Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

By this point, it’s no secret that living abroad has its challenges. Well, I feel it shouldn’t be anyways, I’ve been banging on about it for the last three and a half years 😂 (nearly 4! How crazy is it that I’ve nearly been here 4 years by now 😱)

Anyways, recently I feel like life has been a case of two steps forward, and one step back. I decided I needed to make some changes, try and get out the house more, gain some more independence, start my own things. We put in steps to do that. I’m about to start pilates. I go to play a girls game of paddle (kinda a mix of tennis and squash) and five mins in, I twist my ankle. Oof. Time to rest. Pilates is on hold. Project independence is a little bit on hold really!

Then after that, I was hit with a whole load of health things that plagued me all in a row. My ankle was better, but then I had other things that meant I still couldn’t continue with project independence. I had weird bouts of dizziness, then a bad tummy bug for about a week and then to top it off I had a migraine. Then recently, I’ve gone from having 10 private classes to having three for the next few months. So things have been somewhat turbulent to say the least.

However! I realised recently how far I’ve come (yep, this is gonna be one of them blog posts where I big myself up haha). It was when I was watching Love is Blind (would you believe it), where there was a couple and one was from America, one was from Nigeria. For their wedding they were trying to mix the two cultures and she was trying to learn a little bit of the language, and I caught myself thinking, oh well I’m glad I didn’t have to do that! … hang on a second… Because that’s exactly what I’ve had to do! But that made me realise that for me, it feels completely normal now. It still has its challenges obviously, but I’m like, doesn’t everyone do this? It’s completely baffling to me that its become so normalised, but is a really good thing I think. Whilst I still get tired of being in a different culture, speaking the language, being far away from my friends and family back home and my own culture, it doesn’t tire me out half as much as it used to and I’m way more used to life here.

In the first year of my time here, when I was struggling, I remember my sister said to me that I’d get there. That things would get easier. And I probably wouldn’t even realise that I was there but that I would be. And I feel like I’ve now arrived 🙂

Anyways, that’s all. A short one from me today for once but I shall leave you with a picture of Nolz and I infront of a pretty flowery arch