I May Have Hit My Emotional Limit with France

I wish I could be one of those people who moved to France, magically experienced a nervous system reset, and now writes about their fabulous, slow mornings and aesthetically pleasing life.

​Instead, I’m writing about how I ended up ugly crying in my kitchen over a burnt quesadilla.

It was a few weeks back, when the entire country was in a horrendous heatwave. To be fair, we were luckier than most. We bought a portable air conditioner back in April, and it didn’t get as bad in Nice as in other parts of the country.

But it was still hot, like sooo hot. Stepping outside felt like stepping into an oven, and I had an unusually large number of appointments and errands to run that week, c’est la vie. I also think the heat might have been making people, including me, a bit crazy.

While most days in France come with at least a low level of frustration, this week had proven to be extra difficult. I received a letter (in the actual post, because of course, France) from the tax office essentially saying they hadn’t expected me to file a tax return, but since I had, I now needed to send more paperwork to prove I was supposed to file one in the first place.

After spending 800 euros on an accountant, filling out her overly complicated 29-page online form, and waiting weeks for her to actually file our returns, more paperwork was exactly the opposite of what I wanted to do.

My daily LinkedIn scroll had once again yielded nothing, further convincing me that in order to re-enter corporate life, I would have to leave sunny Mediterranean Europe and move back to cold and grey Europe. A problem I wasn’t ready to face yet.