When I think of President Le Pen, I suddenly struggle to breathe

Sometimes I can go for hours and hours without thinking about them. In my defence, I’ve been busy – not only in London, with my job and my life, but now in New York City, my base for the next few weeks as I cover the midterms.

Jetlag is forcing me to slow down and focus on the simple things – regular meals at regular mealtimes, as much sun on my face as my retinol-laden skin can handle – and there just isn’t space for much else. It really is easy, as a result, to live my fine and pleasant life while the country of my birth threatens to burn to a crisp.

I’ve been asked for my opinions and analysis on the protests in France often, by friends and colleagues and vague acquaintances I happened to bump into, and mostly that’s what I want to say. They feel so distant to me, so unreal, that an entire afternoon can go by without any of it even crossing my mind.

Of course, it’s an embarrassing admission to make. I’m not just a French person, or a political journalist who has often written about what goes on over on the continent. I’m also someone who grew up in Nantes and who took part in protests there, year after year, from 2005 until my graduation in 2009.

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I can think about those years and picture the countless days we spent blockading our high school, sitting on the pavement and playing cards to kill time. I can picture the route we would take from the school to the centre of town for our frequent protests, and I can still hear myself passionately telling my parents about whatever it was we were angry about this time.

Those memories still exist in my mind but they feel like an odd dream, and I struggle to connect them to the Instagram stories I see of my young cousin marching with a placard in Paris, and my high school friends posting irate statistics on police brutality against young people. One of our classmates lost an eye, nearly 20 years ago, because his face happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was hit by a rubber bullet.

I know all this but I still look at social media every day and what I see there doesn’t feel like it’s real. I read endless pieces in Le Monde and Liberation and they tell me the government’s stuffed, it’s just not doing enough and whatever it’s doing always feels like it’s hitting the wrong note, and I care – obviously I do – but I could be reading about Brazil or Mozambique or Bulgaria instead.

I’ve just been gone for too long, I tell myself guiltily. Next year I will have officially spent as much time in Britain as I did in France; 18 years in each country. Soon there will be two sides of me and both of them will be old enough to buy cigarettes and vote.

It probably isn’t that weird that I can watch my people scream and fight for better lives and fail to be truly moved. Who are “my people” anyway?

I’m in the US now and it’s not a country I could ever call home but I just don’t believe my heart has belonged in France for a long time. I’m sure some migrants manage to cleave their soul and leave parts of it strewn across the world, but it turns out I’m just not one of them.

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That’s what I tell myself anyway, because it’s easier than reckoning with the truth. I haven’t lived in Nantes for nearly 18 years but, when I read the papers and see that Marine Le Pen will definitely reach the second round of the presidential election next year and almost certainly win after that, my throat closes and I lose my ability to breathe properly. It’s a fear that’s so primal that it feels wholly unsurmountable; as purely catastrophic as floods or droughts.

For a long time now, my Moroccan-born mother has said that Le Pen would win eventually; that she can’t be stopped forever. I refused to believe her for years but I’ve no idea what to cling onto now, in order to try and prove her wrong.

I scroll on social media and I read the news from France and I don’t let any of it truly reach me because if it did, I worry the ramifications of it all would floor me and leave me unable to stand back up.

I’m in New York but I live in London and all of it needs to seem far away, because the thought of it all being real would be impossible for me to live with