the deconstruction of the picture perfect
P A R I S - dreamy & colorful. full of warm bread & pretty architecture & lights & romance & art. These are the things we think of when we hear the name of this iconic French city, and while I’ll admit, the aforementioned description is pretty accurate, Paris is more - and less - than I expected. More to the point of this blog, it is not picture perfect, despite the fact Instagram may say otherwise.
When I arrived, Paris was covered in fresh, white snow, and no one quite knew what to do - as Paris doesn’t often receive such a cold gift. Imagine if you will, a jet-lagged, over-bagged, stressed out me, with too much to carry, not enough French in her vocabulary, and hardly a clue where in the city she was. For a New Yorker, cities all seem relatively doable, somewhat similar, and they all seem conquerable. When you live in the concrete masterpiece that is NYC, you possess an adaptability, so feeling lost and uncertain and overwhelmed is somewhat unexpected - yet humbling.
That first day was almost entirely a blur - standing in the snow for 15 minutes before someone saw me and let me into the empty building, finding my way to campus and training for my position as a campus leader for five hours when it was the middle of the night back at home & in my body, meeting all my new fellow leaders & staff. I felt like I was floating having had no sleep, no food, & virtually no clue what was happening.
I do remember feeling dissatisfied and let down with the city. It was colder and drearier than I expected, it wasn’t lively, my room was a weird shape, I didn’t know my position would require so much out of me, and I was surprised that I needed French more than I thought. I do remember the sinking feeling in my stomach growing all day long. I remember frustration and anxiety brewing as I couldn’t do basic things like order at a restaurant, or understand what someone said to me rapidly in a store. And I do remember posting a picture of a rainy Parisian street, adding something about my arrival & how cool Paris was - right before collapsing on the floor, crying, and staying that way for an hour.
In those next few days came more pictures about dreamy Paris. More texts telling everyone how great it was. Yet inside, all I felt was dread.
I was angry at myself for feeling the way I did. Was I horribly ungrateful for this opportunity? Was there something fundamentally wrong with me for not LOVING this?
That’s when it hit me - this picture perfect thing I had going on, while not entirely unreal (Paris has its good sides, let me tell ya) was the entire reason for the dread & disappointment I felt in my spirit. That’s the thing. I had been looking at Instagram and Pinterest pictures in preparation to live here, excited & expectant for perfection, and when something less came to greet me instead, I was more upset than I would have been, had I not set expectations based on filtered photos and cultivated captions.
Picture perfect doesn’t really do anyone any favors. It makes us attach our hearts to these ideas that are usually unattainable, and then we feel deceived and wronged and dumb for thinking things would be exactly as we thought.
We do that in life too, we set expectations based on false realities about how we think it will or should be, utterly disappointed when it is less. I do this in my relationship all the darn time. I plan dates in my head and adventures we’ll have and anything less is just heartbreaking. And this takes me out and away from the person right in front of me - a person who always tells me he doesn’t care what we’re doing, as long as we’re together.
So from here on out, there will likely still be pictures - dreamy & colorful. But I am going to try to commit to be honest about where I’m at standing behind or sometimes in front of the camera. Where my spirit is sinking and where it is dancing - and everything else in between. This is a stake in the ground for authenticity about what it really is to live abroad. It isn’t all picture perfect, and I am learning to be okay with that.
