Yeah, I get motivated when I see other people passionate about language learning. Its a great community. I’ve dabbled in Catalan and I’d like to start taking it more seriously, you’re motivating me!
I try to limit my exposure to the outdoors by only going to the supermarket and it’s starting to be a bit hard to cope with. If it weren’t for this Corona virus I would probably be going to the botanical garden and a few museums here in the capital region. Which is part of the reasons why I am going to start writing weekly (or biweekly) rather than monthly like until now. I feel that I need something to be excited for, I have sort of lost the concept of time due to the unusual circumstances. At least I haven’t descended to Homer’s and Mr. Burns’ level of insanity, … yet.
During this past week I have started to reflect a lot on my past. Despite the fact that I didn’t always do well in school I have always had a very strong belief that I will succeed in life. However, it has taken almost 30 years to reach that point. During the first days of the week I was constantly angry, in a way it’s expected. The reason for my anger stems from the fact that certain people haven’t done what they could have done (teacher’s) and that my grandmother enabled an addiction that has complicated my life in so many ways that at times I feel like the Count of Monte Cristo.
But The Count of Monte Cristo has a happy ending and I feel that life imitates art in more ways than one so I’m in a good place generally speaking. Although, I still suffer from the incompetence of some people and the decisions that I have taken to this day.
I haven’t really gotten a lot of learning this week, although I have started to read for enjoyment again after a few years of reading for the sake of it, and somehow expecting that I’ll improve. I am currently reading John Le Carré’s “The spy that return from the cold” in Catalan. It’s a bit hard, I understand the general plot but if someone would ask me what happens in the novel, I might be able to tell what goes on but I’d have a hard time telling how all the individual events are tied together.
The problem with Catalan is that there are some grammatical features that are very hard to dechiffer unless you read up on them. Due to the Corona virus the library is closed and therefore I can’t loan the Routledge grammar guide that I have been using. I am not in a hurry to nail every grammatical feature of Catalan at this moment so it’s not that big of a deal.
I have studied Catalan for about 6 months but these last two weeks is when I have started to take it seriously. Another thing that I have been doing is working on a book about the history of Finnish football. I think it would be great if I could have it written and published before the postponed EURO 2020. It’s a bit far fetched at the moment but then again quite plausible. Opening my own website that will help language learners should be only maybe a month away at this point or even less. Now, it’s less of a pipe dream and more a reality that is getting closer to coming into fruition.
What have I done?
I have decided to focus exclusively on Spanish for at least this month as I feel that I need to finish up learning the languages that I started to a degree where I am truly fluent. With that in mind I have earmarked books and TV series that I want to read and watch. I have been watching a lot of La Casa de Papel which has become my new favourite series. I have also made few important decisions which means that my workload expands once again. The reason is largely due to the fact that my priorities and standards has shifted in such a way that I need to do some reorganising for everything to gel together.
I am slowly getting closer to becoming officially employed with a job that I truly love and that will secure my future. I don’t think I have truly comprehended the magnitude of how this will help me going forward. Since through my years in school I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and the time after school has been plagued with bad luck and costly decisions that have led to constant uncertainty.
I can now comfortably say that I have plans that I know will come through in one shape or the other. There are things that are more likely than others but I feel that it’s more about how I reach my targets and to what extent. Sort of like you might know you will have a family dinner on Saturday but it’s only at the supermarket where your menu will be finalised and the dinner itself might also have many different outcomes but all of them are somewhat predictable.
I have started gathering ideas for thought provoking articles that I’m going to write in Spanish and I feel that having watched three “seasons” of La Casa de Papel I can already write more fluidly than before. I have also tried to continue with being spontaneous with is something that doesn’t come naturally for me. I am however very happy. I started to watch La Casa de Papel on a whim not having really any preconceptions or expectation but it has become my new favourite series.
The link below is to a video of a card staking expert that I found particularly interesting.
How have I felt
On one hand I feel (and know) that I have made a lot of progress, so that’s a great feeling. The days do feel a bit long but considering the workload that I have still ahead of me that’s good. I am a bit tired and irritated because I have had a very irregular sleep rhythm. I have tried to rectify this by taking naps, however, I find it hard to go asleep.
It’s a pattern that I recognise from January. In January I was constantly either excited or in despair. This week I have been either excited or annoyed at the circumstances and uncertainty. Still, the fact that I’m whining about not getting sleep is a sign of how far I’ve come in these last month. Because there is not really much, I can do with my insomnia problems other than work so hard that I’m so tired that I fall asleep immediately.
