Hyper, moi ?

- Hyper, me? -

I had been working in my new office for a little over a week when one day one of my colleagues suddenly turned to me in the elevator right after coming out of a meeting and said "Fned, are you always this hyper?"

It suddenly felt like I'd been hit with a ton of bricks. I was so shocked I couldn't really think of what or how to answer his question and just looked at him with my mouth open and squealed a little "but I wasn't being hyper!" (which probably did little to convince him anyway).

Hours later I was still irked by the comment and kept replaying the meeting over and over in my mind trying to find what I had done wrong that would give someone such an obviously wrong impression of my personality. But even after a minute by minute reply in my head of the entire meeting all I could think of was that I had just been acting like a friendly and optimistic new colleague, and granted, maybe I had gone a little overboard with the smiles (I tend to do that when I'm nervous of meeting new people) but is that really what constitutes being hyper in the UK?

It wasn't really the adjective itself that bothered me, it was more the fact that I hadn't been able to read the signals correctly, nor send them out accordingly.

In France I would have known exactly how to act and what to avoid doing in order to to not come across as being hyper on my first week on the job. Here, suddenly I felt out of my element, out of my comfort zone and completely self conscious...

I am not going to spit in the soup (French expression) and say that we were better off living in France and that moving to London has been a huge mistake. It hasn't. We really have been incredibly lucky and are both enjoying this new experience immensely and feel incredibly grateful to have gotten this opportunity.

But I do think that neither of us had realized exactly how tricky it was going to be.

I'm ashamed to confess that we were pretty confident that with our multicultural background and this being England and all it would all be relatively easy. I mean, we spoke the language, had come here countless of times before, it was technically still Europe and we'd met loads of British people before... basically it wouldn't be too hard, would it?

What complete and utter twats we are!

Since the "Hyper" incident both Hubby and I have often found ourselves in situations where we feel really insecure of how to read the signs, understand the body language, give the correct impression, say the right thing.....

It's part of the "fun" and we know it... and we usually have a relieved laugh over it at dinner afterwards when we realize it really is an "expat thing" and not us individually being morons with the new people we are meeting.

But I guess I had forgotten what feeling "out of your element" felt like. It'd been so long since I'd had the "uh-oh.... did I just accidentally offend her or not?" question pop up in my head. I can't remember the last time I'd committed an obvious-to-everyone-else-except-me faux pas and I've already committed quite a few of those since arriving here!!

But that's subject for another blog post.


When I'm feeling more hyper.


Cheers,
Fned.