Since I wrote my my last post about leaving Facebook, I have been infinitely more productive on many different levels.

Since that post I have:

• read three and a half books.
• I have collated a lot of data for my Grandad’s book.
• I have made four pairs of earrings (I am a secret jewellery-making enthusiast hoping to open a small side business one day).
• Been either running, to yoga or skiing every single day. I am going bouldering this evening, incidentally.

And what have I fallen behind on? Writing back to people.

Perhaps all I needed was to know that I would be depriving myself of a very convenient communication tool if I didn’t get my procrastination under control. For the timebeing, it seems to have worked. I have spent far less time on the internet and have been getting on with real life things instead. It’s a wonderful feeling.

I am hoping to find that this isn’t a phase, but the beginning of a new approach to managing my time. A lasting one.

I never thought sugar and I could coexist without me abusing it, but I think it’s safe to say my addiction is behind me. Perhaps I can do this with Facebook (and the internet in general).

My initial plan is to only reply to messages I receive on Facebook on the weekends (unless urgent). This will stop me from reaching out for my laptop as soon as I get home. Let’s see how this goes. If I fall back to my old ways of surfing the evenings away on the internet, Facebook’s second chance will not be yielding a third.

image taken from here.

If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far.
-Stephen King

I don’t have a TV, so I should be all set to start writing my Grandad’s memoir. I should be able to sit down evening after evening and churn out thousands of words uninterrupted because the menace to concentration that is the TV does not exist in my environment.

Wrong.

Really wrong.

Mr. King is not of my generation. He did not have to put pen to paper and create childhood altering characters like, “It” with the internet nagging him to take part in its shenanigans every two minutes. Otherwise his quote would be about Facebook, not something as innocuous as a television.

These days we’re used to witnessing people suddenly and openly declaring that they are leaving Facebook and I’m sure many people who do leave, like me, are seeking a respite from the background noise, hoping that it will provide the ultimate no-excuse environment in which they can fixate their interests on something supposedly worthwhile, something that contributes to the deepening of those crevices on the brain. That is by far my main motive.

Hang on a sec, before we go any further let me correct one thing – it’s facebook, not Facebook. It’s not a deity.

Now that we have that sorted, I’ll show you what my dependency looks like:

• I get to the bus stop three minutes early, what do I do? Pull out the iPhone.
• Someone is late meeting me (this is, admittedly, perhaps going beyond the realms of believable fiction as I have the terrible habit of running late – something I am consciously working on improving), what do I do? Pull out the iPhone.
• I am intently reading a book but something in the back of my mind is telling me it’s facebook checking time…and out comes the bloody stupid iPhone.

I’m approaching an age at which self-reflection seems to have become as routine as tooth-brushing. Every day I face a new dilemma about who I am, what I should do, where I should go, what I can do to make myself a better person bla bla bla… One positive outcome of having entered this phase of my life is that I have established something central to determining my behaviour in general – I have an addictive personality. My relationship with sugar was my first encounter with this truth and now facebook and the internet in general are surfacing as joint-second place on my list of biggest vices. Eliminating the influence of the internet from my life would mean my blog would go down the toilet, so that’s not something I’m about to force myself to do, but facebook can take the cut. My personal profile, that is.

I’ve managed to stay in touch with the friends that really matter to me despite moving to various countries throughout my life – Zuckerberg’s (kidnapped) brain child didn’t appear on the scene until I was seventeen. So if I hadn’t been hankering after it before it existed, I shouldn’t miss it if I stop using it, in theory. I’ve just this moment realised that for a staggering eight years, I have been able to scroll through facebook and gorge on the occasionally uplifting, seldom awe-inducing and frequently trivial things my friends (and acquaintances I have added out of politeness) are sharing with their social media sphere. That’s almost a third of my lifetime thus far. Jesus.

