At ten years old, I threw a very "Parisian" birthday party — Eiffel Tower cake, my golden doodle's hair sprayed pink, berets, and of course, crepes. All the French clichés. For years, I collected Teen Vogue, decorated my room with everything Paris, and dreamed about my first trip to Europe.

As an undergraduate, studying philosophy and psychology, I fell in love with the work of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, wrestling with existentialism and dreaming about the Parisian cafés like Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore where he wrote. The Eiffel Tower posters eventually gave way to Monet's water lilies, and somewhere in all of it, I was apparently manifesting a life I couldn't quite see yet.

Then I married my Frenchman from Lorraine, and suddenly, France wasn't a dream anymore. It was my grocery store, my préfecture appointment, my boulangerie, my Sunday mass, my village. C'était ma vraie vie. My real life.

I'm Jayde, a Pepperdine MA psychology graduate, USC doctoral student in mental health leadership, and an American building a real life in the South of France. Not the Paris of postcards, but the France most Americans never discover. Markets on Tuesday mornings. A language that still trips me up. A culture that has quietly rewired how I see everything.