oh no i've been neglecting my blog

i've published very few blogposts this month. i'd like to blame it on moving to a new country. or would i? i mean, it's definitely coinciding with me moving to a new country. but it was definitely a conscious choice to let myself ease off of daily blogposting while moving—not exactly directly a result of moving (though some days i genuinely did forget because i'd been doing moving stuff all day). 

that's fine and all, but with any break comes the necessity of breaking the spell of the break. that's what i set out to do with this post here. 

though i haven't been writing very much, i've been reading a whole lot. so much that i have really surprised myself. i got a library card a few days ago and came home ten books heavier. i brought a big chunk of them with us for a long weekend, and i've already blazed through all but two, one of which is an oscar wilde anthology, so i would be truly gobsmacked if i managed to blaze through that one as well. 

it's been years since i've consumed books with such fervor. something must have clicked finally back in place recently—after years of a shoddy, threadbare attention span that was lucky to manage two pages a night, i'm reading entire books in single sittings, like i did before my attention span needed fixing. 

it hasn't yet, i guess, since i haven't written anything yet, but i am sure this will improve my writing as well—or at least influence it. one of my recently read books is famesick, a memoir by lena dunham; i haven't read many memoirs, or maybe i just don't have any in recent memory, and this made an impact on me. it made me wonder how i would memoir-ize my own story: what angle would i take? what overarching themes would help me make sense of where and who i've been? 

moving to a new country inevitably involves tears

i erroneously thought that being in a better place now for my move to sweden meant that it would involve basically zero tears, in contrast to last year when i moved to germany and cried what felt like daily. but alas, moving to a new country inevitably involves tears. being better prepared for something doesn't mean i won't have any feelings about it, it just means i'll be more resourced to deal with those feelings. 

i moved to germany completely unprepared. what i mean by that is i didn't learn the language in advance, didn't do preemptive research about what living there would be like. i simply got on a plane to be with my boyfriend, and didn't look back. 

for a long time, i thought of myself—quite self-righteously, i might add—as someone who would never move to a country without first learning the language. i studied abroad often during my college years, to two different countries where i learned the language of both. 

what you don't realize when you're young is that you're not always operating under ideal circumstances. for example, you may meet the love of your life and end up unexpectedly moving to a new country to be with him, before you've had a chance to learn any of the language. well, that's ideal circumstances in some sense, but unideal from a preparation perspective. 

as happens often, i became what i had previously judged—this time, a foreigner ignorant of the local language. 

perhaps the most interesting part is that in some ways i almost refused to acknowledge this, and continued operating on the assumption that i am someone who speaks the language of the places that i travel to. this meant i forced myself to operate in german as much as i could, despite, again, literally not knowing the language. there is no moral high-ground in attempting a language you literally do not speak yet. 

now i have moved to sweden. my swedish is in much better shape now than my german was at the time of moving to germany. but it's still not where i want it to be. and even if it was, moving to an entirely new place is inherently stressful, no matter how well-prepared you are. 

so i found myself today in an inexplicable bad mood, pushing through it until i finally broke down in tears. specifically, i was crying about wanting to give up on swedish, feeling like every family event we attend constitutes a failure on my end, for not daring to speak any swedish. 

but generally, i was crying out the entire stress of the move. we have to rebuild every single routine. some things we don't have to think as much about, like scrambling to find weights at the gym (our new gym is overflowingly well-stocked). some things we have to think about much more, like buying alcohol (even cooking wine) only at the state-run alcohol store. 

on the whole, almost everything is better here. we're closer to family, we have less of a language barrier, and our neighborhood is exponentially quieter than our place in berlin. since we've moved, i've been getting straight 100s on my sleep score from my apple watch. 

and it's still stressful. even good things. it'll take a while to find our groove, but i'm proud of us for making the move and doing what needs to be done. 

i'm feeling better than ever! and also more annoyed

over the past year, my wellbeing has measurably increased as i implement healthier habits and spend time being happy with my fiancé. i'm no longer plagued by constant lethargy and migraines. curiously, i also get annoyed more often than i did before. the big difference is that while before, i repressed the irritation before even consciously recognizing it, manifesting various psychosomatic complaints as a result; now, by contrast, i acknowledge and express the annoyance as soon as i can, letting it pass through me rather than settle somewhere in my body. 

