I moved to the French countryside alone (Ep. 02)

Okay, so let's pick things back up where we left off last time. In February of this year, I just couldn't ignore the reality any longer. I wanted to create an entirely new life in the countryside. So much so that I said goodbye to my apartment in Paris. None of this made very much rational sense on paper, but then again, I've never been very interested in living life that way anyway. and it will bring it to the unknown and who knows where it will end. That first bite is delicious. And so is the third. But it doesn't taste so good after 100 bites. In fact, I sweat at the idea of eating any more chocolate cake without a moment to breathe. Paris is a rich and decadent city. It is an overload of art and culture and stimulation. People and places and sounds. For someone like me, living in that chaos all the time started to make me feel like I was going insane. I couldn't hear my own thoughts. I felt restless. I prefer to treat Paris like the chocolate cake that it is. I want to go when I feel like having some. And then when that mission is complete, I get the heck out of there. Before I eat so much chocolate cake that I feel sick. So I went about looking for a quiet refuge with the obsessive curiosity of a forensic scientist. Every detail mattered. When I made my announcement, many of you were worried I'd be leaving my parents who sold their home and moved to France to be closer to me. Well, that's not what you think. Nah. So my parents were thrilled with the tips. It's important to think about how life looks differently depending on where you place yourself. I like to think of these different environments as concentric circles. For most of my adulthood, I've had the inner city life. Like everything in life, there are always trade-offs. Inner circles have things like greater convenience, but all of those conveniences come with other things you don't want. Noise pollution, air pollution, lack of nature. Outside of that is suburban life. A little less chaotic, a little more spacious, but still relatively close to the action and lots of people. What I suddenly felt a calling to do was to go further out. Big open spaces, like what I grew up in as a kid. No power drills, no mopeds. No beeping delivery trucks. Nature. I needed nature. I needed to find a place that had the calm and spaciousness that I was looking for, but not so far that I ceased to have access to the city when I want to pop in. Thanks to an incredible system of trains here in France, I knew what I was searching for was not impossible. So that line of thinking helped me narrow my search to within Ile de France, the region that belongs to Paris. Perfect, except that still represents thousands of towns and villages. The enormity of the task ahead of me was only beginning to dawn on me. Most people don't realize this, but there is so much that France has to offer outside of Paris and even outside of all of its big cities. Remember, this is the country that apparently has over a thousand different varieties of cheese. There was only one way to get a better idea. of where to go. So off I went with a backpack and a luggage. Getting out there, wow, what a feeling of freedom. I can't tell you how right all of this felt to me. Maybe I'll feel differently in the future. My priorities always seem to be changing anyway. But embarking on this journey, it just felt like exactly what I needed to be doing. But it's not here. There's too many people. I hear the cars passing. No, no, no. We're not far too far. This town is positively magical. I mean, dreamy. So peaceful. So beautiful. Oh my god. Spending time in villages is great and all. But pretty quickly, I came up against a big problem. When you're far from the city, There isn't a whole lot of public transport. It's way harder to get around without a car. My American driver's license had expired. That's how long I've been living abroad. So I signed up to a driving school in a small town. But it was going to take six weeks to get it. That was literally the fastest I could get it. So I was going to need a better way. Now if only I could find a vehicle with wheels that isn't a car. Are you kidding me? Everything is covered in mud. Impossible out here. I can't see. Everything that could go wrong is going wrong. So with the sun on my face and wind in my back, the search continued. Come hell or high water, I was going to find my new home. Before I go any further, I want to thank the sponsor of this video, whose support makes all of this possible. Without my sponsors, it would be so much harder to finance the production of these videos. and I want to continue to push my own boundaries to tell the stories I want to tell. Now, I haven't talked much about this just yet, but sometimes I have moments of doubt when I embark on big new projects like this. I'm sure this is probably the same for everyone, and doubt is just doubt. Often you've just got to push through and commit to what you're doing. Still, it helps to have tools and systems to better navigate those difficult moments. What you see is a really polished, buttoned-up video of the best moments of my life. But what you don't see is all the emotional processing, It has to happen behind the scenes for me to get to the place where I can present this stuff to all of you. The side of things that you don't think about when you're romanticizing life in the countryside. But this is good, I'm practicing the muscle of patients. I