Mökkihöperön Lokakuu

Finnish is a great language for a lot things, like catchy headlines for blog posts. The above means something like "the Cottage Lunatic’s October) and it describes my feelings pretty well. Yesterday was a bad day, today is being even worse. After having spent a while crying it’s now time to try to solve the problems, after all, that’s why we are facing challenges: to overcome them.

At this very moment I am:

• very dissatisfied with myself: my face is drowning in spots and none of my trousers fit well.
• sad: there are lots of great things going on in my life, but unfortunately I can’t share them with anyone, because quite frankly, those things don’t interest anyone I know. What hurts my feelings isn’t really the fact that people don’t like the same things as me, but that they don’t even make the effort to pretend or try to be interested. It makes me lose both motivation and faith in myself and my abilities. I am fully aware of the fact that this is a problem that has its roots in my personality and personal experiences, though, so I probably need to look for other ways to motivate and believe in myself.
• lonely: I work at home, I study at home and I even exercise at home. Most of the activities that require leaving the house I do alone. I have some good friends but unfortunately we are not seeing each other very often because our schedules clash. This means that I have too much time to spend with my own head.
• worried; considering the amount of work I do, I earn quite well, but it doesn’t mean that I have a lot of money to spare. Everything has to be calculated carefully. If anything unforeseen happens, I will be out in the cold. Right now it’s my laptop that is causing me a headache: it keeps "crashing" once a week (sometimes it simply won’t start, and sometimes it doesn’t connect to the internet). It’s essential for both work and school, and if something happens, I won’t be able to pull 500e from my pockets. 

So, these are basically the problems that make me want to hide under the bed and never come out again. This month I want to eat more healthily and do more exercise (and run that 8K), so at least I should be feeling better about myself at the end of the month. It will be tricky to combine this with the lifestyle of the people around me, but I’ll have to find a way. In the long run my health and wellbeing are far more important than pleasing the people around me. My skin has always been complicated, and it’s probably worse now because of all the bad food and negative thoughts.

The loneliness is probably the most acute problem: I like being on my own and I don’t mind spending the days alone, but it might be a good idea to find a running buddy (where? none of my friends run), join a gym (can I really afford it?), meet friends more often (how will we arrange that?), and squeeze in little adventures into my daily routine (what? where? how?). I though about doing voluntary work as well, but... can I find the time? And where can I find that? Another things I’d like to do is meet East-European people here in Valencia and practise my language skills... where do I find them?

Money... ah. I always have the Finnish government to turn to unless everything else fails, but I hesitate because I already have one university degree, and I don’t want to live on other tax payers’ money*. So... how can I earn more money and still have time for studying? Selling myself is probably not a good idea (I doubt very much that anyone would be interested: see point 1 :)). what else can I do? I have thought of giving private English lessons since I speak better English than the average Spanish person. Where could I find potential pupils? Maybe some translations could be a good idea?  Starting my own company? That’s a little dream I have, but is it something I would be capable of? And what would I do?

Well. This is what will keep me busy in October... hopefully I will be writing a far more positive post on November 1st.

One more thing: if you have read this post all the way to the end and have any opinions, suggestions, ideas, wise words or advice, then they’re more than welcome. At this point I could really use any help I could get :)

 

 

* Finnish students receive both study grants, living aid and student loans (totalling an approximate 800 euro/month) from the government (the sum is higher in the Åland Islands).