I keep expecting that something will go wrong and I suppose in the strictest sense that’s true because when you have to change your plan it’s because the original idea didn’t pan out. However, I keep on thinking that something huge will derail everything but so far it hasn’t.
Based on the reports it seems that Finland will be on lockdown until the summer which means that I feel an obligation to work as hard as I can until summer. I won’t get to enjoy my favourite part of the year which is a bit of a bummer but I have a presentiment that if I manage to achieve certain things during this year, I might achieve things beyond my wildest dreams in the next 10 years. I think that these troubled times have opened a golden opportunity for me that only comes once in a decade.
In 2009 that would have been getting my stuff together and become the grade A student that I had the potential of being. Because of circumstances beyond my control that didn’t happen for which to a degree I am still bitter about to this day.
I think that this week has been a summary of what I have felt during these last 6 months. The weekend had its ups and downs but after a generally good weekend I had a horrible hangover as I drank a bit too much on an empty stomach. On Monday I was quite optimistic but felt it was time to start to explore certain dreams that may never become true.
One of my biggest life regrets is that I didn’t go to university. There are many reasons for that but the main reason is that I could indisputably prove to myself and others that I’m not stupid. I have always known that I’m at least not stupid in the sense that I intelligently impaired. The reason that I question my intelligence so strongly or questioned before is a very complex matter that I’m not going to address right now.
However, one 10-minute phone call might have catapulted this project so far forward that it might be the deciding factor between me living a great life after some really hard years and me finding my soulmate and living the rest of my life happily wherever I want doing what I love.
On Monday I absentmindedly sent a request to contact me on a university website. I thought I’d signed up for a brochure which I could leaf over on my own. A little while after that I received a phone call from someone at the university. I had no idea how called me at first and when I realised that it was someone from the university, I got really anxious. Until Monday I have always hated phone calls even if I speak in my native languages.
The person at the other end of the line was very pleasant and the reason for the call I suppose was a standard evaluation and guidance. I told him about why I wanted to study psychology as I was so nervous, I did stutter a bit and had trouble remembering educational terms such as Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. I was a bit worried that another stumbling block would be my previous education. But based on what I remembered I got the impression that me getting a university degree at 30 is not impossible.
This motivated me immensely and on Tuesday and Wednesday, my hopes of what I still can achieve got the better of me and I started to feel a bit dizzy. I think it was a case of over-excitement as I have struggled many years with depression and sort of accepted that certain things will never happen or at least not on my own terms. Now, I feel that I can choose what my destiny will be. When I’m in a good mood I have the ambitions and self-belief of a megalomaniac and since I have given myself this whole year to self-improvement, I think it’s only made sense to ramp up the pressure and see where my breaking point is.
By the end of this week I will hopefully be ready with setting up my business and then I can start to really get on with making blog content and building up the website. I will be using a website builder like Squarespace, but I remember that only a few weeks ago, I was really nervous about working on website building in any shape or form. Now I feel that it’s probably going to be most pleasant part of this whole project so far.
While I love writing it’s something that I have done so much of in the last 6 months in many different forms that I think working with building a website is going to be a breath of fresh air. Since the 6 months point is coming up I think it’s a good moment to put it into a few sentences how far I have come.
Six months ago, I was in such a bad state that I had to say to myself that this is your last chance if you don’t work on this then the next option is suicide. I sort of instinctively knew that somehow something would come out of it. My first blog ideas were of the sort like “Finnish swearwords” and other quite bland and vaguely interesting. I suppose if I’d polish them up a bit then I would have gotten something that would have earned me a fast buck enough to get me back on my feet immediately.
Luckily, in the past 6 months my mind has started to work the way it should and I have had the patience and coldblooded levelness to not rush certain things. I have learnt a lot about the human mind and I have learnt exactly the mistakes
On Saturday I had Easter dinner a family friend who had nothing to do stopped by and during the dinner we talked about lots of stuff. It was a very stimulating talk and at one point he told me that I am like the professor in La Casa de Papel. On Saturday it felt like a heart-warming complement and now it feels like the truth. I have been worried about this plan from the start, sometimes irrationally sometimes it has been a way for me to make sure that I don’t do any stupid mistake.
