The Finale

Seventeen Thousand Kilometres Outside My Comfort Zone

Here we are, back at the beginning, sitting with that flustered girl on the metro. She is on her way to a new job. A higher-paying job. A French-speaking job.

By this point, I had landed a position as a concierge receptionist in a prestigious office building that housed some of the wealthiest businesses in France. The job itself was surprisingly simple. Clients would arrive for meetings, I would invite them to take a seat in the waiting area, and then I would call the person they were there to see. Apart from signing for packages and occasionally pointing people in the right direction, that was pretty much the entire job description.

But it paid well. And more importantly, it was excellent for people-watching.
I learned a lot about the French through that job.

Every hour, almost like clockwork, groups of businesswomen would emerge from their offices carrying tiny cups of coffee and cigarettes. I admired them enormously. They were almost always dressed in black, holding their coffee in one hand and their cigarette in the other, somehow making both look elegant.
I don’t know how they did it.

There was an unshakable confidence about them. Not arrogance, or performative self-esteem. Something understated and far more convincing. It was as though they had reached an agreement with themselves years earlier and saw no reason to revisit the conversation. There was something in the way they moved that seemed to say, I am divine, and whether you agree with that assessment is entirely your problem. I hated cigarettes. Still, I wanted whatever they had.

Not just in my job, but in everyday life, I was beginning to understand more. I was becoming a version of myself that only existed in French. Little habits appeared without my noticing. I started making expressive noises during conversations. I found myself beginning sentences with bah ouais and franchement. I could navigate the cheese aisle without experiencing a minor psychological crisis. I could make a respectable omelette. I had even started developing the kind of dry wit that the French seem to wield like a concealed weapon. And somewhere along the way, France stopped feeling entirely foreign.

Then there were the French men.

They have a reputation that tends to proceed them. Films often portray French men as charming womanisers drifting dramatically between cafés, cigarettes, and romantic conquests. That wasn’t really my experience.

Yes, they looked at women. Sometimes very obviously. Yet for the most part, it never felt cheap to me. The difference is difficult to explain. It wasn’t the gaze of someone looking at a disposable object. It felt more like appreciation. Like they looked at women as though they were pieces of art they wanted to pass in a gallery, stand for a while, and explore every inch on them.

They were also refreshingly direct. French men, in my experience, do not enjoy ambiguity nearly as much as people elsewhere seem to. If they like you, they tell you. If they want to pursue you, they pursue you. If you remain unconvinced, they frequently return with supporting arguments.

I once had a businessman stop me in the street and ask me out. When I explained that I had a boyfriend, he looked completely unfazed. “So what?” he replied. “I also have a cat. How does that stop me buying a beautiful woman a drink?” Rest assured, I did not go for the drink. I was, however, impressed by the effort. If I had been recruiting for hostage negotiators, he would have made the shortlist.

Overall, I found there was a reverence towards women that surprised me. Even when the intention was purely physical, there was often a level of honesty surrounding it. For all their flaws, ambiguity was rarely one of them.

Of course, not everything about French culture felt natural to me. Australians have a reputation for being laid-back and easy-going. We tend to smooth over disagreements. We look for common ground, and are often more interested in maintaining social harmony than proving a point. As I am writing this, I’m realising that we sound like a country made up of chronic people pleasers. Which could be somewhat true at times.

The French approach things differently. Whenever a group of French people gathered together, there was one event you could almost guarantee would occur. Someone would raise a topic, usually politics, history, or current world events, and express an opinion with complete confidence. Then somebody else would immediately take the opposite position. Not because they necessarily disagreed, but because debating was part of the fun.

Within minutes the room would become loud, animated, and intense. If you didn’t know they were friends, you might reasonably assume you were witnessing the early stages of a diplomatic incident. Voices would rise, hands would wave and people would interrupt each other with alarming enthusiasm. Yet beneath the noise was something I genuinely admired. People were informed. They had opinions. And they could articulate those opinions under pressure.

My boyfriend at the time, explained that debating ideas formed an important part of French education. Looking back, I sometimes wondered if that educational approach might explain why the country has experienced so many revolutions. The French seem unusually comfortable challenging ideas, institutions, and authority figures. Sometimes all before dessert.

Personally, I never adapted to it. I enjoy discussing ideas and I love hearing different perspectives. But I am usually more interested in discovering where people’s thinking overlaps than where it collides. I like expanding ideas, connecting them, and finding the shared ground between apparently opposing viewpoints.

