Hiding in plain sight

I've always spoken French pretty well, for my grade, or age, or amount of time in France.

I always got good grades in French class (except for that semester when I didn't turn in the final and the professor was nice enough to give me a C...) and France and French have always been interesting to me and inspired me to keep working on my French and improving it.

But lately, just speaking the language well hasn't been enough. Ever since I arrived in France, I've been obsessed with losing my American accent, so that I worked on it until I started getting comments about how French I sounded (or that they were surprised to learn I was American).

Loosing my accent became part of the game to melt into the crowd and "become" French, just as much as wearing a scarf and leaving my sneakers at home. I wanted to become invisible, just a regular old nobody and not the "odd foreigner". In Montpellier I'd play the "let's guess who's American game" when I took the tram to class. There were enough of us to make the game possible, and it spurred my efforts to make it impossible to tell me apart from the French woman next to me. I didn't wear shorts or flipflops in town, or my college t-shirt. I bought more skirts and wore scarves.

I thought I was leveling the playing field. "When in Rome, do as the Romans." But the harder I tried, the farther it slipped out of reach.

I'm finishing up my grad school application, and I was talking with someone about about my personal statement, the effort I'd made to write something well in French, and the corrections B had made afterwards. I felt like correcting my French was a criticism of my logic and what I had to say. It's silly, but it felt like I was being judged inadequate. For all the effort I'd made, I still hadn't grasped the logic of the French language and I (or my personal statement) was insufficient.

But then the conversation about my application, and my approach to things in general, made me realize that I shouldn't be working so damn hard to hide that I'm American. I've been so convinced that the only way I'll get ahead is to change my skin, that I forgot two things: first, that I can never really, truly become French like I've tried to be, and secondly, that being American isn't necessarily something to hide or change and that maybe, just maybe, I can see it as a positive, instead of the handicap I was convinced it was. I've been trying to write something that could come from a French student, instead of making it personal and reflective of my American experience.

I used to think it would somehow be "good" to win the transformation game and to become the most French possible. Not only do I see now that it's impossible to win, but it's also a waste of time to worry about. It'll be hard when someone doesn't understand me, and my mind will go into panic "Oh, it's because I didn't say it right. Pronunciation? Grammar? Bad translation? If only I spoke French more like a native...." But I'll work on it. I'll have to stop apologizing for being American, and practice being happy about it. I don't suppose it'll be easy undoing my efforts to hide in plain sight, but being me will be infinitely easier than being not quite French.