The year of 2023 is coming to an end soon and in a way, I am a little afraid of that. Every time the year comes to an end, I have such high hopes for finding more time in the coming year to do things I love – to do the things that make life worth living – but I never do.
I want and need to write to be happy. Writing is how I work through my thoughts and emotions, it’s how I am able to stay positive no matter what challenges I face. Unfortunately, I just don’t seem to have time.
I am apprenticing as a junior programmer at a big company, but once in a while I take classes at a kind of vocational school to improve my skills and earn my degree. When I work, I spend 3 hours every day commuting to and from work, but when I go to school, I spend 4 hours every day on the commute. If you add that to a regular days work, which is both at school and at work extremely stressful, you can imagine the few hours I have left in the day to do things I love. I need to do laundry and clean and cook like everyone else, I need to make lunches every day because I am allergic and can’t eat out in cafeterias or such.
I don’t mean to tell you this as an excuse, I simply want to acknowledge that I don’t have a lot of time left during the day to do things I love. This is the reason this blog is rarely updated these days and also the reason I am a lot less happy than I want to be.
I appreciate all the wonderful things, the few people and great opportunities I have in life, but honestly, I need to start making great changes, nonetheless. If we don’t do the things that make life worth living for ourselves, then why are we even bothering with anything?
Perhaps, the only thing I can do, is accept that my studies and my efforts at work will have to become the second most important thing in my life and that – for a while at least – I will have to try and focus on me.
I want to promise myself to do just one thing – a single thing – that I love once every day for no less than 5 minutes. You may not believe it, but honestly, the idea is almost terrifying to me. I have no idea how to find 5 minutes every day for something that isn’t relevant for school, work or doing practical chores at home.
That’s probably not a good sign. I know that I have suffered from stress for a long time, the more I think about it, the more I think I have lived in a constant state of anxiety and stress for about 2 years now. My body and mind is constantly struggling to find solutions to pay my student loans off, to not fail my exams at school and not get fired at work.
The people I work with are amazing, but there is no room at all to be slow or have difficulties learning. I get an assignment and do it. I can ask for help, but maybe my colleagues are stressed or something, because odds are I will have to find a solution myself or give up doing the assignment altogether. I was hired to apprentice and promised I would have time to learn, but reality is quite different.
School is similar, we are promised that we are there to learn, but in reality, we never have time to understand the subjects we work on. I have never worked with python, and I had 3 days at school to learn, then had 2 days to do a project as an exam. The week after I had 3 days to learn about big data and then again, 2 days to do a project in a system and framework I have never seen before as an exam. Maybe some people will feel that I am complaining for no reason, but remember, I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in a different field. I am in no way afraid of hard work and have done hard work before.
I don’t want to complain. I just want to learn. I am not super clever or smart, my memory is limited – in many ways I am a normal person, except that I have autism spectrum disorder.
If I fail my exams or get fired because I don’t work fast enough, I still have student loans to pay and rent and food and everything. So, I can’t fail. I can’t get fired. I need to work harder, so that I don’t.
Only, thinking like that is not healthy. If I fail an exam, I can try again once or twice. If I get fired from work, I can probably find work somewhere else. If I fail all my exams and get fired from work, then surely, I can find some other way to earn enough money to pay off my student loans and everything else. I just don’t want to be afraid of not having enough money to survive, and honestly, that is probably the source of my stress.
Money. Or my fear of lack of money. My fear of not having enough.
Probably, I am not the only one to feel this fear. I think, I will have to put some faith in myself and my ability to survive in spite of everything. Nothing is worth living this way – not even passing my school exams or keeping my job. If I lose my job and fail my exams, even if I lose everything, I think I might still be happier than I am now. That, in itself, should be proof that I have to change things sooner rather than later.
I will do something that I love, something that makes me happy and makes life worth living, for at least 5 minutes every day – it could be playing guitar, writing my blog, studying Japanese or another language that I am trying to learn or it could be as simple as sitting with a cup of tea and reading a book that is utterly unrelated to school or any of my studies(reading for fun, when was the last time I did that?).
Taking responsibility for our own life, no matter how we ended up where we are, can be an incredibly powerful thing. I hope that 5 minutes every day is going to help me take responsibility for my own life somehow.
Nothing is better yet, but somehow, but I want to feel better and that’s a pretty good thing, I think. It’s not like I am not still struggling, stress seems to stay in your body for a long time, but it’s a fine second step, if my first step was just accepting that I am stressed.