Other than it demanding our attention all the bloody time, it also gives way to people being lazy in face-to-face encounters. Facebook ends up providing conversation material, like who of your mutual friends got married, has tattooed their three year old’s ears, eaten an icecream in their bath tub recently, etc. Just because it’s gossip about a friend that you came across on the internet, and not about a celebrity, it doesn’t make it any less pointless or vapid for it to be the sole source of chin-wag material over a coffee with a friend. It’s also sad to think that facebook takes the mystery out of reunions and the like – I am immensely looking forward to seeing some of my friends from High School in May, and if it hadn’t been for facebook I would be in the dark about one of my friends’ marriage and the subsequent arrival of her adorable baby girl. Although it’s thanks to facebook I’m able to initiate a gathering, there is a bitter sweet feeling surrounding the idea that it could have all been a wonderfully pleasant surprise.

Enough is enough. I’m leaving. I don’t have this quality that everyone else had bestowed upon them at birth, I was created unequal – where my willpower should lay there is a void. I have no choice but to be an all or nothing person and facebook falls deservingly into the “nothing” pile.

Sometimes it’s best not to overthink things, to let things take shape without the influence of your meddling self interests.

These days all that I seem to be able to think over and over again is, “what now?”. I’ve landed myself the job I wanted, I’ve sat the Goethe Zertifikat exam (who knows if I’ve passed or not…) and I’m not quite in a place where my virus will let me start training for another marathon again (though I think I’ll be there soon).

Although I sound somewhat aimless now, I have my next long term project ahead of me already: working on my Grandad’s memoir. It’s something I’m going to be knuckling down on as soon as my Grandad has his iPad – I need to be able to communicate with him from Switzerland on a regular basis and his ancient laptop is a bit of a hindrance. I was envisioning this being a bit like the scenes portrayed in the graphic novel, Maus, but being abroad makes that an impossibility, the iPad will have to do.

The thing is, although I have this immensely fulfilling project ahead of me, I’m still apprehensive of what’s going to come after that. I am addicted to having something productive yet daunting looming ahead of me. There are upsides to this obsession, but for the most part it leaves me feeling dissatisfied with the present and constantly longing for what the future is supposed to deliver.

What bothers me most about this is that I don’t think I was always like this. I’ve always been one to dip my finger in every pie I set eyes on and pile way too much of said pie on my measly saucer-sized plate, but not because I had great expectations for the future, more because I felt like nothing was stopping me at the time so I had no reason not to.

I have proof that I didn’t think about my future too intently until 2007-ish, and even then it was just a cursory attempt at delaying the inevitable decision I was going to have to make in 2009. I chose to read English and Italian at University not because I harboured aspirations to become a translator, an interpreter or an academic. I made my decision based solely on what I knew I would enjoy and what I felt would complete me as a human being, as opposed to as a potential employee of a multinational monster.

Admittedly, this left me shaking in my boots when my final year of Uni came and went and my prospects of being employed by a bank (I had done two internships in banking, hence the glimpse of clarity in 2007) went down the toilet with the rest of the world’s economic prospects. When I was offered a job in online marketing at a language school company headquartered in Zurich, I thought, “why not?”

When I realized the job would actually take me to Zurich I hesitated, but reaching the second “why not?” didn’t take long. A sunny day and a glimpse of the Zürisee was all I needed to feel London would survive without me.

Basically, I didn’t let over-thinking get in my way. I went with the flow. Obviously, not in the typical hippy-like way “going with the flow” tends to bring to mind, but I was letting go nonetheless.

Either I’ve just recovered from long-term schizophrenia and that happy-go-lucky part of me was actually the product of a mental illness, or I’ve somehow abandoned the part of my psyche I happen to treasure most (especially now that it’s gone).

How does one win back spontaneity, free spiritedness and naivety if they all seem to have been spent frivolously on past insignificances? Do we pool up a reserve? Do I have to wait until my supply is replenished? I guess the irony is that I just have to let go and see what happens.

gif from here.

