Roots

The weird girl on the block *

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. ― Kurt Vonnegut

It’s strange to think that I’ve lived more of my life in France than in the United States.

Does that make me French? Or am I American? Am I neither? Or maybe I’m a little bit of both. If a passport tells me who I am, then I am most definitely American. But identity is rarely as simple as a passport.

I was recently talking with a good friend — a Swedish woman who has spent almost as much time living in Italy as I have in France, married to an Italian, as I am, well, to a Frenchman — about roots. It’s such a complicated, multifaceted notion, and immeasurably personal. Roots means something different to each of us, doesn’t it? We feel it differently, define it differently.

I call the United States — Florida, where I grew up — home. I also call France, wherever I happen to be living at the moment, home. But the word carries a different weight in each place. And yet, if I am honest, I have never felt entirely at home in either country. Not fully natural in the United States — which is, perhaps, why I left — and not entirely belonging here in France. I exist comfortably enough in both, but I do not completely fit in either.

Living between countries creates a peculiar condition: you are always slightly foreign.

But there is an advantage to that, and one I embraced long ago: not fitting in is liberating. It frees you from society’s expectations — how you should look, how you should dress, how you should act, what you should talk about, who you are meant to be. Once I freed myself from the way others saw me, and from who I was supposed to be, the possibilities of (re)inventing myself felt endless. I would never be properly French, so my faux pas, small and not so small, were indulged and forgiven; those blunders and my oddities were racked up to my being American.

So why not inhabit that space entirely?

I have always lived fully immersed in French society rather than on its outskirts, never within an expat community. And yet, no matter how I try or what I do, I know I will never completely fit in. I will never be considered French by the French.