The French Dispatch I - Feeling Lonely in the City of Lights

View from the Tour Montparnasse

‘The French Dispatch’ is a reflection on the experiences of one student on her year abroad in France. In a series of columns, Emily Moss discusses the highs and lows of life in Paris, offering (what she hopes to be) helpful tips and insights to future year abroaders, as well as reflections on cultural differences, the language difficulties that living abroad entails, and the challenges of being a young woman in a city not exactly well-known for being welcoming of those who decide to make it home.

It’s an unseasonably warm afternoon in late October, and as I write this I’m sitting outside a café, still tricking myself that it’s summer. I arrived in the middle of a heatwave, and Paris still looked just like the picture-postcard city I’d fantasised about living in for so long and the life I was suddenly leading felt too good to be true. But in all of my naïve optimism, what I didn’t seem to appreciate then was that this was still only in my first month in Paris. After so much time spent in Cambridge and in the UK during the pandemic, it was only natural that I’d be wearing the strongest possible pair of rose-tinted glasses after arriving in a foreign country. As the semester at my host university, ENS, started up, orientation week- and all the activities- stopped, and the people I’d met in my first few weeks suddenly started becoming busier, I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt so suddenly, unexpectedly, lonely.

It had started innocuously enough, as a realisation that,  apart from my lovely flatmates and one or two other international students at ENS who I’d stayed friends with beyond orientation week, I still didn’t quite feel as though I had any other “friends”. I had plenty of acquaintances to go partying with or sit with in my classes but otherwise would go days or even weeks without seeing them; as for friends, I could count them on one hand. “You’ll make proper friends soon, it’s only been a month or so!” I remember my mum telling me during one of our (many) phone calls as I sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg one evening. It was perfectly sensible advice: after all, good friendships take time, and in my first term at university, I’d felt similarly lonely after a month, but soon after ended up making some of the best friends of my life. Why did it feel different here? 

Rue des Rosiers

Perhaps moving from a university city like Cambridge to the French capital is the simplest answer; although Paris’ size had been a major attraction to me at first, I hadn’t truly appreciated how easy it is to feel lonely in big cities- especially true when Cambridge was the largest “city” I’d ever lived in. In Cambridge, you’d never go even half a day without seeing friends or acquaintances- around college, in Sainsbury’s, at Market Square, at a play rehearsal, in the pub, on a night out in Fez or Cindies. Not only had I moved to a new country and a new city, but this also meant having to start all over again, which, for a jaded twenty year old like myself, feels like an awful lot of upheaval, and felt all the more bittersweet when I thought about all the friends I’d left behind in Cambridge who would be graduating this year and so wouldn’t be there when I returned for fourth year. Seeing them return to Cambridge and enjoy their third year via Instagram and Facebook most definitely didn’t help to dissipate the loneliness. 

But, dear reader, after about three weeks of what I can best describe as reliving all of the slightly hellish feelings of my first term at university all over again, with the added intensity of living in a new country and city and having to speak in my second language, things have started to feel much better. I’m not quite sure when the turning point was. All I know is that I’m not feeling as lonely or as homesick as I was a few weeks ago. 

The Pantheon

Calling family and friends at home regularly- but not too regularly- has worked well for me, as well as other friends on their years abroad, because it’s always comforting to know that they’re often feeling exactly the same as you!  Meanwhile, making some English-speaking friends has often been great for those times when I’m tired of speaking French and just need some Anglophone humour, because that’s something that I’ve found can’t quite transcend language barriers. Staying busy has also been important for stopping both the loneliness and the homesickness, since I realised that I felt worse when I wasn’t actively trying to stay busy and planning things to look forward to; studying abroad often gives you far much more free time than you’d have in Cambridge, since the workload is usually light for Erasmus students, and I’ve found this to be the most unexpectedly disorientating thing about my year abroad so far. Sightseeing as much as possible (which isn’t usually too hard if you’re in a major city…), signing up to more classes at ENS that I’m not validating (i.e getting credits for), doing extracurriculars like singing in a choir, joining a wine-tasting society and rediscovering sports I used to love, but hadn’t had so much time for at Cambridge, like climbing and running, have all been great for filling up my schedule and giving me at least a semblance of the pace I was used to in Cambridge. They also enabled to meet new people who are fast becoming my friends. 

Don’t be afraid of literally (temporarily) escaping the city you’re living in to explore a new part of the country or continent where you’re spending your Year Abroad! My flatmates and I, for example, are booking weekends-away to other French cities like Strasbourg and Montpellier, whilst I’m also planning a solo trip to Bruges. Travelling somewhere new will most likely dissolve the general monotony that often sets in once you’ve settled into wherever you’re living, and gives you something else exciting to look forward to. Something about the ability to just hop on a train and end up in another country just seems endlessly novel- so make the most of it!

And so, after a few weeks of wallowing (some wallowing is allowed, I think), I found these suggestions super helpful for getting me out of whatever hole I was in, and I hope that whatever stage of your year abroad you’re at, or if you’re not on your year abroad yet, or if you’re just nosy and like reading self-indulgent blog posts, you might find these suggestions helpful too! Above all, just know that the year abroad is almost inevitably going to be a lonely experience at times. Don’t be too daunted by it; I’ve found it’s just a question of finding ways to make you feel better in the short term with your situation and working towards a long-term routine which will make you forget you ever felt lonely in the first place! 

All images used belong to the author unless stated otherwise