don't think I would have been so solid to make this massive life shift and go on this adventure without the support of my therapist who has changed my life. This is what I like so much about BetterHelp. They make getting therapeutic support much more accessible. Where traditionally, it really hasn't been. It's more affordable. But it's also built to fit your schedule. You can test different therapists out until you find someone you click with for free. And you can communicate however you prefer, whether that's by text, audio, or video call. It's easy to sign up and get matched with someone immediately. There's a link in my description if you're interested to check it out. Or you can just go to betterhelp.com slash Nathaniel Drew. Clicking that link helps support this channel, but it also gets you 10% off your first month of BetterHelp. And now, back to my adventures in the countryside. So often in my life, my impatience has gotten me in trouble. And this year, I'm learning about the incredible things that can happen when you give everything a little more time and space. Somehow, I knew from the beginning that this was going to be a multi-month journey. So March turned into April, and April turned into May. My world grew warmer. The birds sang louder. With every passing day, the sun would take more time, meandering across the sky. The feeling that stood out to me about this spring... was a sense of magic. A feeling that had begun to seem like a distant and fading dream throughout this last winter, which had hit me hard as it always seems to. I fear losing that feeling of magic. Sometimes I find my way back when I just let go of the things that I'm holding onto so tightly. I've tried so hard to figure out the rest of my life, but I'm realizing that's an impossible task. There is so much beauty in having something capture my attention, for that to run its course, and then it being time, for something new. I am thrilled and awed by all of the surprises that come with each new chapter of my life. New places, new ideas, and new people. I just feel giddy all the time. I just feel giddy. It's just me in the fields. Oh my god, I love it. The French countryside holds many incredible secrets, just like everything the French seem to touch. It feels aged and layered. You can feel the centuries that have been lived here and on my journey. I met two really unique characters that I'd like you to meet. I'd be lying if I said I didn't struggle a bit to stay patient in finding my new home. Sometimes I felt alone in my search, so I'd look to stay in people's homes. One day, I found a listing online for a temporary room in a home. And that's how I met Jean-Luc and Joseline, two artists in their 70s who welcomed me into their beautiful home. She's a sculptor, and he's a photographer. I just get along really well with artists most of the time. We don't have to agree on everything. When we spoke about politics, we certainly had our differences. But there was a mutual respect beneath all of our words that mattered so much more. We spoke about how they met decades ago. I would like to go home with my wife like my father, in the last week, at 84 hours. Often, we'd have meals together, which was when we'd have these conversations. The two of them showed me their workshops, which were in a barn they had fixed up next to their house. They grew up in a different world. It was so fascinating to me to see examples of their work from throughout the decades. It reminded me that I want to work more with physical things. It was a real joy for me in working with my hands. I'll leave a link to both of their work in the description if you're interested in checking it out. So, this is what my life looks like right now. and I cannot even begin to guess what comes next. When I stop deluding myself for a moment, I realize that's how it's always been from the moment I was born. I feel an impulse to figure out what comes next, but instead, I've just been creating space to learn a new way of living. You don't have to rush through your life if you don't want to. In some ways, it's been a bigger change than if I moved to another city in another country. This is a whole new world that I'm entering. I'll just say that my priorities are shifting. The thing I'm most drawn to is learning to live more in the moment. To notice what I'm experiencing at all times. I have so much to learn still. I feel a bit like an amateur, honestly. But that's probably normal. You've got to start somewhere. That's okay. I have a whole lifetime to keep practicing. To keep learning. Isn't that a wonderful gift? Oh, and just so I don't leave you hanging. For those of you that keep asking me, where did I end up? Well... Just when I was least expecting it. There is so much more to come. If you want to see where this adventure leads, you know what to do. I can see you like trying to stop smiling. We transition by going into your mouth like... Yeah, yeah, it's like a cool 2016 travel transition into my mouth.

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Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro
00:35 – Paris is like chocolate cake
01:53 – But what about my parents??
02:26 – II. What am I looking for?
03:10 – III. The Search Begins
05:02 – IV. The Search Deepens
06:38 – Sponsor
08:13 – My multi-month journey
09:43 – I meet two French artists
12:44 – So this is what my life looks like right now
13:48 – Just so I don't leave you hanging...
14:15 – Bloopers