this is all coming into clearer view as i begin re-reading healing back pain by john sarno. i've never had any significant back pain specifically, but the book tackles a wide range of psychosomatic issues, despite a focus on back pain. i've read it once before, at a time when i had been losing hope that i'd ever get a handle on a persistent shoulder pain that i initially assumed was some sort of injury and later began to consider as a manifestation of some sort of emotional pain instead.

my first reading of the book was particularly frustrating. throughout, the author repeats over and over that he has cured patients with mere education about the issue: specifically that the pain is nothing structural and is purely psychological in nature. after learning this, his patients felt their pain vanish, either immediately or over the course of a few weeks. reading this while in the throes of my own pain, i wanted to scream and thrash about, begging the author to explain how exactly that could be the case, and especially, how that would ever be helpful for me since i already knew my pain was almost certainly psychosomatic and hadn't yet been able to make a dent in it.  

thankfully, albeit ever as inexplicably, my pain also vanished as the weeks passed. at first, i had started to make an effort to name and face any emotion that crossed my path, treating any surge of pain as an indicator that i should search for a feeling that my body was trying to actively repress. this was tough work, but seemed to help. after a while, i stopped being as conscious about it, but seemed to be improving all the while anyway. 

the shoulder pain specifically has resolved almost completely. it was especially helpful to resume physical activity without fear of aggravating or worsening an injury, because i was confident there was no injury to be worsened (sarno talks about this in the book, but i wouldn't have believed it applied to me if i hadn't previously just seen a physical therapist whose examination concluded the same: no injury or structural problem, just "weak postural muscles," the very same muscles sarno posits are involved in the pain disorder he describes). i began lifting at the gym, and now have some muscle in my arms (and elsewhere on my body) where before i had none at all. 

i do still have small acute issues here and there, but i can usually pinpoint the emotional stressor and move through it in a reasonable time frame, compared to a low-level baseline pain i experienced previously. i also noticed flare-ups when i don't get enough to eat. 

as i start reading healing back pain a second time, i already feel much more receptive than i felt before. i've made significant progress moving through pain that felt intractable, and i feel hopeful that a reread can help me even more deeply, especially as i work through my emotions (like anxiety, irritation, and anger) more consciously this time around. 

we moved!

we moved to sweden, so the last few days have been quite hectic. our wifi turned off on the last day of april, and for some reason my cell service was downright atrocious, so for the remaining days before we moved, i was all but off-the-grid, save for the times i mooched off of my fiancé's hotspot. 

so now it's been several days since i've written a blogpost, and i feel some friction getting back into it. what do i even write about? is it even worth doing? why not keep the break going? 

but i want to do it. even when i'm fuzzy on the reasons why. so i'm making this post to break the spell and get myself back in the groove. 

it's funny, i didn't realize until writing this post that it's potentially been a long time since i've written any meta-post—a post about blogposting. which i assume means i've been in an adequately-oiled groove of writing about things other than writing. that's great news! 

i don't tend to notice when something that used to be hard has become easier. my fiancé is great at pointing it out for me. it's nice to recognize when i've made progress, rather than just continuing to be hard on myself regardless of where i'm actually at in the process. 

i'm excited to live in sweden. i think i will adjust much faster than i did when first moving to germany a little over a year ago, but i expect i will still have a clear adjustment period. i'm glad we've spent so much time here before moving here permanently; it doesn't feel like an entirely new and alien place. 

our (nearly) empty old place in berlin. we got to leave some stuff since our friends (hopefully) will be replacing us as tenants!

last fashion show in berlin

today i'll be modeling in a fashion show for the last time before we move away from berlin. my model bag is packed and ready to go and my stomach is slowly twisting itself into gentle anticipatory knots. my fiancé will be coming, and gets to sit in the reserved section since we each got to have one guest attend for free. 

this is somewhat of a full circle moment, tying things up in neat little bow: the cast of models (as well as the hair/makeup artists and the organizer/model coordinator) is a repeat from some previous shows i've done—the first i'd ever done in berlin. and now they'll be with me in my last. 

last night, i was reminiscing with awe about the casting process for those first shows. i had found a casting call on instagram and showed up the next day, hoping to be cast. usually casting calls occur in some room inside some building, but this was out in the open—anyone could join, and anyone could watch. 