Something I realised as I was combing through my list of potential upcoming posts is that I don’t write about myself much on this blog. It’s partially because I use it as a platform to keep me “writing” and partially because I don’t want to bore people. In the process of abiding to these two notions, I seem to have drifted away from the original idea of what a blog is for and towards thinking that any writing I post on the internet has to be representative of the writing skills I’ve polished throughout my schooling. My blog is not a website, I am not offering a product of any sort, I am simply sharing my ideas, observations and recommendations. My writing does not need to be perfect, I don’t need to contrive ways to sound like a “writer” (anyway, this is entirely a self-professed title to which I can only attribute a handful of freelance jobs and, rather tenuously, my degree).

The difference between the blogs I follow and my own seems to be that I don’t chronicle the day to day stuff very much. I post about holidays, about unusual events, etc. but this doens’t depict an honest picture of what my life in Zurich is like, what trying to give up sugar looks like, what battling a recurrence of Epstein Barr does to my body.

This is something I endeavour to change in 2013. The upside to this is that I will post more often because the pretention of feeling like I should only post article-like posts will slowly erode and I’ll feel more comfortable just whacking out a post – just sharing passing thoughts when I feel like it. That’s the idea, anyway.

I’m hoping adding a personal touch will bring more readers too. Since posting less frequently and less about myself than I did before, my blog traffic has plummeted, understandably. Remember the drawings I used to post? I have an iPad now so they will make a comback! I find that the blogs that suck me in the most are ones that give me an insight into someone’s life, someone whose life I admire or relate to. I need to extend my hand to people looking for the same and just hope that such people exist in my case.

Ultimately, what I want to achieve with this blog is to spread a message and to have people interact and share their take on my message, not compile a portfolio of pretentious crap that nobody wants to read. The message is simple:

• Living abroad is fun and fruitful
• Eternal learning is a must, whether it be a new language, a new discipline or about life in general
• Nutrition and exercise are the keys to a happy body
• Travelling opens the mind
• Expanding your network never gets dull

Here’s to a more prolific and personal 2013!

Happy New Year and a good slide into 2013! (German saying that clearing doesn’t work in English)

Struggling with the load a bit, eh?

I have been floating through the last three weeks or so in a mild daze, induced partially by the demands and excitment of a new job, the toll of getting up earlier than usual for said job and the non-stop maternal interaction I’ve had with the visits of both my own and B’s mothers. Yes, that’s right, I have changed jobs and have gone into a new industry altogether and am now a banker in Switzerland. I keep saying “Swiss banker”, but that’s a slip of the tongue because clearly I can’t be a Swiss banker anymore than I can be a Chinese theologist, because I’m not Swiss. People who have known me for a long time are used to my pedantics. After three weeks, I can say that the new scenery is doing me good and I can feel myself growing again, which was the main point of making such a drastic change.

Anyway, what I mean to say with the drivel above is that I have a legitimate reason for treating my blog with as much neglect as a (successful) dieter treats their chocolate with. That, by the way, is not something I’ve been particularly virtuous in, chocolate has been soothing me after my challenging days in the new office. Once again, I’m noting my dependence on it and slowly trying to recalibrate and kill the urge to demolish our Lindt collection. Since I can’t run to relieve my stress, chocolate and alcohol have been fililng the void – not very well, mind you, the itch to move has reached unbearable levels now. Yoga has come to a temporary hault as I exhausted my yoga funds for this month when buying some new work clothes.

The combination of chocolate guzzling, the stress of adjustment to a new environment (and language) and Zürich’s typically unpredictable Autumn weather, which is dictated by the Föhn, has seen my tonsils rebel again. I’m not here to dwell on the one year mark of this virus plaguing my life, but rather, to reflect on the various types of stress one is subject to and how one might go about eliminating, if not all of them altogether, at least the superflous tendency to keep fuelling them.

