I'm also tired

You know how I don't like it when it seems like my blog - or anyone's blog, or instagram, or any of it - only reflect the sunshine and roses parts of life. So I thought it's time to tell you: I'm tired.

There's just so much.

I'm a highly sensitive person. I take in everything. All the new impressions. Everything is slightly different from Sweden, so everything takes slightly more energy to deal with. Everything just functions a little bit differently. Simple things like going to the supermarket or understanding traffic (it comes from the wrong direction!) or understanding how to get a train ticket or getting a library card or understanding the pharmacy and so many more - they are all very small and if it was just one thing I woulnd't notice, but together, it's a lot. And it's all interesting and exciting - and it's tiring.


There's the sleep thing. Liam needs less sleep than I do. And he gets up early (ish) in the morning. And when he leaves for work, I can't go back to sleep (because I don't function like that). And the evenings are the most fun part of my day, because in the daytime I'm alone, so I want to make the evenings longer ... by staying up as late as Liam normally does, instead of going to bed as early as I should to get as much sleep as I need. Someone should have told me I'd get to 33 and still not have figured out the sleep thing. Sigh.


I don't have enough to do in the weekdays. This is one of the more difficult things, because obviously, having less to do should make you less tired, right? Well ... not necessarily. Like I said, I'm sleep deprived. And I've also had a whole bunch of photo work and design work to deal with at the start of summer (which is super fun! But not when it's the only thing I do). And the sleep deprivation makes me less inclined to make fun things happen. So I get the work done, because that has a higher priority. But then I'm just tired and restless and fidgety, which makes it harder to do something constructive, which makes me even more restless, which also costs energy ... There are different ways to be tired: There's the fulfilling fatigue after a day's good, productive, rewarding work, and then there's the empty, nagging fatigue after a day of not doing anything fun or productive at all - just being lazy, and feeling lazy. I've had too much of that lately.


And all the people! Liam knows EVERYONE, which suddenly, unexpectedly means that everyone knows me. He's a visible person, well known in dancing around here, who hasn't been in love in ages, and suddenly shows up digustingly in love with some Swedish person literally from one weekend to the next - I get that people are curious about me. And they are incredibly warm and welcoming and super lovely! It's just that the sheer number of new people and faces, who all speak either fast, quite fast or super fast, take up a lot of mental space. Everyone knows my name and I want to remember everyone I've met (because they're great!), but I don't and it makes me worry that I hurt people's feelings - which is also exhausting.


Oh, and speaking of speaking fast ... The language thing. Yeah, I get that my English is decent, and I'm proud of my ability to communicate in this strange and foreign country, but not having a very heavy Swedish accent is becoming more of a problem than I could have anticipated. I'm starting to wish (not really - only when I'm really tired) that my own English sounded more ... I don't know, foreign? I have to ask people to slow down OFTEN. And I KNOW that people are doing their best, and no one is doing it on purpose. It just gets frustrating when I ask someone to slow down please, and two sentences later I have to say "sorry, but I DON'T UNDERSTAND A WORD OF WHAT YOU'RE SAYING". Speaking with native English speakers at international dance events is not the same, because then everyone slows down the whole time, without thinking about it ... Here, I'm always the only one, and people just forget that I don't understand their accents (they think they don't have a "strong accent". People. This is the north, you have accents). It wears me out.


None of these things are disastrous. I'm trying not to complain; I'm trying to tell it like it is. I never lie in the blog: If I say it's wonderful, it's probably more wonderful than I even have words to make it justice. And so many things about my, so far, three weeks in the UK have been utterly wonderful. But I'm also tired.