6 – Ligevægt

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

— Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes I just don’t feel like being a functioning human being. For about ninety percent of my time, I do the “right” thing—homework, sleep, exercise, socializing, etc.—but for the remaining ten percent, I am just not in the mood to deal with life’s normal rigamarole. I usually don’t sweat those periods as long as they aren’t too long or too frequent, but during my month and a half in Denmark, I have spent a bit more time in a funk (as I call it) than normal.

Ok, I have to come clean. In my third blog post, I mentioned that over that weekend I had gone on an adventure. To be honest, after my journey to Christiansborg Palace (on a Friday), the rest of my weekend was quite the opposite of an adventure. I don’t recall if it was because I was feeling overwhelmed or tired or sick, but I remember that I just shut down and cooped up from Friday night to Monday morning. I neglected to do any homework or socialize, preferring the company of computer screen and the comfort of my sheets to the unknown beyond my room.

Both during and immediately after that weekend I was ashamed of myself. Everyone had told me that going abroad was “going to be an amazing experience” and that “I would be traveling and exploring every weekend.” I felt like I was squandering my time here and wasting away in my room. In hindsight, this feels a bit like the lie we are sold about college. Everyone says that college is going to be “the best four years of our lives,” and while that isn’t untrue, there’s a much more nuanced range of emotions we all experience. The same is true for study abroad. Am I having a good time? Absolutely. Am I sometimes sad? Of course, it’s human.

My trick to dealing with any of these funks, as I like to call them, has been finding the little things that bring me joy and remind me of home: snuggling up with a good book, snagging a pack of sour cream and onion potato chips at the supermarket, watching my favorite YouTube channel. All of these things have helped me stay in the realm of functionality while I’m here.

When I left from home (which for me happened to be on New Year’s Eve), I set up several strict goals for myself abroad: daily exercise, no added sugar, and no TV. Two months since then and I have more or less abandoned all of them. A month in, I realized that it just wasn’t feasible to push myself in that way at this time in a new country where I’m already faced with other challenges. Now that doesn’t mean I stuff my face with sweets in front of the TV for several hours every day, it’s just that I’ve found a better way to balance those freedoms and a sustainable routine. A dessert or two a week won’t kill me, and neither will skipping the gym after a long day of classes or watching a few funny videos at night. Similarly, one night of going out per weekend has proved to be enough, letting me enjoy those loud environments with friends while still giving myself some alone time to recharge.

What I’m trying to get at is balance. I’ve so often viewed things in my life as black and white, good or bad. In that way I had hoped to achieve perfection in my life. That has led me to project some distorted expectations on myself and on others. To that Sam I say “be gone.” A new goal I have set for myself is to embrace the murky gray between every black and white decision I see. In this way I hope to strike a sustainable balance in my life.