What do I mean by this? Largely speaking, I mean acknowledging that there is a difference between physical stress caused by overexerting or underexerting your body and psychological stress caused by the constant battle against mental obstacles. I find most people are affected by both at the same time and eliminating either of them in their entirety is near impossible if we’re to go on living in the modern developed world. However, I do think it’s possible to tone down some of the factors that attribute to the collective entity of physical and psychological stress to bring about a serener status quo for oneself.

Now, you might think that physical stress is limited to those who do extreme or punishing forms of sport, such as marathon running, mountain climbing, rugby, or anything at a competetive level. I don’t think this is the case. Since stopping running, I find that the lack of physical activity is making my body feel lethargic and this is not due to my running hiatus per se, rather to the fact that I haven’t adequately replaced this gap with another consistent physical activity. I also noticed that as a result I am out of breath everytime I climb more than one flight of stairs. I may have put a stop to “punishing” myself for an average of 5 hours a week, but the general sense of malaise and the exhaustion, albeit mild, that I experience doing every day stuff due to being far less fit has become a much more pervasive form of physical stress. I’m sure this is something the vast majority of the Western world’s population can relate to.

This is why I have decided to go running jogging again, but very slowly and in highly controlled dosages. Another reason for this decision is that I have started to doubt that the physical component of this stress I was placing myself under was entirely to blame for my symptoms. If I look back on the last year, I see that I placed such tall demands on myself both physically and and mentally. I pushed myself to network in order to find a job, to run a marathon, to go bouldering, to learn German, to maintain a sense of professionalism in a job I was hoping to leave (a job I believed kickstarted the whole thing to begin with), to dedicate myself to this blog and other forms of writing, to continue enjoying the richest of social lives, to try to defy the forces of German slowly impeding on my Italian, to ensure I made a concerted effort not to forget any of my other mother tongue, to write my Grandad’s autobiography, to do the occasional all-nighter translation job, to try to read all the books on my bookshelf (despite making this an impossible task by using book retail therapy as a means to wind down) and to try to develop my future business idea. The long list above is, to me, proof that physical stress induced by running and swinging kettlebells cannot possibly take all the blame for my predicament. There’s no doubt it was largely self-inflicted and that I clearly need to reflect on my lifestyle if I think maintaining the above is sustainable, which is indeed what I used to think. Did I mention I was even thinking of enrolling in a distance learning nutrition course on top of all this? Oh, and of trying to learn either Spanish or French while working on my own amateur jewellery line? I think you get the point. Of course, I was also subconsciously placing myself under added pressure by feeling disappointed with myself whenever I dropped one of the balls I was juggling. You can see from the comical image of infant Christine desperately trying to appear in the photo my eagerness to participate in anything and everything regardless of appriopriateness is not something I developed with adulthood, and neither is the hairstyle.

I clearly had too much on my plate and was attempting to test the weight capacity of said plate, and while I enjoy being busy and am actively prone to seeking out hecticness to maintain what has always been my status quo, I’ve now realised the only way to avoid ending up with shards of porcelain in my lap is to redefine what is “normal” for me. I’m not just saying this in relation to my particular health issue, I’m inclined to think this applies to a number of chronic conditions in general. I’m not saying I’m an expert in this, but I don’t think it takes a physician to detect that stress is not favoured by the body and that stress can be felt in a variety of forms, and not just negative forms at that. In fact, since I developed this condition, I have come to believe even more heavily than before in the power of relieveing yourself of stress and the power of nutrition. When I say “stress” I mean both the forms I mentioned before, but also both negative and positive stresses.

What do I mean by positive stress? Surely that’s an oxymoron … or is it? The glandular fever specialist I have been in touch with has mentioned that excitement, even in its postive form, taxes the mind and body. That’s not to say we should eliminate intense enjoyment from our lives, not at all. However, for some of us, the energy exhilaration requires of us is almost on par with the energy we lose to negative stress. It simply means that, like all other forms of “stress”, we need to balance it with rest so as not to fall off the edge.

