I’ve been in Albania 39 days. I was sick the first week or so, and then I was sick the last two weeks– so a little more than half of my time getting settled in here has been spent being sick. It’s not the best start to a new country, career, and job, but after the unexpected loss and traumatic grief of this past summer, I am just grateful to be alive to have this experience.
Then, of course, is the matter of all the time spent actually moving in to my new life in Albania. Our apartment was fully furnished, and we moved from the hostel to here within the first few days, but fully furnished just meant furniture. We had no kitchen supplies or linens, and there were various mundane household items- like trash cans and hangers and paper towel holders and so many other things- that had to be purchased. Shopping in Tirana is a specialised endeavor, where each tiny shop has a micro niche. There is literally one place to get the lighbulbs, and one place to get the cleaning supplies, and one place to get brooms- truly, just an entire stand of brooms, that’s it. Grocery stores are firmly just groceries, and usually not even fresh produce, because that domain belongs to the street vendors.
In a country Google maps has not yet met at streetview level, plus the lack of addresses and the lack of Albanian, finding all these speciality shops has been an adventure. We had to hunt them down using handwritten, landmark laden instructions, or go out like witching for water and hoping some internal, gut instinct of “yes, down this street lies a stall with dishes”. Then, once the stores were found by luck (with the directions) or by luck (with the witching) we had to make several trips back and forth on foot.
We also had to get phones and bank accounts and figure out where to grocery shop and how to find our way back home in the maze of alleys. The sheer labyrinthine network of random roads and dead ends and alleys and back paths is impressive.
God help Google when she does start rolling through on streetview, because it will look like piles of spaghetti noodles once the “roads” are mapped. I love that it feels like figuring out a puzzle in which I happen to live.
On top of getting bearings home wise and location wise, I started work after being here only three days, which was totally unexpected (the start date changed this year, to the surprise of everyone). At least once a week I was setting something up, or bringing a document to work or sending an e-mail, or taking off an entire afternoon to go to the American embassy, or, more recently, taking off an entire week to flop on my couch in a haze of sickness.
What I’m trying to say is, I haven’t been here very long at all, and most of that time has been consumed with setting up my new life here (in all the banal glory that entails) or being sick as hell. What’s weird is that I feel like I’ve been here much longer than 39 days, and because of that I’m getting frustrated with what I feel is a general “not doing enough” problem.
And by weird I mean it’s insane and I’m not sure why I have these expectations of myself that are totally ridiculous and kind of unattainable given the circumstances.
I feel like I’m just now settling into a routine of what life looks like for me, here, and in logical land, that makes sense. I’m getting a handle on my job responsibilities, I know my schedule, I know my students’ names, and I know how to jump out in traffic with relative confidence. I learned my Albanian numbers, although it’s still hard for me to really catch what people are saying to me, numerically speaking, when I’m trying to give them money.
I have, thankfully, made friends. We’re planning some trips and social events and in general things are awesome and Albania and I really like each other. The problem is that I am beating myself up about not doing “enough”. I haven’t, for example, worked out since we moved here. We’ve also been eating out a lot, due to a combo of wanting to try local places and my being too tired to try and cook when I get home from work. I have a few looming paperwork things to do that I keep blowing off. I have, quite possibly, pumped more Coke into my kidneys in the last month than in the previous year.
Right now, when I come home from work, about three out of five days I immediately take to the couch and let the air conditioner blow over me while I veg out on FB. But teaching is exhausting work, as anyone who has done it will tell you, and yes, I went to the hospital a little over a week ago, so I need to cut myself some slack and stop fretting over being lazy. Because that’s really what this is all about. I’m over involved mom-ing myself over being lazy, not doing enough, not getting enough done. I thrive on doing things, and when I’m not I feel like I’m wasting time.
I think this is probably completely unfair to myself, since I just picked up and moved to another country, started a new career, a new job, and visited a hospital in the first month, but these are the mental trials of an adult child of the Gifted and Talented program in elementary school.
Everyone else is out ex-patin’ it up at trivia night, but I am so exhausted I made myself stay home. I told that bitchy type-A voice in my head to shut up so that I could have a nice, quiet night at home alone. I know I need this downtime. Logically I know I have been in a new country for less than 6 weeks so it is fine if I am still eating ice cream every day after work, or if my yoga mat is gathering dust, or if I’m not blogging consistently or haven’t filled out paperwork for school yet.
Sometimes I think I’m too good at kicking my own ass and making myself be productive and responsible, because when I need to be kind to myself it’s hard to back away from relentless pursuit mode and give myself permission to just be a meatsack on a couch, vegging out to stupid blogs or falling down YouTube rabbit holes.
I’m pretty sure a lot of this guilt is just me still processing everything that happened this summer, so I have to keep that in mind, too. I feel like I have to DO ALL THE THINGS because if I don’t it’s like some slap in the face of the gift that is getting to wake up and be alive another day.
Oh. Yeah. Ignore all those other paragraphs. Those last two sentences nailed it. Ugggh, I hate my stupid brain sometimes for being so good at hiding real problems by dressing them up with decoy problems that just distract me.
Thank God for writing so I can figure out what’s happening inside my brain by dumping everything onto a page and sifting through it.
Narrator’s Note: Throughout the entire year in Albania, I could never bring myself to write about my sister’s death. I refer to it cryptically (as I did here), and it obviously had serious negative impacts on me, but it took an entire year before I could write openly about it. Dealing with fresh grief, while moving to a new country that isn’t exactly the easiest to adjust to, while starting a new career and job was something that I look back on now and don’t honestly understand how I did. This post was originally published October 5th, 2012, on Blogger.
