It’s been a year since I arrived in Ireland.
If you told me a year ago that I would be where I am now in my life I would say have said, what the fuck are you talking about.
Sometimes I think about what I was like in Denmark and I know I was a difficult person to live with back then. I was not psychologically prepared to be away from everything familiar to me, much less to live in an isolating, myopic place like Denmark. And I really, really lost my bearings, and I was not strong enough to fashion new ones on my own, and so I sort of ended up trying to cling to norms, hoping it would lead someplace familiar.
After a year in Denmark I kind of knew I would leave as soon as I could, but I didn’t know how to do it.
It was difficult to try to be perfect, not just Danish-standards perfect, but to also be the type of person that someone like * deserved. There is no harm in wanting to be a better person, but given how much work it inevitably entails, you have to have a certain mindset to attempt it. To have a certain level of maturity that no amount of trying will achieve. Either it just happens or it doesn’t, and we did not understand that at the time. But that’s why it was so difficult, because it just never happened to me (I don’t think I’ve still even reached it).
When I knew I was moving to Ireland, I somehow had the naive viewpoint that I would simply learn to be more responsible and more adult. For years and years I wanted to be “mature” and somewhere along the way I kind of stopped associating that term with “fun” - I had fallen into the fallacy that they were mutually exclusive.
Apparently not.
Apparently if you stop trying so hard, growing up is much easier. At least you don’t have the weight of your failure being someone else’s disappointment. At least if I mess up once in a while, I only have to deal with my own judgment.
I did not imagine that living alone in Ireland would introduce me to a feeling of liberation that I have never had. I thought I would spend every evening miserable, crying over cat videos on Youtube. I thought I would be like other immigrants that I see in the city sometimes, shuffling home quietly with a grocery bag of that night’s dinner, watching Friends reruns on TV. That’s how I spent the first few weeks. If you want to do that, fair enough, that’s your choice, not mine. But that’s the thing: for the longest time I didn’t think I had a choice. I didn’t think I had options, I was too busy going through my life as I thought it was supposed to be, never taking risks, never being adventurous. Because, why bother? I thought I had all the ingredients already to a life that I was meant to live: a job, money, someone I could spend the rest of my life with. And I thought if I just mixed it all together I’d make a fan-fuckin’-tastic cake. Why bother with the sprinkles?
To be honest, I learned more about myself in the short time here than I have in my entire (albeit short) adult life. I’ve learned to accept my flaws: my pettiness, my arrogance, my tendency to roll my eyes a bit too much, all those things that I felt I needed to keep in check but eventually became too exhausting. And because I accept them I can tackle them in a much more civilized manner. I’ve realized that I’m not so bad, really - I have nice eyes, someone once told me I had a great smile, a girl I barely know told me she thought I was cool (sure, she was drunk at the time, but I’ll take what I can get, thankyouverymuch). I’ve learned to shut up and pick my battles, to ease my verbal diarrhea, to not seek approval from everyone all the time. I feel much nearer now in trying to figure out who I am.
Not that I don’t have any work left - I have loads. But I feel like I’m in a good place, both literally and figuratively. Ireland’s frustrating in a lot of ways, but its flaws are familiar, like me I guess.
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Addendum: The irony is that we both finally get it, what we wanted from each other, now that we’re apart we understand what we were both trying to say to each other for so long. Ironic because what it took for that to happen was for “us” to cease existence. But I agree, we can never get a clean slate back. All we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on. We will always be someone to each other, there’s no getting around it. But at least we both have all this space to come to terms with the events of the past year, and someday this will all settle and then we can be friends.