Ultimately however I have perfected my business plan down to a T in just three weeks and I also know more or less exactly how I will achieve some of my wackiest dreams. I also had a bit of an epiphany around eight o’clock I for a moment I thought that I have found a perfect plan to achieve all my dreams and at that moment I felt depressed over the fact that I will get more and more depressed because I have it all figured out.
Of course, the world is always moving forward and perfection is impossible, a few minutes later I am already finding new challenges to think up of. Also, just because I have figured out a waterproof plan on paper there is also execution. How the execution goes is dependent on millions and millions of variables. This week has been the best week of my life.
A quick recap (April)
This month has been a significant month, during this month I have made a somewhat detailed plan of how I can become a true polymath and so live up to my username. I have also questioned the purpose of this thread and whether it’s an excuse for me to have a platform for my narcistic side of my personality. Regarding that matter I have come to the following conclusion.
This thread was/is supposed to be a means for me to hold myself accountable on some level but it has also started to become like a science lab for my writing and a way of self-therapy as I have had some serious issues over the years. I am finally starting to get to the bottom of the reasons why I have acted the way I have and why I have been so miserable over the past 20 years and why I’m more, angry and annoyed then depressed and anxious during this past month. Or at least not anxious for the reasons that I used to; I have a theory about anxiousness that I might share at some point in the future.
I am sure all of us are a bit more anxious than normal in these times. I feel that anxiety is a topic that has affected me in many forms this month. I think writing about anxiety and alter ego and other stuff would be a good way for me to prepare for my university degree. I think it would be easier to read about complex subject if I first think through them and try to tie them to my observations from personal experiences. I hope that I could stick to not write so often (weekly) and rather focus on monthly recaps. What ever happens I expect the quality of my writing to increase during these next couple of months.
My struggle with anxiety
I am a very anxious person even at my best, at my best it manifests itself in that I want to push ever higher, at my worst it means that I’ll eat unhealthy food and can’t concentrate. I tend to take things a bit to personally, in the sense that I get so fixated on a specific goal that I lose sight of the greater picture. A perfect example of this behavior was the following that happened at the end of last week.
I have at least in my head already mapped out how I am going to go about starting my writing carrier. I have also slowly but surely started working on book ideas and lots of stuff come incredibly naturally to me. So, I have started also to think ahead what will I do if I become my generations Stephen King or something like that. I think it would be cool to own my own football club. I love the sort of administrative work that goes into making budgets, thinking about team building from a psychological point of view, etc.
My obsessive nature lead to me hoping of being the owner of a mid-table club in a league with teams playing in Europe regularly by as soon as next year when the football begins (Autumn 2021). No matter how you look at it the timeline is absurd. But I felt depressed for a few hours when I came to that conclusion.
These sorts of things have also a negative equivalent this week I bought a PlayStation 4 and some games to go with it. The reason was that due to what I now know about how my life has gone why it has gone the way it has and all that I find myself really angry. With all the Corona stuff and with the increasing speed that I adapt to my situation I sometimes feel very disorientated. I need something to make me relax a bit.
If someone had asked me at the end of May last year what I would like to achieve in the coming year I would probably have said something like “I would like to get the apprenticeship to become a store manager that I applied to, I would like to travel to Milan between March-May and I would like to study languages in a structured manner” and I would have been really, really happy about that. In some ways that sounds now to me as a prison sentence based on what I am capable of doing.
That’s the scope of how much my perspective on things have changed in under a year. I have some baggage that makes me extremely anxious about situations that based on what I’m capable should pose no problem. I am probably one of the most on the surface calm person one could imagen but I have had a few what some would probably call panic attacks during this month.
I get over them quickly and I have a feeling that I’m closer to a huge milestone than I could ever phantom. To put it metaphorically, I’m one meter away from solving lots of problems but I’m acting as if I’m one kilometre away due to my anxiety.
The last two months have been the worst months in my life. I burned out, like Icaros I was to confident in myself, and did not respect the fact that some things take their time. Language learning is supposed to be a fun thing for me but I turned in to a choir.
I am however getting better and I am moderately optimistic that the end of the year will be less hectic.
Due to personal promblems I have not had time to focus on languages. I have decided to focus on languages that Im good at and nor do what Steve does.
All big grand projects are also cancled.
Sorry to hear about that. Hope things improve for you soon.
Sorry to hear about that. Hope things improve for you soon.