My grandmother came up with a brilliant non sequitur when I called. "That's nice," she said distractedly. "Did you hear that your cousin Julie was on Studs and her date is a weightlifter?" Nearly every woman in my family has had a baby by the age of 21, and I, perversely, was going to Oxford. This was stepping out of line as surely as if Chelsea Clinton had decided to go to a community college. We tell ourselves that American meritocracy makes all things possible for everyone; it's the logistics that get tricky, the small details of boldly going where no one like you has gone before.

It was Mom's comment that pinned me like a bug on a specimen card. Contemplate the absurdity of the scene. No long apprenticeship, no proving yourself through promotions or gigs or publications, just a catapult -- at the age of 21 -- into your 15 minutes of fame. Your brief, previously undistinguished life reels by with digital clarity: the high-school guidance counselor who called you an underachiever. The coach who cut you from the track team. Even your own mother doesn't believe this sort of thing happens to people like you.

I began to feel like a sea animal trapped in a tidal pool, exiled in a new and threatening environment, unable to get back to my own atmosphere. Although I had gone to Bryn Mawr rather than the University of North Dakota and said shockingly disloyal things about my intention to leave Minot for good, I belonged to my origins. I was still a Minot Woman. Now the Atlantic stretched wide, a physical manifestation of everything I didn't believe I could do, or should do. It was that moment of disconnected terror we all experience at the shedding of an old identity and the assumption of a new, inchoate one. We embrace the old; it's everything we've ever been. The new garments we hubristically don may well be emperor's clothes: a public humiliation that will expose us as poseurs.

At times, the disconnect between old and new is so wide it borders on the schizophrenic. The next autumn in New York, I met the American Rhodes scholars who would fly to London with me that night. Bigger than life they were: football and track stars, an aide to Al Gore, actors, a model who would shortly be one of People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People, scientists who had already published technical papers, a successful entrepreneur, someone who had worked with Mother Teresa. In such company, who wouldn't wait for a hand at one’s elbow, the voice saying there has been some mistake? How can you take your place among this group without displaying the inconceivable arrogance of believing that you belong? And when you must stand and present yourself, do your mother's awed words come back to you, and is it paralyzing? Elbow to elbow with my new comrades in a 747, I felt pressed up against a cold glass that separated us, me on the outside, them on the inside.

The adjustment to Oxford life wasn't nearly as difficult as those first hours with the Rhodes class. Few people -- certainly not the British -- cared who we were, and we made our cultural blunders and discoveries without any intrusive supervision. When I wore a rowing jacket to a session with my supervisor and his kind features rose up in horror, I felt a warm sense of acceptance and nurturing at the idea that he would worry whether I misused my study time.

As foreigners in Oxford we were so free that the rare gesture of semi-parental expectations came as a welcome symbol of belonging. Some of us found, to our great joy, that the burden of success, carefully accumulated throughout frantically busy undergraduate careers, could be laid aside briefly in favor of vivid conversations, sunny afternoons in boats of every variety and voluptuous reading of all the books we'd never had time to open. At its best, Oxford can be a cocoon from which your better self is reborn.

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