At The End Of The Day, What Really Is A Good Tom Cruise Movie?

They say it takes 21 days to form a habit. Don’t ask me who says it. When I first found this out I was in middle school, which means that it very possibly could be an old wives tale that I’ve been led to believe for years, like how I had to be told at age eighteen that milk doesn’t make everyone cough and I am, in fact, lactose intolerant.

I have been in France for 24 days. If I were to believe this fact to be true (I just looked it up--it is not true in the least, and was in fact made up by motivational speakers), then I have made the habit of living here. It’s certainly starting to feel so. I’m starting my internship this week. The lady that works at the bakery that sells empanadas now knows me by sight. I can successfully make it to the grocery store without getting lost.

Things are on track.

However, there are three things from home that I miss. Two of them are kinds of food, and the other one’s my dog. I ordered a dirty chai latte at a Starbucks, and very quickly discovered that not only is that not really something that is ordered here, it is considered an abomination worthy of actually walking away from the customer who ordered it to ask the baristas if it’s possible to make it. I can speak French to anybody and they don’t seem to think I’m slow, but the second I smile at them they switch to English, because that’s the waving red flag of an American. 

There are things that I miss.

But let me tell you, my millions of fans: I do not wish I were home. In fact, the motivational liars were right about how being anywhere for more than three weeks makes you start to see it as something familiar and comfortable.

But this is more than that. I can’t say this without sounding pretentious, so here we go. I have never wanted to live in Austin. I love Austin, it’s honestly the coolest place ever, but as I’ve mentioned here before, the majority of my life has been spent scheming how to get out of Austin. Numerous attempts have been made, and some worked temporarily, but I always came back. Not because I kept getting homesick, but because that’s when my plane tickets told me I had to go back. Also, in most of these situations, I ran out of contacts and was legally blind until I could get home to order some more.

This is all to say that I have spent the majority of my life, picturing my ideal future to be somewhere else. When I was little, I’d think of the college I’d go to or the job I’d get, and how it would be in an exotic far-off land where I could live and learn and meet Brendan Fraser. I’ll admit, at first I just imagined myself as the librarian played by Rachel Weisz in The Mummy. But even when I was a fresh adult who was being asked to plan out her whole life, I would say that soon I would not be here. The first time I heard about the study abroad program I’m in right now was about a month after I started college, and I almost signed up to go the next semester, or to just hop a plane and chance it with the school admin. But I felt God very firmly say that I wasn’t supposed to go until the spring of 2020. After I stopped whining, that became my light at the end of the tunnel. This class sucks, I’d think to myself, but in a year I’ll be in France. I don’t feel like Austin has anything for me, I’d say, but in a few months I’ll be in France. There is a habit that your brain could pick up if you let it, a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel habit as I’ve just coined, where you will live your life not as the life it is, but as the thing you have to endure before you can truly live your life.

And now I am here, and for the first time in memory, there is no light. I have reached my goal, the one thing I clung to for years, and I am happy. It’s only been 24 days, and I’m already feeling everything falling into place. There’s a relief to finally want to enjoy where you are that I didn’t realize existed. Honestly, I wish I’d let myself feel like this more back home.

Of course, this is not my final destination. I don’t like Tom Cruise, and no buildings have exploded in slow motion yet (fine, I looked the movie up to make that pun, I realize Tom Cruise isn’t in it, and I have no idea if there are explosions). I will go back home in a few months, and if I were to trust my intuition, my light will flip back on in the tunnel. But it will not be the same tunnel, and I will not be the same person. I will have built a habit of being happy in the elsewhere, and that is not something even a motivational speaker can take away from me. 

I don’t really know where I was going with this, only to say that I am here, and I am happy, and now, no one can forget it.