It was 2015. I needed a job and wanted out of Seattle after growing up and going to college in the same six-mile bubble. The solution came via a post on a neighborhood blog: FRENCH FAMILY SEEKS AU PAIR. A woman named Valérie needed someone to watch her seven-year-old twins in Paris. The au pair would take French classes at the Sorbonne and live in a separate dorm-style room in the family’s apartment building in the heart of the city. Food, a cell phone plan, health insurance and a metro card would be provided.

A brand new life without having to do any of the boring parts of setting up a new life?! I was sold! After a couple of Skype calls to be reasonably sure it wasn’t an elaborate human trafficking scheme, I applied for my visa and booked a one-way flight to Charles de Gaulle. For the next 15 months, I forged a new life against the backdrop of my old one, mingling the lessons conferred by each and adjusting their ratios to create a cocktail of my own design. 

This process began in the apartment where I now lived and worked. Valérie and her partner Yann were younger than my parents and in a committed civil union, but unmarried. (Umm, romantic much??) I was mesmerized by Valérie’s collections of work-appropriate jumpsuits, books from a past life in publishing, pastel bottles of creams and lotions jostling for space on the bathroom counter. She thought pansexuality was beautiful and that an apartment without music was “sad.” She gave toasts! On Sundays, Yann closed the kitchen door, turned the radio up and made soups, quiche or crème caramel. He disapproved of the way I said “mmhmm” instead of opening my mouth to say yes. We bonded over Saturday Night Live and at Christmas dinner, he made his teenage nieces and nephew laugh till they cried at the far end of the table.

The twins, Adèle and Héloïse, were climbing all over me within minutes of my arrival. They were identical, with big brown eyes, the kind of full brows Glossier claims it can give you, and wavy, walnut-colored hair that formed rats’ nests if you looked away for too long. Big emotions bubbled out of their compact, wiry bodies: giddiness when we counted cars in a traffic jam, indignance when I confiscated a ball of Silly Putty they’d decorated with shards of broken glass.

Adèle once explained with a world-weary sigh that she had wanted to be a stylist when she grew up—until she realized her sister would be “saving the world” as a veterinarian. Héloïse so ardently believed Peaches the woolly mammoth should have married Ethan instead of Julian in Ice Age 5 that she wrote a letter to Pixar about it. They had already had American au pairs for years and sounded like native English speakers. With each other though, they broke into high-speed French, entering a universe all their own that was impervious to interruption by adults or oncoming traffic. They required hawk-like supervision on sidewalks. 

When I was in elementary school, I achieved autonomy over my homework by proactively doing it before getting back to whichever YA fantasy novel I was sure to finish by bedtime. I was also really unpleasant to anyone who tried to help. Thus, it was generally from a safe distance that my parents encouraged me to do my best.

Adèle and Héloïse were as obsessed with books as I’d been, but firmly eschewed the work-before-play model. They had to be coaxed from the toilet, where they’d linger reading as long as they could, to the coffee table to do their homework. Once they were there, it was an interactive—and even physical!—activity. One time I was reading Adèle vocabulary words to spell while she did a headstand facing the couch. A few words in she lost her balance and fell backwards, screaming as her nose crunched up against the base and started pouring blood. Valérie and Yann reviewed the kids’ homework every night and chided them for misspellings and messy handwriting. Valérie’s mom, a retired lawyer who visited from Normandy every month or so, devised additional exercises for them to do as she whipped up crêpes and financiers for their snack.

Beyond my commitments to the twins, I constructed a social life and strove to improve my deficient French. When I spoke to locals in the beginning, they mostly responded in English. Maybe they were just excited to practice with a native speaker, but they might as well have said, “You sound terrible and I can barely understand you.” At my friend Marion’s game nights, I’d move around a lot so that no single person had to spend their entire evening talking about things I had the vocabulary to discuss: hometowns, food, siblings. There was definitely a time where I didn’t understand we were in the middle of a serious geopolitical discussion and piped up to ask Baptiste what his favorite color was.

It was a hectic time. I thought back on high school and college when I was juggling school, work, extracurriculars, dating and friendship—how my parents often told me I was doing too much and needed to slow down. That’s one of my family’s values: not being too busy. We always relished days with no time constraints, where a garage sale would lure neighbors to our garden for coffee and donuts, which would turn into afternoon drinks, which would turn into dinner. Any obligation that cut the flow short was a nuisance. Yet the further into adolescence I got, the more compartmentalized my days became. I developed a reputation for “always rushing off somewhere.” I felt guilty about it.

