Lessons from deep rest

I took two weeks off because it was the holidays, because I was really tremendously tired, because I did 70% of my business’s annual sales in the final three months of the year, because I burned out a little but not a lot, and because I haven’t taken a real-ass vacation since before the Biden administration.

I did what normal people did. Lots of regular things. I put up a Christmas tree, exchanged presents with loved ones, ate a lot. And then I flew to France, and now I’m writing this on the TGV to Marseille, where I will be living for the next two months, again like a completely normal person would do.

I have learned many things, like how twelve years of French education once made me fluent, but after 22 years of not using it, I am now just inhumanly good at reading text, not composing my own sentences. So I am strictly on read-only mode with the French language. This is more useful than nothing, sure, but it’s still occasionally frustrating and always destabilizing.

Helpfully, I melt into Paris. With the curly hair and city face, I am constantly parsed as natively French. When I speak, I speak with a native Parisian accent, as is taught in American schools. So people always think I went to the Sorbonne or something, and then I have to explain that no, I’m American; and yes, that’s an Italian passport, it’s a long story. And then I have to apologize & switch to English, which causes even more psychic whiplash for everyone. I fully recognize that having these problems is both unrelatable and astoundingly privileged, but they are my problems right now, the things that are sitting on my desk that I get to wake up and disentangle every day.