Friend #16 - Marisa
The girl from tenth-grade French class
Marisa, I love a sentimentalist.
The first conversation I remember having with Marisa was in tenth-grade French class. I hadn’t honed my nosiness then but I managed to find out that she was born in Jamaica and immigrated to Canada with her family when she was seven. “I started playing the piano when I was seven,” she told me.
“Oh, so when you moved to Canada?” I replied.
Marisa remained a friend until the end of high school. Not a close one but one who I admired and respected. She was and is the most brilliant writer I know.
When we spoke a few weeks ago, she called me from her apartment in Montreal. She now works as a reporter for the Financial Post.
“I still play the piano,” she laughs when I remind her of our first major encounter.
As we reminisce on our high school days, the topic of over-achievement makes its way to the forefront. I admit that in high school I ran blindly toward the goal—getting the highest grade possible in every class without knowing what I was trying to accomplish. “This problem is almost endemic,” Marisa says.
After completing her undergraduate degree in international relations, Marisa spent two years studying journalism and international relations at Columbia University in New York City, though most of it was remote due to the pandemic. The city eventually became the epicenter of COVID which forced her to leave.
“I didn’t have any illusions about New York,” she tells me. “It’s a very transient place with people from all walks of life but I’m sure you know from your time in Miami, the US can be a confusing society.”
Marisa stayed with a family member in New Jersey for a few months and studied Italian in her free time. “I think that was the best thing to come out of the pandemic,” she says.
Learning French took me on an adventure throughout my late teenage years and into my early 20s. Marisa had a similar experience and recently passed her DALF C2 exam, the highest diploma of French as a foreign language issued by the French government.
“I wonder if we were in France at the same time,” Marisa says.
“I was there for the first couple of months of 2018. In Strasbourg,” I reply.
Marisa spent her entire third year in Aix-en-Provence, a university city in the south of France that I visited in 2015.
She describes the year as a formative one. “I had time for hobbies like playing the piano and reading and it was there that I decided I wanted to write for a living. I was writing a blog in France and I noticed how my writing brought people together. It was this paradigm shift and I started thinking, ‘what if I wrote for a living.’”
The two of us compare our time abroad and both bring up that people in France know how to balance work and life. “We’d go sit in the park for hours and there was a part of me that thought, ‘is this how we’re going to spend our entire day?’’’ Marisa says.
My time in Strasbourg taught me the importance of mealtime: the art of simply eating without distractions and for the purposes of enjoyment. Marisa says, “If anyone needed an excuse to visit, it was common to say something like, ‘I have this bread going stale, come eat this bread with me.’’’
Marisa has been in Montreal for two and a half years. She lived alone at first but then acknowledged her loneliness and realized it was better for her well-being to live with a roommate.
“I take tennis, art, and Spanish classes. I see the same people in my Spanish classes,” she says.
We discuss the difficulty of making friends as adults. The intentionality and directness that must follow any positive encounter for a relationship to grow, especially in a world of remote work.
“Do you want to stay in economic journalism?” I ask her.
“Yes, I think so. I like that I can attack social issues from a financial lens,” Marisa says.
In journalism, French has allowed her to interview some impressive people, like Emmanuel Besnier, a billionaire who rarely speaks to the press. The interview can be found here.
“One of the best things about journalism is that my sources teach me a lot. I recently got investing advice from a billionaire,” she says.
“Would you ever go back to school?” I ask her.
“Maybe far into the future if I ever wanted to teach one day. I like the lifestyle of a professor—being surrounded by young people and having my mind opened.”
Vivre, connaître la vie, c'est le plus léger, le plus subtil des apprentissages. Rien à voir avec le savoir.
― J.M.G. Clézio
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Hey Friends! I’m working on turning 52 Friends into a book. It will be a collection of essays about loneliness written by you. Inevitably, the selection process is tricky but if you have an experience with loneliness that you’d like to share, please contact me at miriamsamdur@gmail.com.