But living in France never made me believe one culture was better than the other. It did, however, make me aware of the limitations of my own education.

I had left school knowing very little about world history or global politics. Most of my understanding came through whatever media I happened to consume. Whether that be news programs, films, documentaries or books. There are stories we absorb so often that we stop recognising them as stories.

Growing up, I had inherited a very simple understanding of the world. There were good guys. There were bad guys. The good guys were more powerful, more righteous, and eventually won. Living abroad complicated that narrative.

My boyfriend knew an extraordinary amount about history, political philosophy, and global affairs. Conversations that started over breakfast often stretched across entire mornings. He introduced me to ideas I had never encountered before. Everything from anarchism to Tolstoyism.

One afternoon we were staying with a friend who owned a huge world map. I sat cross-legged on the floor while he explained shifting borders, political movements, historical conflicts, and the long chain of events that had shaped the modern world.

I listened with my eyes wide and my jaw practically on the floor. What shocked me wasn’t that I discovered history was complicated, it was discovering how much I didn’t know.

I realised that every country teaches its own version of history. Certain facts are emphasised, others are minimised. Some stories become central to national identity while others discreetly disappear into footnotes.

For the first time, I started seeing the world from multiple perspectives instead of just one. And once that door opens, it never really closes again.

I remember learning that one of the world’s most admired political figures had committed actions that would clearly qualify as war crimes by any honest standard. The evidence wasn’t controversial or hidden. Yet it had somehow never appeared in the version of history I had been taught. That moment stayed with me, because it forced me to become more curious. The world became less tidy, but it also became more interesting.

In my third year living in Paris, one of my childhood friends came to visit. He had left Australia before I did and had spent years living throughout Europe. By then he had lived in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Spending time together again was strangely moving. We recognised each other immediately. Yet we were also meeting entirely new people. We had both changed. Not dramatically, or in ways that would necessarily be obvious to anyone else. But our eyes were wider than they used to be. We now carried different assumptions, different questions and different ways of understanding the world. We were no longer just those barefoot Australian kids playing cricket in the street.

Even now, when I see him, there is an unspoken understanding between us. A shared experience that is difficult to translate to people who have never lived abroad. Because moving countries changes you in ways, that are not always visible. But in ways that are permanent.

I began writing this series because I thought people might enjoy hearing what it was like to live in Paris as an expat. Somewhere along the way, it became something else. It became an exploration of my younger self. A way of returning to those moments and feeling them properly.

Back then, I had a habit of intellectualising everything. I would analyse my feelings, explain my feelings, and think endlessly about my feelings while doing almost no actual feeling at all. If I’m being honest, I still do this sometimes. The difference now is that I notice when it’s happening.

Writing has become one of the ways I find my way back to myself. It helps me step out of analysis and into experience. Having people read these stories keeps me accountable to that process. It asks me to tell the truth rather than construct a clever explanation.

So if you’ve followed this journey from the beginning, thank you. I genuinely appreciate you being here.

More than anything, I hope this series encourages someone to spend time living somewhere unfamiliar, even if only for a year. Not because another country will magically transform your life, but because placing yourself inside a different culture changes the questions you ask.

Notice what happens when you become the outsider, or what happens when your assumptions stop working.

Notice what happens when you discover that people across the world are far more similar to you than you expected, and yet beautifully different in all the places that matter.

The girl who arrived in Paris thought she was moving there for love. The girl sitting on the metro thought she was trying to build a life in a foreign country.

Looking back now, I think both of them were mistaken.

I wasn’t moving to France to find a different place, but to find a different perspective.

And somewhere between the language mistakes, the cultural confusion, the crêpes, the preschoolers, the metro rides, the debates, and the homesickness, I found one.

The more I learn about people, the more convinced I become of something simple. Curiosity is the cure for prejudice. Not certainty or ideology, but curiosity.

Because it is very difficult to hate people once you have sat at their dinner table, learned their language, listened to their stories, and discovered that beneath all the cultural differences, they are trying to make sense of life in much the same way you are.

Seventeen thousand kilometres felt like a very long way from home.

It turns out it was exactly the distance I needed.

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Roll credits.
Watch this, you won’t regret it.
And if you do, that’s not my problem.

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My name is Mara, and my publication Organised Overthinking is part poetry, part observation, part “I should probably have kept that thought to myself.” Making eye contact with the human condition and then writing about it. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, I would love it if you would consider subscribing.

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