before this, i had heard that fashion contexts in berlin would likely be mostly in english, but i quickly realized that was not the case. armed with perhaps a handful of days of my a1 german class, i ascended the stage, strode right up to the microphone, and introduced myself in simple german, switching to english only for the second half of the sentence explaining "why i'm here." then i catwalked confidently down the stage, in the blazing sun, in front of a small panel of judges and a large, mulling crowd. 

i don't know what possessed me to speak so confidently in german instead of just introducing myself in english. it felt a bit like when i was around 5 years old, at a pool with my large family, and wandered off to try the high dive on my own since no one was watching me. when i enter a context with no one expecting anything of me, i can accomplish things i haven't ever done before. when no one is around who knows me, i can be free to be someone new entirely. 

at today's show, that won't be the case—so many people around will have seen me model on the runway before. that's a good thing. i want to become more comfortable expanding my capacities around those familiar with what i have achieved before. i want to free myself from the limits that close around me when i'm afraid how i'll be compared to my past self. i want to explore the vast expanse of possibility, even when i'm nervous to be different than i was before. 

home alone for a weekend

being home alone (for more than a few hours) without my fiancé for the first time was genuinely psychoactive. i enjoyed my time and was more productive and functional than i expected, but i also felt strange emotional echoes of the me i was before i met him, and found it nearly impossible to sleep.

we've lived together for over a year now, spending almost every second of that time together. this weekend was the first time we'd be apart for several days at a time. my fiancé was traveling away to france for a friend's bachelor party—a friend whose wedding we're attending in japan in a few weeks. i'd be home alone with our dog, bianca. 

my biggest fear was that i'd revert to being basically nonfunctional. before we got together, i had difficulty motivating myself to complete tasks, from household maintenance to leisure activities. i worried that without my fiancé around as a regulating presence, i'd regress to my old ways. 

i was pleased to discover that for the most part, that didn't happen. the only exception was that i had incredible difficulty making myself go to sleep. without anyone else around, it was somehow a hundred times harder to put my phone away for the night and close my eyes to sleep. i also found that lying there in bed, i felt a loneliness i hadn't felt since moving to be with my fiancé. 

i did eventually fall asleep, after moving to another room and cuddling with bianca. and all in all i still managed to get 6 hours of sleep the first two nights, and 7.5 hours the last night. normally i get around 9. 

despite my relative lack of sleep, i did manage to be productive in a satisfying way. i've written before about how my creative process has evolved since no longer living alone, and i took this opportunity to indulge in creative endeavors i wouldn't be as comfortable doing when someone else is home, like modeling practice, trying out new tiktok styles, and making a youtube video. 

i also went shopping a few times! normally i forget shopping is even a thing, but i really should go out every once and a while. getting a cute new dress is just an absolute thrill (and i still have room to rebuild my wardrobe after moving continents). 

throughout the weekend there was a strange sense of "who am i now, in this context?" i felt a slightly disorienting return to a shade of some previous self, almost like i had teleported my past self into this new context, but without my fiancé physically there to make it sink in. 

when my fiancé returned home, it felt almost surreal. the sun shone differently, sculpting him with gorgeous shadows and illuminating him with a brilliant outline. he looked so unbelievably handsome i actually couldn't believe my eyes, tearing every time i caught sight of him. with him finally home, i slept like a rock. nine solid hours with zero wake-ups until my alarm went off. 

maybe it sounds silly, but this weekend felt like integrating my lonely previous self with the happy healthy self i am with my fiancé. i felt anew how much joy and brightness my fiancé brings into my life, and how heart-wrenchingly, earth-shatteringly i love and adore him. he's the hottest man in the world and just lives in the same home as me! i get to see him every day! i'm eternally grateful, and i can't wait to marry him.

STOP THE COUNT!!!!

last month, i wrote a post about my fascinatingly linear blog growth so far, joking that everyone should coordinate to view my blog approximately 1727 times in april—so the trend would continue—that'd be great. 

imagine my surprise when i log in today and see that the count for april so far is exactly 1727. like, am i being punked? (but no for real, is this just genuinely a coincidence? does blogger have some sort of algorithm? are they showing my posts to people? i'm baffled.)

so yeah, if everyone could do me a solid and not view my blog at all again until may...that'd rock.