But as I got to know Valérie, I noticed she moved at my speed. She’d breeze in from work around seven, pour us each an Apérol spritz and give me her undivided attention while we caught up at the kitchen table. Twenty minutes later she’d unapologetically move on to something else, but the duration of our bonding sessions had no bearing on their value. When I was overwhelmed by how many things the girls and I had to do after school—homework, piano, English, bath, dinner—she offered tips for doing them more efficiently. Wash Adèle and Héloïse’s hair every three days instead of two. Use the steamer baskets to cook fish and broccoli at the same time. One evening I was heading off to an open mic and told her I hadn’t had time to practice. Instead of saying, “Well, you pack your days too full, honey!” she waved her hand as if to say not to worry and assured me I would practice on the way there.

It wasn’t the first time someone taught me how to wrangle a part of my life that had been vexing me. In ninth grade, I met my best friend Greta in sixth period choir. As we caught each other up on our entire lives that year (once, famously, behind a music stand that Ms. Burton furiously slammed down, revealing our chattering faces and firmly shutting us up, before continuing her lecture), I was struck by—and studied—the way Greta told stories. She made fun of herself constantly and cackled right along with me and whoever else was listening.

She also laughed a lot at other people’s stories, asking questions to underscore the funniest details and teasing the storytellers in this benevolent way that made it impossible for them to take themselves too seriously. Once I let it slip that I didn’t like showering and definitely didn’t do it every day. She called me Cavewoman for the rest of high school.

I used to get really embarrassed as a kid. Forgetting my clarinet on orchestra day made me burst into tears, and I wished I could sleep for a week after peeing my pants in front of my friend Tim. (Note: I actually peed next to him, but effectively on him. It happened in my family’s Volvo and the pee rolled right across the pleather backseat, soaking his jeans and probably his socks. Tim, a literal angel, had the good instincts to ignore reality and make pleasant nine-year-old small talk while my mom mopped him up with a sweatshirt.) 

I even felt outsized secondhand embarrassment for others. There’s a German word for that: fremdschämen. One afternoon when I was six, I was playing with a friend on the sidewalk outside my house. Partway through our game, we noticed a girl our age walking across the street with her parents. When the girl saw me, she waved enthusiastically and shouted, “Hi, Rachel!” After a moment she realized her mistake and said, “Oops, you’re not Rachel. Sorry!” then skipped off down the block, probably never to think of it again. I spent the rest of the day sobbing on her behalf. 

But in high school, I discovered that telling Greta about an embarrassing moment transformed it into a funny story. It not only inoculated me against all future embarrassment or fremdschämen associated with that moment, it crystallized a conversational centerpiece I could wield proactively! I controlled the narrative!!

That’s how, as high school went on, I became invincible. Getting pantsed in the hall, sneezing a huge snot bubble onto my arm, walking into a pole while casually chatting with an ex: these were stories for the story bank. I paid a lot of attention to funny women, mainly accessible to me via SNL since I didn’t have a computer. Kristen Wiig was my favorite. To be able to so fully inhabit characters as wide-ranging as the Target lady and an A-Hole buying a Christmas tree is simply unjust. 

I eventually learned that the women of SNL had all done improv. So, though I had never seen an improv show or so much as watched Whose Line Is It Anyway, I joined an improv team in college. In the beginning it was terrifying. I was used to memorizing lines, not making them up on the spot! I hated miming objects! Why couldn’t we have real props?! I felt like I had a finite number of characters: condescending English lady, nasally woman who pushes her glasses up her nose for emphasis, Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist. I burned through all of them in the first few weeks. I didn’t know how to track my own improvement, so instead I shouldered the anxiety that comes with taking perpetual shots in the dark. I had a hard time responding to the last thing said because I was trying to think ahead, or because I was distracted by roommate drama.

When improv is good, it’s magical. At its best, it feels like making eye contact with someone across the room and knowing you’re thinking the same thing, and wanting to laugh but having to hold it in because you’re in church or class, which makes the whole thing ten times funnier. At its worst, it can be excruciating. But regardless of how your scene is going, you have to maintain strict control over your brain. You are allowed to think about 1) what your scene partner just said/did and 2) what you’re going to say/do next. You are NOT allowed to think about how the audience feels about your “zombie crow” character or the way you mime grating cheese. It’s kind of like a chaotic version of meditation.

