The art of relocating - Part II - "Legitimacy".

A note on some feelings which recently surfaced, when Vanessa and I ran into a couple we hadn't seen for a while, and what began as a pleasant enough conversational exchange, soon had us on the back foot, in a sort of panicked display of what can only be described as "anxious over-explaining". It was very aparent that this was a central tenet to our personal sense of being in the right place.

If our sense of belonging relates to the emotional landscape of moving to France, then legitimacy is the ground under our feet. What we tread upon, stumble over and wade through, can sometimes feel a bit like running through a ploughed field wearing nothing but carpet slippers. Previously, the sense of something feeling totally "legit", was traditionally applied to social media sites or maybe emails from @1836&42#.nigeria.con - roundly connected to our sense of true or false - easy to spot and dismiss. But on this occasion, it all got a bit personal.

Legitimacy for relocators to France can often lean into having the right visa, health cover, or an International drivers license. It's satisfying and even slightly smug. Rock solid, paperwork precision. But it's also the sense that we have a "right to be here" that is much more deeply internalised. That we feel allowed and almost authorised to take up the space in the life that we are building in France. Relocating can somehow throw that into chaos.

We arrived in France with a fairly well sketched plan. Find a country estate that matched our business model, seek out investor capital, buy the property and get to work. There was no millstone around our necks with regard to a timeline, or expectations around "by next year at the latest", so we felt fluid and ultimately capable. OK.. so there were maps, with arrows and lines and colured sticky dots; stunning villages, interesting bits and places of general interest, side-by-side with the blacked out bad-lands of the industrial French North-East.

It's not long before the narrative needs to be presented to the people you meet. "So what are you guys doing here?" is the story starter where we press "play" and our personal long-and-short-of-it, becomes the intro. Our informative and interesting calling card, by which we define our presence. All well and good, until you run into the same people 6 months later, and for one reason or another, the actual anecdote has not really shifted. The shift occurs in the feeling of somehow having to "explain yourselves..." for each little setback and speedbump, for the probems and the postponements. Delays and missed deadlines - interpreted as Vanessa and I generally sitting around, thumb-twiddling - or as one commentator unmindfully suggested, "scooting around France like gyspies".

The fear associated with "not being quite as legitimate as we thought", quickly goes internally viral. It is imposter syndrome on steroids. People we met or ran into only occasionally, were taking our plans yet "unfinished", as purpose "unworthy" and we chose to feel it accutely.

Legitimacy has an inner economy. It fluctuates like an exchange rate, inflating when things go according to plan, and hissing with escaping air when we lose a bit of forward motion. But some people don't seem to get it. Nice chats end up being awkward explanations, that sound like we are accusing the dog of eating our homework, or the cat got at the business plan, or a sudden gust of wind carried away the colurful French maps with lines and dots and arrows. We even found ourselves avoiding people to whom we would "owe" a comprehensive progress update.

Relocating can feel like a colossal lesson in suspended momentum. It is not easy, requiring significant vulnerability, self-belief, courage and sense of purpose that are above and beyond the appetites of many. Not that we are in any way better or braver, but just hard-wired to a different purpose. Legitimacy is the X that marks the spot - the massive gulf between worthiness and shame. Worthiness says "you're doing your best" while shame chimes in with "you are not where I think you should be, you are clearly failing and you don't deserve it". Legitimacy, standing slightly dazed in the middle, gets slapped in the face with a wet haddock.

Of course it's not just the opinions of others that jar and bother us, our own internal chat threads are full of traps around i) Comparisons - "How come they succeeded and we haven't yet..what's wrong with us?"; ii) Isolationisms - "We don't know anyone well enough with whom we can be truly vulnerable"; iii) Finance-based self-doubts - "Are we brave or just bonkers?"; iv) The over-explaining - "Yeah, so the Notary got Covid, two big investors had a sudden change of heart and we discovered termites in some woodwork"... the funny thing being, that number iv) is the actual truth behind our delays..

Each chip to the vulnerability of self is small. Barely visible. But over time, we start to shrink a bit. We diminish ourselves. We start down bumpy tracks of aplogies where none are even necessary or justified. We seem to wear, with an uncomfortable willingness, the badge of failiure. The legitimacy gap opens. The space between "we actually have a plan" and "our plan appears to have caught on fire". Existentially, I start to get a bit angry.

Angry at myself, mainly, because in reality I have given my power away to a stary of acceptability. Of deciding that I have an obligation to explain myself. To justify the dealys around the deadlines with a plausible rationale that will somehow soothe other peoples misplaced curiosity. In a walnut shell, we found ourselves attaching legitimacy to outcomes, rather than our own strength of character. A rookie error? Probably. But we are done with that.

Like true belonging, legitimacy is not negotiated externally. You can't earn it in other people's eyes. You especially can't borrow it, through candid, cock-and-bull stories. The discomfort of delays and disappointments has to be leaned into willingly and without the need for approval-seeking justifications. The discomfort itself is where our identity and self worth begins. The choice of integrity over image. I would even go as far as proposing that legitimacy has more legs precisely because things take longer, cost more and stretch our self-belief to its elastic limit. Anyone can feel ligitmate when it's all going well. But that is not the reality of relocating. There are pauses and punctures and problems. But legitimacy forged in those fires, is a sword worth weilding.

All journeys are over when they are over, despie the repetitive, seagull cries of "Are we there yet?" Just because it hasn't happened yet, it doesn't mean it's not happening.

So perhaps that is the real art of relocating - the part we can teach oursleves. Belonging - the feel of truly "landing", asks you to open your heart. Legitimacy requires that we stand tall in our shoes - not perfectly, but honestly. Then, we have a very good chance of saying "Honey, I'm home".