When I Find Me, I'll Come Back to You (much trendier)

I have about 600 hours to go before I will be in France as an expatriate. I’ve been feeling a lot of mixed emotions this past week, which include, but are not limited to: nervous, excited, sad, dread, ecstatic, and most definitely in denial. Packing is going okay, but I have no idea how many clothes I really want to take (who wants to look American in France anyway). Brother Olsen will be glad to see that I can fit in my suitcase (sort of) so he can use my plane ticket and come with.

Lately, as I have been driving around my hometown, buying odds and ends to take with me to France for my school year abroad, I keep hearing the popular song “Come Back to Me” by David Cook. The lyrics that seem to bounce back and forth in my mind are: “You say you gotta go and find yourself / You say that you're becoming someone else / Don't recognize the face in the mirror / Looking back at you.”
When people ask me why I’m going to the University of Nantes for a school year I often jest that I am going on my “scheduled existentialist period.” Most people laugh, but secretly I’m serious. I’ve seen my peers blossom and transform into their respective niches as adults, while I have been avoiding the idea of being defined all together. Any major personality changing decisions I simply avoid by going back to finishing my homework. I’ve been suppressing the inevitable, because it scares me to know that my fate- or who I am going to be as an adult is in my hands right now and I have no idea who I want to be. I see before me that I can become whomever I want: the successful businesswoman, the athletic soccer mom, the eco-friendly vegetarian, or a myriad of other potential people. I am no longer bound by high school labels but I don’t know who I want to be, so I’ve just avoided the entire concept of changing altogether.
Aristotle is quoted as saying, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” So I’m leaving you all so that I can make the rest of my college experience an inherent part the person I am to become. I’m packing my bags and I am going on my scheduled existentialist period. I’m nervous, but excited to be an expatriate; it will be quite the experience to start from scratch. In France, absolutely no one knows me, my values, my religion, my parents, my high school, or even my name. I can choose to be whomever I want because no one will know my past so I will simply have the present to mold myself into the person I want to see looking back at me in the mirror. It is a scary prospect, but I like the idea of figuring out who I am before I make any big commitments.
I’m going off to the unknown world we Americans call France (where people really do shave their armpits) where I will find a new culture, a different lifestyle, and me. I’m choosing to go tabular rasa and be transformed as Ernest Hemmingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot did. “And when you see what you need to see / When you find you, come back to me.” So, when I find me, I’ll come back to you…but remember, I’m not leaving you, you just all aren’t coming with.