I was captivated by Europe at 14. I’ve spent 20 of the past 30-odd years living and working in Amsterdam, Helsinki and Paris. My wife is French. My kids were born in the 17th arrondissement, have two passports and are both brilliantly bilingual.

So writing about Brexit was never going to be easy.

My first independent trip to Europe – on the boat train from Victoria, to stay with my French penpal – was two years after Britain joined the EU. I had my first puff of a cigarette, kissed a girl for the first time, went (most shocking of all) to a restaurant en famille when it wasn’t even anybody’s birthday.

And I learned that it is not obligatory to feel crippled with very British embarrassment when arguments about politics get passionate – which, over the past three years, has gone some way to saving my sanity.

The job of Europe correspondent, which I now do after working for the Guardian as a London-based feature writer and, before that, as a foreign correspondent in three EU capitals, was intended as a way of reporting the continent differently.

Like many news organisations, the Guardian covers the big member nations and, of course, the institutions in Brussels, but does not always look beyond them. The plan was to do news as necessary, but also more in-depth cross-border journalism: reporting and analysing how different EU countries, including those we rarely pay much attention to, cope with the issues all are now confronting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jon Henley: ‘At times it’s quite hard to keep Brexit in its box; it tends to take over.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

It still is the plan. Unfortunately, though, 23 June 2016 got in the way. Since then, my time has largely been taken up with Brexit: I write the weekly Brexit briefing and present the regular Brexit podcast, as well as reporting and analysing many of the latest developments in this ongoing, slow-motion car crash.

For a while after the referendum I did this from London, where I’d been based for the previous 12 years. But last summer, partly for personal reasons but mainly because it was obviously better for a Europe correspondent to be based in mainland Europe, I moved back to Paris, where I was chief correspondent for nearly a decade until 2006.

And covering Brexit from the continent has proved an eye-opener. After half a career spent outside it, I’d like to think my view of Britain is not entirely anglocentric. But seeing at first hand how we are observed abroad, particularly at a time like this, has only underscored how much Britain’s take on Brexit is, well, British.

Up to a point it’s only natural, of course, for national media to report what happens in Brussels through the prism of the national interest, and for politicians to big up their claims of what they will be able to get out of negotiations with the bloc that Britain, for reasons best known to itself, voted to leave.

But the UK’s fraught, interminable and increasingly shambolic efforts to quit the EU have revealed, for many on the continent, a country locked in a narrative of its own exceptionalism, still clinging to the mistaken belief that when push comes to shove, 27 countries intent primarily on defending their own national interests will somehow end up giving Britain what it wants because, come on chaps, we deserve it. We’re Britain, after all.

Throughout the entire process, it appears from here, the Brits have been negotiating essentially with themselves, rather than with the EU27. And when they have tried they have proved inconsistent, incoherent, entitled and wholly incapable of compromise either with themselves or their neighbours.

Above all, Britain has been unrealistic, and startlingly ignorant of the workings of an organisation it has belonged to for nearly 50 years. So much of what has been proposed from the UK side has simply been impossible – but because it continues to view Europe through that uniquely British prism, it proposed it all the same.

Here’s the key thing: the EU is a legal construct, a rules-based organisation built on a half-century accumulation of laws and treaties. Its greatest single achievement is the single market, which its remaining members strongly believe has raised prosperity and living standards across a continent, and whose rules are non-negotiable.

So it was never going to be possible for Britain to “negotiate” Brexit with the EU27 – especially since, in the memorable words of Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s prime minister (a man not often listened to with great attention in London): “When the UK was in, all it wanted was opt-outs. Now it’s going to be out, and all it wants are opt-ins.” Ultimately, Brexit was always going to mean what the EU27 said it meant.

It has taken a uniquely British combination of ignorance and arrogance to assume otherwise: a blind faith that solutions that did not actually exist in the real world could and should be accepted; that the EU27 would roll over and give Britain all it asked for; that Brexit – as ministers promised – “has no conceivable downsides” and would be “the easiest trade deal in history” because “we hold all the cards”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two activists with the EU flag and Union Jack painted on their faces kiss in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 19 June, 2016. Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters

Pascal Lamy, the former World Trade Organization chief and EU commissioner, perhaps summed Brexit up best, in the days immediately after the referendum. The process would, he said, be like “trying to take the eggs out of an omelette” – and so it has proved. The real question is, how could anyone have ever imagined it would not?

Watching the shortcomings of one’s country and its political class be held up to the light, carefully examined, and then roundly ridiculed by people for whom the UK has long been a model of pragmatic common sense would normally, of course, be painful. Oddly enough, it isn’t particularly.

I find the idea of Brexit painful – very. I’ve never worked on a story at once so huge, and about which I feel, personally, so strongly. At times it’s quite hard to keep it in its box; it tends to take over. I was never the kind of person who swears at the radio or the TV; Brexit has made me that kind of person.

But what has gobsmacked continentals is not so much the Brexit decision itself: a country should of course, if it wants to, be able to leave the EU.

It’s the way politicians (and large parts of the media) have handled it: their failure to come clean to voters about the fact that the Brexit they were promised does not exist; that any Brexit at all will come at a hefty price, certainly in the short and medium term; and that Britain, in the 21st century, simply does not occupy the same place in the world as it did in the 19th, or even much of the 20th.

That’s what has revealed to Europeans a Britain that they did not know existed – and that, really, I didn’t either. So I’ll be mighty glad when it’s over. Not just because Brexit feels to me like an amputation, but because I’d like my job – and my life – back.

As Brexit advances (or, at present, not) the Guardian will remain at the heart of Europe. More than ever, we aim to cover the continent in the kind of breadth and depth that no one else does. That’s what I want to be doing. But I’m not holding my breath. Painful as it is, Brexit has quite some way to go yet.