The Velvet Type

November 19th, 2025

Nothing is what I thought it would be.

I 100% mean that in the most dramatic way possible.

All my life, I have felt like a caged animal, gnawing at the bars of my enclosure. As a U.S.-born citizen, Gen Z, and a deeply sensitive personality, life has felt like one catastrophe after another. So I left.

I left everything I’ve ever known, every person, place, and sense of familiarity. I packed my bags and hopped on a flight to Europe. It wasn’t a way for me to escape, to run away from unresolved experiences from the last 25 years of my life. It felt like I was leaping into the murky depths of the unknown.

That’s exactly what happened. The grass is not always greener, and without a support system, it feels like everything is going to sh*t. I haven’t had a stable foundation to support me on my adventures, well… ever.

I moved to France, to a rural town in the northeast of the country, where the buses run every hour and the closest city is an hour away. I feel out of my mind half the time, like this was one big slap in the face, another mistake, another mess-up. But what if it’s not? What if this is all part of a bigger story I have yet to read through?

It’s the what if that haunts me. The inability to simply give up and move back home. Go back to a life full of cars and overconsumption. I enjoy the convenience of America, but I left for a reason. I left because there’s this thing inside me, it’s a hungry beast that refuses mundane routines, repetitive days, and a lack of adventures. It’s a powerful hunger that refused to be ignored any longer. It clawed and ripped me apart from the inside just so I would recognise it was my soul screaming at me for more.

I listened, for the first time. I packed, obtained a visa, bought a flight, and now here I am. Quite lost and confused. But this time, this isolation has cracked me open in ways I have never experienced before. It’s forced me to look at the deepest parts of me that have been starved for far too long.

I don’t have some magical fix, some answer from the great beyond. Right now, it feels like I’m navigating alone in a dark, empty forest with no light to guide me down a path.

It’s quite terrifying to be so alone. I’ve always been alone in a way, it’s this hollow space that I keep searching for ways to fill. But this kind of alone, in a foreign country, with a foreign language, and an ocean away from family and friends; it’s a depth of isolation I’ve never experienced. It’s kicking your feet at the bottom of the ocean every day, just hoping to break the surface.

The craziest thing is that I can’t give up. It’s been one month and 12 days. Not much has physically altered my experience, but my internal world that I’ve relied on my entire life is crumbling. Bits and pieces that have clung to me over the years are chipping away and forcing me into something new. I don’t know the shape yet, I feel more like a pile of playdough with no direction on what to make it into. But it’s this hope that’s sparking in the darkness, that the shape will begin to take form before I even realise it. That everything will eventually amount to something more, that this is all just temporary, a learning experience I’ve forced upon myself.

Right now it feels like everything is going to sh*t, that the rain will never clear, and I’ll continue to slip through the mud for all eternity… But something else is being built that I can’t yet see; maybe it will all work out, maybe it won’t. At the end of it all, I’m trying. Isn’t that what life really is at the core? Trying new things and seeing where it takes you? Maybe I fail, but what if I don’t?

I think I’m going to post weekly, document my emotional world in words that may or may not do the experience justice. But if someone sees this, and they connect with it in some way, that’s all that matters to me. 

Signing off,

Kassandra L.