Ten Unpublished Posts

I went to the US last week, for one week. In short, it was an adventure. People died, people disappeared, people were charged with crimes, I got stuck in Iowa, I lost all my possessions, I lost a thousand dollars, and more. I’m dramatizing it, but all those things actually happened in some way. And more, of course, but that’s for another day.

Life has been up and down these past few weeks. I wrote ten blog posts, published one, then took it down. The other nine are written, but I won’t publish them. Every time I write something, life happens, things change, and I feel different. It began with the next wave of people I know leaving the country. After all my previous friends left, losing even more people was difficult. It made me want to leave the country as well: I was asking what the point of staying here is.

I learned since then that the point is enjoying what I have here: this life I’ve built for myself, the people who come and go, and the people who stay. Because not everyone leaves. Then I went to the US. I didn’t want to go. And bad things happened. But on my way home, at last, I was happy to have this idea of “starting fresh.” I had brought new clothes and had a new mindset of focusing on myself. Then things simply went downhill… including losing all those clothes (though I got them back in the end). At that point, I was simply asking “Why?”

After things continued to get worse and worse, I had a realization: What does it matter? That isn’t a good thing to ask at first. I wrote a story for my writing group based on these experiences and thoughts and feelings. It ended up being a very beautiful story, in my biased opinion. Then, I started thinking: If all these bad things resulted in my writing a good story, then I got something out of it. And for whatever reason, that brought me a sense of peace. I decided to forgive the people who had disrupted my happiness and move on with my life. Because what else can anyone do? Furthermore, I decided to treat those people with compassion. It was that specific decision which put all my negative feelings aside.

In short, I’m now at a place where I can write a blog post and publish it. I figure I may as well express my concerns openly:

I want to leave Iceland. With all the people coming and going, all the people who have disappointed me or let me down, those who have hurt me, I want to go off to Finland where I can have a peaceful space. I’ve been telling my friends that my dream is to have a couch. So I can read. And a desk. So I can write. Instead, I have a small bed that’s currently covered in bags because I have no space to unpack anything from my trip. I have a small desk that hardly fits my tiny laptop. And I have endless disruption: cooking, cleaning, people coming and going, occupied kitchen, occupied bathroom, annoyances from my landlord (I owe her a towel because the building’s washers turned it one shade bluer — it’s still a towel that dries wet things), etc. It isn’t that I’m complaining, rather I’m frustrated and want to move on. In Iceland, I can’t do anything. In Finland, I can outright buy my own apartment.

I want to become a language teacher. I’m tired of working in tourism. I’m tired of saying the same lines and phrases and speeches over and over and over and over again. I love the people at my work. I don’t love the work. The people make the job enjoyable, but there’s only so much menial labor I can take. Half the time, I feel like my job is useless. They could replace me with a video saying the same information. Instead, I am the machine. I’ve been teaching Icelandic. I’ve been studying Finnish and now Slovak. I love the languages, they are beautifully poetic. I don’t have time to study. I don’t have time to teach. I don’t have time to share my passion for them. I need to make time, but I need to work to save for an apartment with my minimum wage job in a hyper-inflating housing market.

I want to read. As I described, my living situation makes it difficult to focus — I can’t read when there’s noise, plus I have nowhere to even sit down to read. There are so many books I wish I could get through, but I’m sticking to shorter ones for the sake of convenience in my situation. I also want to read in other languages, but I need a desk where I can both read and keep a notebook. I don’t have that space. Regardless of any of that, I’m working too much with too varying of a schedule to be consistent about reading.

I want to write. This is the most important one for me; I call myself a writer, after all. But with so much disruption, so much weighing on my mind, so many disturbances, and such an irregular schedule, it makes it extremely hard to find the space to simply think. I’ve had my moments of peace and happiness here and there, but they aren’t consistent. Yes, I’ve put aside my biggest concerns, but there’s too much else to even want to write. I do my best for my writing group, and I am grateful to have created such a thing, but those works don’t constitute a book. I truly want to begin my third book. Or write for fun if nothing else.

Every day has been different. I have a bad day or feel down. Then the next day is great. But then the day after is the same as before. To ask why, I’m well aware that I am always the end-cause of such things, but it doesn’t help when unfair circumstances seem to be happening so often. The disappointment I felt when I landed in Keflavík after being forced to check my bag for no reason — to wait at baggage claim for an hour and then learn the bag was lost — is indescribable. It feels unfair to say, “I should have been okay with whatever the situation.” I should have been okay with it. And I was, in the end, after I made peace with it. But I still felt bad. I’m only human, after all. Then things somehow got worse from that point over the next few days.

I have no concluding thoughts other than that it’s frustrating when everything goes wrong. I can say that I know things will also surely pick up again and that this is all for a reason. But when is enough enough? And how long will I need to wait? The answers to those questions aren’t for us to know, but that doesn’t stop me from asking.