So, other than resting, what else can I do to reduce the volume of stress I put my mind and body through? In my case, I can make a concerted effort not to regard running as the competition against myself I always did but as a way to keep my body in check and to feed my sense of well-being. I can acknowledge that technology has made our lives easier, in one sense, and that it has multiplied the dimensions of what we expect ourselves to achieve as single individuals, but that doesn’t mean I have to follow these expectations or forcefully apply them to every facet of my life like I have been. It’s ok not be fluent in German overnight, to still stumble through the language at times, it’s ok if my Japanese is no longer quite as sharp as it was seven years ago, it’s still there, it still functions, it’s more like the unicycle to the bicycle that is English – I possess the talent, I just have fewer opportunities to make use of it.* It’s also ok if my next marathon time is slower than my Paris time and nobody’s quality of life suffers if I update my blog a little less frequently than I’d like to. The important thing is that i give myself the time to enjoy all the things I keep myself busy with and to do that, I need to grant myself a break sometimes.

Amongst the things I enjoy doing I need to prioritise, but I also need to rearrange my life on a macro level and incorporate down time too, or else I will stop enjoying these hobbies. Effectively, I think people try to cram too much into their lives because life has taken on an immensely accelerated pace for our generation, but also because we think we have to in order to be better people. This is one form of stress that can be avoided, that doesn’t have to be part of your default mode. Just back the f*ck off a bit, it’s as simple as that. Say no a little more often if you have to.

That, my friends, is what I believe the key to health is, or at the very least to keeping chronic conditions like mine at bay. Nutrition, as I said, ties into this too, seeing as not eating well is taxing on the body and therefore stress-inducing, but as I approach the 1600 word mark of his accidental essay, I have decided to take my own advice; to pause to catch my breath and reallocate my efforts to tomorrow if need be. Or the day after. Or even a week after. If writing about the nutritional aspect of my outlook is of imporatance, I will do it, if I decide it’s not, I won’t. A simple and sobering thought, but one that took a long struggle to develop and settle. Better to take it easy and enjoy the ride than to struggle, it makes for a better picture too!

*I can actually sort of still ride a unicycle when pushed, as I believe I proved on this blog a few years back.

To anyone who has been kind and loyal enough to check back here over the last couple of weeks, thank you for your patience. I sincerely hope I’m not speaking into a black hole of no followers, but alas, that is the often intangibly lonely nature of blogging.

As you may have derived, I am back from a road trip across the North of Spain, a road trip that I would define as epic, in my own terms. I say this because, cliched as it may sound, there were some mind-opening and life-altering moments along the course of the 1800km we carried our bodies over. More on this in posts to come, I promise.

This is just a short post to alert people of my return and my way of explaining why they never got a postcard. When we finally get to the elusive moment in which technology surpasses all other forms of anything we currently do on a daily basis, I will conjure a digital postcard and send it out to anyone waiting for me to show signs of life. For now, seeing as my idea has not been pounced upon by Apple yet, and due to my sheer laziness when it comes to postcards of the paper variety, I will send you all a belated postcard in the form of the image below:

To whom it may be of interest,

I have had a wonderful time traversing across the Northern Coast of Spain in a Seat Ibiza with my trusty driver boyfriend. We consumed more white bread than I ever want to have to face again – we doused that bread in copious amounts of wine in a bid to lessen the guilt. The four provinces we crossed – Galicia, Asturias, the Basque Country and Catalonia – have treated us immensely well and I have successfully rolled my way back to Zurich with an immense urge to read some Hemingway.

Incidentally, while we did go to Pamplona for San Fermin, men in kilts being overturned by bulls were not on the agenda. I weep to this day over having missed out on this undoubtedly life changing incident.

The detailed updates on where we went, where we stayed, what we saw, whose wedding we crashed and which bull fought the hardest will be churned out slowly but surely in the next few days on this blog. Stay tuned, my friends.

Lots of love and post-holiday giddiness,

Christine xxx