Becoming "Personality-less"

In America, you’ve been told to “just be yourself” since kindergarten. In a new culture, however, that won’t be an option. Unless you’re bilingual, you’ll struggle to communicate, period. You’ll freeze for no reason in basic interactions. You’ll feel infantilized during dinner debates while contributing how you enjoy both salt and pepper. In a sense, you’ll become "personality-less." Emma recalls, “When I arrived at my French school, being American was suddenly my only defining factor. For the first 18 years of my life, I had been 'the music girl,' or 'the theater girl,' but when I moved to France, my definitive qualities were no longer relevant.” 

What nobody tells you about that first month abroad

The height of your personality-freeze will likely occur around week three. (It takes a few weeks for the initial excitement and wonder of being in a new country to wear off, and for the reality that you live here now to set in.) It’s also right around then that you’ll be hit by your first colossal wave of homesickness. You’ll miss your friends and family, and perhaps most of all, you’ll miss feeling like you. Emma notes, “Once school started, people would try to talk to me in French, and I couldn't understand them. I felt so vulnerable. I've always been able to express myself with positivity, so this was embarrassing and alienating [...] I'm also a very family-oriented person, so being away from home was really hard. When I'd go to my room at night it was so quiet, and I had no one to talk to, which I wasn’t used to. I would say I was calling my mom almost every night.”

In his interview about taking a gap year, Andégo founder Robert Zenk further notes, “We don’t talk about whether or not you’ll be homesick. It’ll happen. It’s more so how hard it will hit you, so it’s important to have different outlets to help you adapt [...] Focus on the connections you’ve made abroad, whether in your community, or with students and teachers [...] Other things I’ve found that help with homesickness include journaling, positive self-talk, and taking a moment to stop and smell the proverbial roses.” As the weeks roll on, take comfort in the fact that the waves will get smaller, and you may even learn to surf them with curiosity.

The other side of homesickness 

Another side effect of being cut off from the dominant parts of your personality is that you’ll develop your lesser traits and uncover new ones. Emma observes, “You have to lean into your other strengths and build other parts of your personality. I was always a confident, outspoken, bubbly person…but when I first arrived in France, I realized I couldn’t be that girl in French. There was something about reining that in though that let me focus on what I want to do with my life [...] Rebuilding my entire image from the ground up allowed me to re-appreciate the things I'd taken for granted about myself.”

And as you pick up the language, you’ll find your voice again – albeit it might be grammatically incorrect. There’s a reason the joke exists, “Ever since I moved to France I live in the present…because it’s the only tense I speak.”

For Emma, her language hack was to carry a mini notepad and pen around everywhere. She notes, “Whenever someone said a word I’d never heard before, I'd be like, ‘Can you tell me what that means?’ I would write it down, and then I'd practice how to use it later.” The sense accomplishment from navigating situations in another language, even in a rudimentary way, is unlike anything else.