École-o-mania, or: yes, all of France is organized around the school year
Updated: Sep 3
In the United States, I always felt like Christmas Day was the moment the world would finally explode from the built-up frenzy of pre-holiday hysteria. Weeks of anticipation, coordinated outfits, school concerts, office parties, shipping deadlines, sugar, lights, and questionable inflatable lawn decorations all seemed to gather force until there was nowhere left for the energy to go.
Here in France, it is a bit different. The great national acceleration does not happen in December. It happens in September. We go from a long summer torpor, as if we were floating on a tire tube down a slow river — it’s an American thing — to lurching over the falls in a barrel. This year, it happened sometime between Monday and Tuesday night.
By Tuesday morning, everyone seemed to be free-falling into the current of the new school year, gathering speed and getting soaked with insurance forms, multi-colored pens, medical clearances, bus passes, and binders filled with children. You may have heard the roar of the water upriver before the fall, yet it still felt somehow unbelievable. How can a country go from languor to logistics in a day?
Ah, but here, this is how it is done. We pay for our summer languor by building up a debt of deferred agitation. July and August may belong to the body — to heat, naps, train stations, cousins, beaches, empty offices, and the strange suspension of ordinary obligations — but September belongs to the calendar. The calendar always comes to collect.
I do not know exactly why it is this way. I am an expat too. I am still, after all these years, partly observing from the outside, taking notes on the rituals and pretending not to be confused by the stationery list. But I do know that the frenzy can feel exciting after the stillness. There is hope in the newness of things. A clean notebook is not nothing. A sharpened pencil can resemble a promise.
Still, the rentrée is not only about school bags and timetables. There is another rentrée, less visible but often more demanding: the psychological one. After summer loosens the structures that usually hold our lives in place, we return not only to work and appointments, but also to ourselves. And sometimes we come back to find that something has shifted.
Summer has a way of interrupting the stories we tell ourselves about how things are going. We travel. We see family. We spend longer stretches of time with partners and children. We return to old places, or old versions of ourselves, and then discover that they do not fit as neatly as they used to. There is more room, briefly, to notice whatever we have been too busy to notice during the rest of the year.
For people living away from the country where they grew up, this can be especially disorienting. Perhaps you return from a visit “home” and realize that home is both entirely familiar and not quite yours anymore. Perhaps you come back to France and feel grateful for the life you have built here, while also suddenly aware of how lonely it can be to live between languages, customs, and assumptions. Perhaps time with your partner has made certain tensions harder to tuck away. Perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all, and yet you return feeling that something is different.
That is the odd thing about the psychological rentrée: it often arrives disguised as ordinary life. The children go back to school. The emails start multiplying. The calendar fills. Everyone seems to know what they are doing. Meanwhile, beneath the practical avalanche, a quieter question begins to insist on itself: Is this the life I want to be returning to?
Not necessarily because anything needs to be blown up. Not necessarily because you want to leave France, leave your relationship, change your work, reinvent yourself, work out regularly and all the things that influencers exhort you to accomplish. The question may not be asking for immediate action. It may simply be asking for attention.
One of the hardest parts of living abroad — and I suspect, of being a person generally — is that contradictory feelings are not bugs in the system. They are the system. You can love France and feel lonely here. You can miss home without wanting to go back. You can love someone and still feel unhappy in the relationship. You can be grateful for the life you have created and still wonder whether something is missing. You can want to belong without wanting to surrender the parts of yourself that make you different.
We tend to distrust these contradictions. We rush to solve them. If I feel this way, I must need to leave. If I chose this life, I should be satisfied with it. If I love this person, I should not be unhappy. But feelings do not always arrive as instructions. Sometimes they arrive as information. Sometimes psychological change begins not with a decision, but with the capacity to stay with a question long enough to understand it.
That may be the more private work of September. While the country sharpens pencils and labels notebooks, some part of us may be asking to be noticed too. What did I learn about myself this summer? What did I keep avoiding during the year? What am I longing for? What have I outgrown? Where do I feel most like myself? And perhaps most tenderly: what kind of life am I returning to, and does it still feel like mine?
There may be no immediate answer. That is all right. The rentrée already asks a great deal of us. It asks us to find the forms, buy the shoes, answer the emails, remember the codes, and re-enter the current. Perhaps we do not also need to resolve the deepest questions of belonging, love, identity, and home by Thursday.
Perhaps it is enough, at first, to notice them. To let the questions be spoken aloud, in whatever language feels most natural. To admit that the return to routine can stir up things that summer only briefly made visible. That, too, can be a kind of rentrée: not simply returning to the life we left before the holidays, but returning to ourselves with a little more awareness of what we need.
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