You Can Call Me El

Written on Wednesday 17th June Hi pals, guess who it is! Your favourite (surely) anxious bitch! I keep coming back to this blog only when I feel like shit! What’s that about! I guess it doesn’t give a very representative idea of what my life is like at the moment, but then who wants that anyway??? Let’s curate this shit!!  Yes this is a weird energy, I know. I’m currently in a new phase of anxiety, which I thought was worth mentioning because it’s an interesting one. It doesn't happen that often but when it does it sure is fucking annoying! The phase is this: I Feel Anxious But I’m Also Furious About It.  For the sake of comparison, usually it’s more like, I Feel Anxious And I’m Too Scared To Do Literally Anything. Usually there’s a bit of anger in the mix as well, at the fact that it’s stopping me from doing Literally Anything, but it’s too buried under all the helplessness and fear and certainty of death, so it makes a change.  The furious phase is, I’d say,...

It's hard to write something without a satisfying narrative. For a proper story, you want a beginning, a middle and an end. For example: first I felt okay. Then I felt terrible for a while. But then, after lots of trials and tribulations, by the end I felt better. This is what stories should look like.  The trouble is, real life usually doesn't have a satisfying narrative. This is why I stand by my theory that films based on real events are often in some way disappointing. Consider the Sound of Music. It'll surprise no one to hear that we watched it numerous times when I was growing up, and it was a formative part of my childhood. But, there was an issue. The happy ever after wedding scene was, for some reason, in the middle of the film! This must have been some sort of error. Instead of finishing there, the film continued with some awkward, unnecessary singing of Edelweiss again , the family singing in front of a gigantic crowd for literally ages, and lots terrifying cre...

That's right, this week is Mental Health Awareness Week! Look at their website: the theme is kindness . It’s really nice that this exists, especially at the moment. I encourage you to dive in. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about this week. Mental Health Awareness was a ready-made theme, but… I’m tired. It’s obvious that Mental Health Awareness Week is good, CLEARLY. It’s fab that we have it, and that we have World Mental Health Day (on 10 October). But I’m just… so aware already, you know? Thinking about mental health is crucially important and it’s also BORING and I do it ALL THE TIME. I’m sick of it!!!! So I came into this feeling vaguely annoyed, and then I spent some time on the campaign’s website and felt guilty, because honestly they’re doing great work. Of course we should be focusing on kindness, the most important character trait anyone can have, and of course we should be trying to spread it. It’s reassuring that there are compassionate, diligent people w...

There’s an interesting tension between the wish to do something and the wish to do nothing. I’ve been thinking a lot about how appealing it is, when you’re busy and stressed, to dream of a time when you have nothing to do. Thinking about finally putting your feet up, watching endless TV or films, the trashy kind you’ve seen before, playing computer games, lying around. I think lying around is the main thing, really. It’s the main component part to chilling . But… is the dreaming about it nicer than the doing it? I have a guilty secret, which is that I was glad to be put on furlough. I felt close to burning out in January and February, and I wanted to do something about it but didn’t. I’d just started a new job and was worried about asking to take time off and I didn’t know if I’d have the confidence. And then I was furloughed, and I was handed the time and space I needed to rest and think and recover. Or this is how it might have felt, if it hadn’t been prompted by a pandemi...

Hello again. Here we are still in lockdown! Isn’t it interesting that in the UK we seem to refer to it as lockdown, while other countries are calling it quarantine? Right?! Lockdown rather than quarantine! What’s that about! I know this is using quite a loose definition of the word ‘interesting’. But I thought it was, or at least a tiny bit noteworthy, and on balance, I think that’s partly as a result of one of the many annoying new habits I’ve picked up recently. This habit is one I like to call ‘being furiously observant all of the time’, and it leads me on to the subject of this post, which is Mindfulness and Gratitude Oh My God. In this new observant state, I notice so many things. I see specks of dust on the bedside table. I hear the clatter of a mug onto a table. The vibration of a phone is excessively loud. I can hear birds singing, even though there’s nowhere for them to live near this flat so I don’t know where they can be. The tiled floor feels smooth and hard and t...

Hi friends. It’s me, Eleanor. Long-term fans of me will remember this blog from my third year of university. That’s right! I spent a year abroad as an English Language Assistant in Chemnitz, Germany, and I kept a blog every week, and I’ve revisited it today for the first time in five (5) years. [1] And now here we are on 22 nd April 2020, in London, England, the world. By my count, this is week 5 of enforced working from home, and about a month since lockdown officially started. Hope things are going well!!!! I was moved to sit down and write this today for a couple of reasons. I will lay them out for you here: Number One : As of yesterday, I am on furlough and I don’t have any work to do apart from domestic labour such as keeping the flat clean and tidy, which because of Feminist Reasons I’m not fucking doing, even though it would actually make sense for me to do it because my sweet boyfriend is still working full-time/breadwinning as we speak. (“I’m not your litt...

I arrived in Germany on 8th September 2014 and will leave on 13th June 2015, making my official time living here just over nine months. A year abroad is often hyped up to be the best year of your life, meaning there's a lot of pressure to not only have a great time but also tell and show everyone how fab it all is. Before you leave for the adventure, people you tell are either thrilled or terrified on your behalf; it's rarely a lukewarm 'oh that sounds nice' reaction when it is revealed that you're moving to a different country for a significant length of time. In my experience this interest peaks just before you depart, then cools massively leading up to your first return home, when it becomes clear that life abroad leaves you looking mostly the same with no immediately obvious scars.  This diminished interest could be partly my fault; I must have made Chemnitz sound very uninspiring, judging by the number of people that still think it is a tiny, rural village (i...