I’ve finally reached the stage where I’m just bursting to writing about everything that has happened to me in the last few months. Now that our Danish Internet company has failed yet again to get us online I’ve decided to write it in Word until I can get online properly again. (As you can see we sorted it now!)
I’ve been in Denmark for some time now and the honeymoon period has worn off so I can see clearly again. Since I’ve been away I’ve been up and I’ve been down and I’m back on a more even keel. I find that when something changes my life so dramatically my mind can’t keep up with it all, life becomes almost dreamlike. This paired with the mania that swept me along at first left me open for a lot more than I bargained for.
I think there is something hypnotic about having to spend a lot of money when you’re not used it. It seems to trigger something in me to become reckless and this then infects every level of my being. I get caught up in thinking the universe will catch me from every fall, no matter how much I put myself at risk. I believed I had finally reached the point where the world was bending over backwards in order to get my dream; to be a professional writer and photographer.
I was sure that everything was coming into place. I’ve often had times in my life that when a change was necessary, money I needed suddenly appeared, jobs were offered and houses fell into place. This has happened to me so many times before, when I saw it happening again in order for us to move to Denmark I got the fancy idea that all my worries were over; I was about to become what I always wanted to be.
In a way I have done that, or at least what I need to be for the time being, but I am not where I expected at the start of things. In fact I really had very little expectations to start with; Ray had done most of the work by going over first. I had some idea, I didn’t have a clue.
I heard someone say once ‘you can’t know your own culture unless you see it from the outside’. This has really rung true to me in this move. There is enough here that is the same as Britain, like the countryside for example, but there are many things that are different: Buying oil to heat your home a year’s worth at a time, looking after a wood burner, no internet grocery deliveries, free education including university level and much more that I’ll no doubt be writing about to great extent.
One thing I have found to my cost is that people are still people no matter where you go. I don’t want to go on about it in great depth because I can’t really blame anyone for being who they are and having issues, we all do, but the 8 or so friends we had before we moved have dwindled to perhaps one (although we haven’t heard from him in some time).
Let just say that our former native house mate left us with no car in a house in the middle of nowhere. He was supposed to have fixed us up a car so we didn’t have to rely on him so heavily, but he hadn’t done so. I have no real idea why he left so abruptly but I think tensions built up and then miscommunication and fear did the rest. So again Ray and I find ourselves on the outskirts of society, in this case quite literally, but this time in a foreign land where we are illiterate. (For a writer that last part is painful!)
This is, as you can imagine, when the depression kicked in. I knew now that we had a lot more bills to cover and I would have to work again. Well I know that now; back when this was happening I was hiding from the fact, convinced if I thought hard enough I could find a way in which to get round it. This delusion lasted until last Monday when finally I was forced to face the fact if I wanted to keep this beautiful house in this beautiful place, the kind of place you could grow old in, that I would have to sacrifice my fantasy again.
One thing that has been good about going through this down though was that I learned something vital about depression. I learned that no matter what you love, what your passions are, given enough ground depression can make you loose your interest in anything.
For a period we had both fallen into a slump, to allow a bit of time to recover from the shock of being cut off from our friends. In this time I had plenty of opportunity to work on my books and take some wonderful shots out of the window at the sunsets here. I couldn’t do it, the depression was winning. I was almost convinced that all I wanted out of life was to stare out of that window at the countryside and think. That was the sum total of my ambition.
I’m not saying that we don’t need a break to regroup sometimes and I do think I needed it, but I realised that unless I fight this creeping, infectious assumption I would loose my books to it. I would loose anything I wanted out of life.
At this point when I saw this pattern unfold in my mind I realised that this same attitude that spoiled everything could be the cause behind my phobia and loathing to be in my line of work in IT. There are many real issues that make it difficult, but on the mental level if I don’t have the motivation it just doesn’t get done, if I do it always does in the end.
As soon as that was in my mind I knew it was right and over this week I’ve gradually come back to a more stable mindset, without any medication ever entering my system. I seriously feel ready to venture out there again, only a week ago that was alien to me. Sometimes it just takes one thought to turn your life around.
I’ll be going over some of the other topics I mentioned here later on, as I’ve much to say on my move to Denmark, but these thoughts seemed to want to come out first so here they are.
So, I offer these words for reflection…
