I (shockingly) don’t have it all figured out

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I wanted to come back with a fun and vibrant story about how life in France has dramatically improved, how everything is going brilliantly, how I've 'found my people' and built a stable and secure life for myself, all by myself. I wanted to write about fun things, things that people would be interested in reading. I told myself that people have enough going on in their lives and I wanted my blog to be a place for people to laugh and momentarily forget whatever difficult thing was happening in their life.

I waited and waited for the moment where I felt better about my life to write my next post. I would write a fun, happy post, one that people would find amusing. I didn't want to fill my social media with photos of me doing fun things, happy and smiling when that wasn't actually reality for me, I didn't want to contribute to the deception of social media, so I waited and waited for the right moment to start posting again. I waited and waited and now it's been over two months.

Although that 'perfect' moment hasn't happened yet, I love writing my blog posts and I didn't want to stop just because I was feeling a bit down in the dumps. Instead of lying and pretending everything is fine, or going completely silent, I've decided that I could actually, maybe be honest too.

Life in France is hard. Harder than I imagined, and I can't put my finger on what it is exactly. I look back at Alicante and Budapest through rose tinted glass, as if everything was easy there (spoiler: it wasn't). Between French administration, living life in my second language, a long distance relationship and navigating living life by myself for the first time, I have my hands full. It can be really overwhelming but I try to be grateful for what I have- an amazing studio apartment close to the city centre, a new proficiency in the French language I thought I would never achieve, the opportunity to help people everyday through my volunteering work, the laughs I have with the children I look after. I have a life that people (myself included) dream about and I am aware of how lucky I am.

At the same time, I think I have always been under the false impression that life is like a recipe- you eat well, exercise, do things you like, do the things you don't like but need to do and everything will be fine. You will be happy. If you aren't, it's surely because you've missed out on a step in the recipe. You've clearly made a mistake somewhere. I thought that if I was exercising, looking after myself, keeping my apartment clean, socialising and keeping myself busy, then I should be happy. If i wasn't it's because I've done something wrong. After months of torturing myself, trying to figure out what step of the recipe I've missed out on and trying to constantly find solutions to 'fix' how I feel, it is slowly dawning on me- to my absolute shock and horror- that sometimes, things are out of my control. As a self proclaimed control freak, this was definitely not the realisation that I wanted to come to but I'm realising as I get older that everything I thought I knew, I don't. I thought I knew the recipe to being happy. I thought I knew how to thrive living abroad. I thought I knew french verb conjugation. It turns out that I actually don't know any of these those things. And that's okay, because who really knows anything anyway?

As I try to make sense of this period of my life, I realise that although I was looking after my body and my mind, one thing that I had completely neglected was my soul. I think Western societies are particularly negligent of the concept of looking after your 'soul' or 'spirit.' A lot of the time our sole focus is keeping the wheel turning- going to work, earning money, indulging in whatever the newest product is popular on social media. Consuming. Whatever we can do to maintain the status quo and uphold the system. The truth is that we completely forget about the part of us that isn't there to perform or to consume, the part of us that is there just to be and experience.

I was fortunate enough to begin my year exploring Paris with my boyfriend. We saw the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame and so much more. I felt like my head was on a swivel, everywhere I turned I saw something new and beautiful. I spent the first week of this year practising being and experiencing, without any expectations of myself. It was like a breathe of fresh air. A welcome reminder that life isn't just working and doing and producing but also, simply just being there. I don't know what the next year holds but I know that after just one week of letting myself 'be,' I feel so much more ready for whatever is to come.