why I didn’t move to France

I went in to visit some of my favorite high school students this week (shout out: WARRIOR FOOTBALL,) and it was driving them nuts that I didn’t reveal the reasons behind my decision to not move to France. Here we go…

WARNING: This is a longer-form blog post.

In order to best tell this story, we have to rewind to my college graduation. The days were narrowing down and the pressure was on to make a decision and finally have a ‘good’ answer to the dreaded “So, what are you going to do?” question. I interviewed with a company I really wanted to work for. 4 rounds of interviews…. and then they weren’t hiring. The day I found out, I was alternately offered a spot teaching English in France. It felt like fate was throwing me a bone, another option.

Yet, the second I opened the acceptance email, my first thought was, “Oh crap. This isn’t right.” And then my post-grad-panic took over. I needed something; I accepted. I had 5 months before my start-date in France.

Fast-forward 2 weeks: I break my leg climbing in Canada. Sparing you the details (which involve an airlift off a mountain), I spent most of the summer unable to walk and then pushing myself through hours of physical therapy a day. France was on the back burner. No, it wasn’t even on a burner yet. It was on the counter behind a protein shake canister.

And then September arrived. And with it came debilitating vertigo, exhaustion, and eventually panic attacks. I could barely stand. After a week of panic, of not knowing what was wrong with me, it dawned on me: France was my poorly chosen escape-route out of the Land of Uncertainty, and this was my body’s way of keeping me off the wrong path.

France was an excuse. France was fear. France was me, fed up with yet another period of uncertainty, wanting to hold on to something even though my gut warned against it.

I decided not to go to France and the next day the doctors figured out what was wrong, and the problems began to subside. Just like that.

But in typical Annika-fashion, I had to do something big. Now I was unemployed, still sick but recovering, walking with a limp, and all I had was a one-way ticket to Paris. So I got on a plane to Paris. Obviously.

I spent the following five weeks wandering around Europe, visiting friends. I stayed on a hole-y air mattress (aka the ground) in my friend’s pantry in Bordeaux. I sang to cows and ate more than my fair share of potatoes in Northern Ireland. I made my first homecoming to Sweden, where my family is from and where my heart feels most at home. And I went back to visit my beloved Alps and bought over 2 pounds of chocolate in Switzerland. Mile by mile, I came back into myself. Mile by mile, I recovered.

Do I wish I had trusted my intuition and turned down the job in France right from the start? No. Do I regret turning down the job in France after all those months? NO.

We do stupid things. We panic and want our lives to fit into perfect boxes. We want to avoid uncertainty at all costs and maintain some semblance of control over our outer lives. And that’s okay. We’ve been raised this way. Society wants us to be this way.

But we can choose again. We can quit at the last minute. Heck, we can quit in the middle of the first two months. We can transfer after a semester. We can change our minds and embrace the unknown.

For me, all the magic happens when I turn myself and my life over to the unknown. I can pinpoint and trace the most joyful moments of my life back to the times when I decided that I needed to jump. And I did.

Let me be clear. Had I decided to go to France, it would not have been a mistake. A long and painful lesson, perhaps (turns out I do not, in fact, enjoy French culture very much), but not a mistake. I look at my life like an experiment, not a destination-oriented journey. Every choice is something new to test, to try out, to see if it produces more joy.

So if someone asks me the “So, what are you going to do?” question again, I’ll have the perfect answer: “I’m not sure yet, but I’m figuring it out.”