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.