A couple of weeks before I left the UK and moved to Strasbourg last September, I made the decision to live by myself for the time I was in France. I’d never lived by myself before in a country where I’d grown up speaking the language and knowing the culture, let alone somewhere new. And that was part of the reason I wanted to do it.
Today I thought I’d explain a bit about my reasoning behind that decision, and what I feel I’ve learnt from the experience.
First of all, a brief history of my living situations: prior to beginning my Year Abroad, I’d only ever lived with other people. Before university and then between terms, I lived with either one or both of my parents in a family home. I also had the good luck of never having to share a room with my brother apart from when we were away on holiday. Once I got to university, I lived in halls. In my first year, I had an ensuite room to myself in a staircase with six other students and in my second year I had my own ensuite room again and lived with 5 friends with whom I shared a kitchen. So as you can see, I’ve always had a space of some size to call my own, but the step from having a room of one’s own to a flat is noticeable nonetheless.
I will say that part of the reason I decided to live by myself was in some aspects a matter of convenience. I didn’t know anyone else who was going to be in Strasbourg prior to going out there; the nearest person I knew beforehand was a friend from Oxford who was also going to work as an English assistant in Alsace, but she was based down at the very bottom of the region and several hours’ train ride away. As such, if I were going to live with other people for the time I was in Strasbourg, I’d need to either find a flat share that was looking for another person and hope I got on well with them or find someone to flat hunt with fairly soon after arriving. After I’d got my head around the idea of living by myself and had actually become quite excited by the idea, I was quite happy to do so and leave out what seemed like yet another step in the process of finding somewhere to live in a new place.
I will pause here to say that there are of course many advantages to living with other people. For one, there’s always the cheery thought of “if I died in this flat, I wonder how long it would be before they found me…” On a slightly less morbid note, there’s always someone to help with the housework, and if you can coordinate things, you can even shop for food together and buy in bulk to save money. From the perspective of a languages student on a Year Abroad, provided your flat mates are native speakers of the language you’re trying to learn or even just reasonably fluent themselves, then there’s someone else to speak to and practise your language skills with.
The best advice I can give when it comes to deciding this is to know yourself. Know whether you function better when there are always people around or whether you really value having time to yourself in your own space. Know whether you’re quite happy to get all the housework done by yourself or whether you start convulsing at the thought of having to do the washing up. In general, my advice for making housing and lifestyle decisions on the Year Abroad and in any similar situation is to know yourself. I’ve learnt over the past year that I function much better when there’s a decent amount of sunlight and good weather, so on reflection Alsace may not have been the best choice in that respect. But I also understand that some of these things are lessons you’ll learn afterwards and all you can do is carry that knowledge forward to the next time you’re in a similar situation.
The main reason that I decided to live by myself in Strasbourg last year, rather than convenience, was because I wanted to prove to myself that I could, that I could not only survive but even thrive and enjoy living by myself for the best part of a year. I figured if I could go through the hunt for housing alone in a foreign city in a foreign country where I didn’t yet know the language of looking for accommodation, then when I came to do so again later elsewhere, whether back in my native country or in another foreign one, I’d already have had a bit of a crash course in the whole process, and thankfully I feel it’s worked (although I’ve yet to put it to the test).
Another part of living by myself was seeing how I’d cope socially. While I am more introverted these days than I was a few years ago, there’s still an extroverted side of me that benefits from being around people and doing things socially on a regular basis, so I figured that living alone would make me more determined to get out and make friends and find things to do in the city, rather than having the default setting of going home and talking to my flatmates, possibly not in French. What I will say is that didn’t always happen, and although I did use my living situation as a source of motivation for getting out and doing things, there were also many occasions on which I didn’t feel I had the energy to go out into the city, and not having anyone around in my flat meant that there was no one who could pressure or persuade me into doing something in quite the same way.
At first it was quite strange. I remember the first evening feeling as though things were too quiet, and as though I were just waiting for someone else to get home and start making noise just by virtue of being there. But as the days wore on, I soon got used to my new environment. By which I mean I soon developed the habit of singing, talking and generally making small noises to myself when I was in my apartment, a habit which I’ve found rather more difficult to shake since returning to living with other people. Sorry family.
