which I’ve decided to separate by “episodes”, I’m going to choose just one of those lessons to ruminate on and, in a way, to symbolize my personal attachment to each place. These posts will be complemented by some hopefully fun (possibly funny) throwback pictures too, of course!
Episode Four: The Feeling of Home
Sometimes, we use the word “life changing” for things that really call into question the meaning of the phrase: a wardrobe hack we saw somewhere on TikTok, a banana bread recipe that uses a super-special ingredient we’d never thought of, a shortcut for changing some setting on our phone for a feature we think about maybe twice a year. All very interesting things, of course—but big enough to change our very existence? Moving to Paris, however, was truly a choice that transformed more than one aspect of my life.
For the long version of the story, I have five years of videos on YouTube documenting why and how I made the leap from my parents’ home (where I had been living again temporarily) to France; the short version is catchier, though: it was for love. Because this move also meant being with my French partner and becoming a part of his French family, it was both total immersion and overwhelming unknown.
It’s safe to say that many lessons were learned over all those years—the longest that I’ve lived in a single place since leaving my childhood home—but the lesson that I’ve chosen to highlight for this series is perhaps most interesting because it was a slow-burn, only truly sinking in after all that time: changing homes is a conscious decision, but being at home is an elusive feeling that grows on its own, and only with time and patience.
The learning curve of those first few months was drastic. I had a new job, writing and editing in English but within a completely multilingual and multinational environment. I lived in a neighborhood that I hadn’t really explored before, and when I went looking for ingredients I liked or products I had used for years, I couldn’t always find them—sometimes because they weren’t there at all; other times because they were packaged differently, described with words that I hadn’t learned yet, or stocked in an unexpected aisle. I had been teaching myself French, but the reality of hearing the language all around me, using it in situations both mundane and significant (immigration appointments can be scary!), and being confronted with unexpected interactions illustrated just how much I still had to study. Motivated by what I’d learned about myself in Spain, I plunged ahead despite frequent mistakes and awkwardness.
I embraced everything that Paris had to offer, especially in those first couple of years. I fell into a routine that consisted of habits I’d always had, but also a sprinkling of new ones that fit the city, the language, the culture, the job, the friends, the lifestyle that had developed day after day.
When exactly did it happen, then? I asked myself that question a lot at some point on the other side of the hill, which I had climbed and crossed without even realizing. It was sometime after crying because the bartender misunderstood me (possibly on purpose) when I used the wrong gender for “white wine”—which is not “vin blanche”—and sometime before stopping to help a suitcase-laden British tourist find the train station to continue her visit to her daughter outside the city. Just like that, I couldn’t remember what was “normal” to me before and now. Just like that, this once-foreign place was just as much a home to me as my hometown, if only in a different way.
Time passed: waking, walking, working. My husband and I adopted a cat, our adorable Hamlet. We went on vacations to cities not far away but rich with their own unique histories, languages, food, and experiences. The events of 2020 shook all of our lives, but they also led us to adopt a second cat, our spirited Bingley, and taught us to appreciate the love and comfort of the little family we’d formed. (I also tried cutting my own bangs, but we’re going to pretend that didn’t happen.)
Everything became natural. Because that’s one thing that I didn’t fully understand about moving to a new place: you can make the decision to uproot your life and replant it somewhere else. You can tend the soil, water it, nourish it, turn it into the light of the sun’s most radiant beams. But you can’t actually make it grow. The feeling of being at home is difficult to define and impossible to manufacture. It’s not one that happens because it’s logical—because you’ve lived there long enough already, because you have a job and friends and a favorite restaurant there, because ten thousand people subscribed to your YouTube channel to see your life there. It happens when your identity and your circumstances simply…merge. When it doesn’t feel weird to say you’re “going home” at the end of a trip, even if that trip was to the place that used to be your home.
Naturally, immersion takes effort, too, and there are things you can do to speed up your acquaintance with a new place of residence and, ultimately, how quickly you can feel comfortable there. Try new food, start adopting aspects of the work or leisure culture, learn the language—these are all wonderful things! But getting to know a place is just one part of settling in. The rest, I’ve found, manifests on its own as you carry out the joys, the disappointments, and the normalities of life there.
While my husband and I ultimately decided that our lives no longer fit within the borders of Paris, we will always have a unique bond with the city, even if we only ever return as visitors. It was the first time that I truly understood what it meant to have more than one true home.