I’d arrived in Paris wanting to take improv classes, but didn’t like the show I saw at the only school with classes in English. So I found an open mic on Meetup.com and decided to become a stand-up comic. I started spending Thursday evenings in a tiny, cave-like smoking room in the basement of an Irish bar near Les Halles. The audience, mostly comics, sat on stools. There was the requisite creepy guy who joked about cheating on his wife.

On the improv team, I’d learned that “the specific is universal.” You could get a laugh at campus shows just by moisturizing with Jergens Natural Glow instead of lotion, or by setting a scene in Lois McDermott’s Psych 101 class. But in front of a largely French audience, most of my go-to specifics were useless. French people hadn’t gone through stereotypically American rites of passage like prom. “Jello salad” meant nothing to them. They had interacted with both children and Americans, however, so material about the kids I nannied or cultural differences between France and the United States was a safe bet. 

I liked responding to things the kids did as if adults had done them. Adèle used the mixed drink emoji in a text I let her send from my phone, which was clearly “a cry for help.” I compared making dinner for her and her sister to being a chef in a restaurant where you also had to bathe guests and then beg them to put underwear on. 

The formality of the French became a recurring theme in my shows. When you enter a group situation in France, you can’t just wave hello to everyone—that’s considered lazy. You’re supposed to cheek-kiss and say “Hello, [NAME],” to each person, which can really eat up a lot of time and derail whatever conversation was going on before you got there. Initially I found this ridiculous, I’d tell audiences. 

But then I imagined trying to explain the rules for American-style group greetings. “Okay, so you hug the people you know really well, shake hands with the people you’ve never met and wave to everyone else. But if you’re good friends with everyone except one person, just hug that person too so they don’t feel left out. Unless they seem like they’re not a hugger, in which case you can wave to them. Though you could just wave to everyone at once if that seems like that’s more the vibe…” We’re a mess.

The formality of the French language was fertile ground as well. When you translate French directly into English, it sounds pretentious. The way French people say “I’m looking at you” literally means “I regard you.” I gawked when Parisians in their 20s talked about wanting to faire l’amour (translation: make sweet love) without a trace of irony. And it wasn’t just their words that sounded flowery, but their rhetoric. While I’d heard American guys push for unprotected sex based on pure sensation, one French guy took a more philosophical approach: “You know een life, we ‘ave to take reesks…”

Years of bombing onstage with my improv team had beaten most of the embarrassment out of my body, and my days in France took care of the rest. Bombing as a stand-up comic felt more personal because I couldn’t chalk it up to an unlikeable character or something one of my teammates had done. If the audience didn’t laugh, it was because they didn’t think I was funny. Or more accurately, I learned to remind myself, they didn’t think my jokes were funny that night. 

One afternoon toward the end of the year, I waited for the girls outside their school gates under bright gray skies. The usual crowd of parents and nannies spilled off the sidewalk into the alley, some catching up with each other, some on their phones. I greeted the parents I knew: Inès’s mom, Éva and Chloé’s mom, Noémie’s dad. Then the front doors opened and dozens of laughing, shrieking children came pouring down the stairs. Parents waved and shouted names, trying to catch their kids’ eyes before they descended into the throng. The twins’ cartables—stiff, square-shaped backpacks that were almost like briefcases—got stuck on people and things as they fought their way to me. 

Adèle had forgotten her homework again, so as the crowd dispersed, we walked back up the steps to talk to her teacher. I always spoke English with the kids so they could practice, but I addressed Adèle’s teacher in French. She responded—in French! We chatted for a couple minutes, confirming that I understood everything Adèle was supposed to do that evening. 

But while we were talking, Adèle tugged on my arm, muttering about my accent and how she wanted to go. I put myself in her shoes for a second. She usually repelled embarrassment with this classic French gesture where you shrug, blow a truncated raspberry and raise one eyebrow at the same time as if to say, “So?” I liked the way things bounced off her. But here she was feeling embarrassed about being seen with someone who spoke French with an accent. She was probably also feeling fremdschämen. Her head retreated deeper into her faux fur hood. 

“Just a minute, Adèle,” I said.

I turned back to her teacher and finished the conversation. Then Adèle and I headed home with Héloïse to eat clementines and read The Magic Tree House. A few months later, I relocated to New York, a city with world-class improv where everyone moves at my speed.