But in addition to proving that I could live by myself, I also wanted to have the experience of taking an apartment and making it into a home for myself for my time in Strasbourg, without having anyone else there to do it for me or to enter into an apartment that was already someone else’s home. I’ve taken pride in the fact that my rooms at university have often been described by others as being quite homely (although ye be warned: it takes a fair amount to achieve that aesthetic and the car is always ridiculously full when I go back to university), but there are differences between sorting out a room that you live in for 8 weeks at a time and one that you live in for 8 months. For one thing, I didn’t have to plan my room around the fact that I would need to be taking everything down and packing up again in about 2 months’ time.
See, for all the time that I was in Strasbourg, I technically had 3 registered addresses, and each of those felt like home, although it did take a little while for me to be able to say that of my apartment in Strasbourg. That may well sound strange to some of you, but I’ve always felt that my homes were multiple, or at least from the age at which I started classifying my residences as either Mum’s or Dad’s.
I was recently talking to one of my friends that I met in Vienna, Ed, about the idea of home following this post that he’d written which touched on the subject. Just before we met, he’d done something similar in moving across the globe without the aid and reassurance of having family at his destination.
Part of our discussion incorporated the idea of what components do or don’t constitute a home. Interestingly, his definition wasn’t linked to a physical place particularly, and while I tend to think of my various homes in terms of the geographical space they occupy, there’s a lot more that makes a place feel like home, the chief of which is the people. I’d even go as far as to say that the only things we ever really have a lasting connection to are other people, purely by virtue of the fact that they move and change with us as we do in a way that physical entities can’t, whether that’s a house or even a country. Even religion, to some extent, I would argue is something that doesn’t particularly change and instead it’s our relationship to it that changes and the effect it has or that we give it in our lives.
The reason that I consider home to be dependent only partially on the place is because I feel as though I have multiple homes and also because I can be somewhere and it not feel like home. I think if you can feel a sense of being at home in a place regardless of the physical space and geographical location, then that’s a pretty amazing thing and the confidence and reassurance it can bring you is hugely valuable.
I think that home is also something dynamic, and the reason it conjures up feelings of safety and relaxation is not because it remains still and fixed, but because it moves with you and your relationship to it is the thing that remains more constant. With nostalgia for a home that you’ve known or a time when home felt more reassuring, I think that the reason it feels that way isn’t because home is something constant, but because you’re remembering it within the context of who you were at that time. So because we as people are ever-changing (or at least that’s what I think), home is also by necessity ever-changing with us. Time for a song lyric.
No matter where the journey leads you, if your path leads to somewhere new, you’ll always have a home in this heart of mine. – Home (Scott Alan)
This is part of the reason why I think that people are so instrumental to the idea of home and also why a home is itself dynamic and changing like a person. We as people are forever changing, and any home we have and continue to have has to change with us to remain so.
That’s also the reason that I don’t think that a place that has once felt like home is forever and always a home to us. How many of us have gone back to a place we once knew and loved deeply, only to notice little things that have changed about the place or things that we previously didn’t notice that now annoy or upset us in some way? We change, and the homes that don’t change with us cease to feel like home.
On a related note, Ed also wrote about the idea of arriving into a place that already feels completely like home, where you’re instantly recognised and loved even if you’ve never been there before, which he described as being like the idea of love at first sight, albeit with a place. Another close friend of mine once said to me that they didn’t believe in love at first sight but they did believe in lust at first sight, partially on the basis that lust is more of a physical and visual emotion. I agree with the idea of love at first sight not being a case of love as we later come to describe it, but I think that’s partially a failing of the English language to have just the one word ‘love’ that we use to refer to so many different and varied emotions. I’m all in favour of a development in English that would result in having many different words for love, like the oft-quoted idea of the Inuit people having many different words for snow to differentiate between them.
Essentially, that’s the reason that I talk about ‘making’ or ‘building’ a home, because I think that something intrinsic to the definition of home, or of my definition at least, is the idea of it being something that you put time and effort into. But like a lot of emotional or philosophical journeys, I also think it’s one that doesn’t really have a finish line. I still phrase it as ‘building’ a home, but I think it’s a project that is always under construction and for which there is no singular fixed end point. Have another song lyric to finish.
It’s where you’ll never feel lonely, whenever you’re alone. That’s how you know you are home. – Home (Frank Wildhorn)
This lyric, from the song somewhat appropriately titled ‘Home’ in the musical Wonderland (a darker take on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass), I think best encapsulates the moment that Strasbourg began to feel like more of a home for me. Yes, to begin with things were pretty lonely and I found that quite difficult in the first few days and weeks, but when I reached the point where I began to find enjoyment and solace in the loneliness, perhaps better termed the most positive solitude, I began to feel like my flat and the city of Strasbourg had become home.
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