begone, inertia!

we moved countries this month, which has disrupted many of our normal routines. including, but not limited to: going to the gym 3x a week, me booking swedish tutoring sessions, and of course, writing this blog. 

that wouldn't be so bad, except that we're also heading to japan for two weeks. which means, if we let it, this could become a weeks-long break from many of those routine tasks. 

my sage and practical fiancé managed to get us in the gym yesterday, so we've been marked safe from a month-long absence there. his reasoning was that even one within those weeks would be better for maintenance than a complete break—though he did say it wouldn't be the end of the world to have an extended break. 

but i felt it prudent to follow his advice. i could already feel the inertia building, and the emotional friction creeping up each passing day. 

so here i am, doing the same for my blog. i can feel the hesitation lingering ever so slightly longer each day. when i'm in the swing of things, my internal "what if i skip today" voice only has the mic for a few seconds, then my fingers take over and i just start typing. 

the longer i don't write any post at all, the longer that voice holds the mic each day, and the less likely i am to break through the inertia and get up any post at all. 

so here's my post! 

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!