comfortable discomfort

Along with the weather and the landscape, plans and decisions change too.

I'm noticing how here in Iceland nothing is ever set in stone and you just have to get used to a constant state of uncertainty. You can plan some things, but you can never be sure how it all goes. A storm can come, a road can get closed, the wind can blow you away.

Anything can happen. Nothing can happen too. Things change fast. 

I was planning to stay in Snæfellsnes for 5 months, but suddenly something made me realise that I should leave sooner. It takes a special kind of strength and patience to live in the middle of nowhere and I know that I won't be able to handle it for much longer. My city-bred heart reminded itself where it comes from. It is longing for a comeback to a bit more urban life right now and I need to follow it. 

Spring is here and everything is even more beautiful now, but I know that I have to move on.

Today I'm going for a short trip to Reykjavik. In June I'm moving there. Leaving the peninsula for the first time since I came here 3 months ago feels extremely exciting and I'm so pumped up for this I can't sleep.

Time has come for a new adventure. How am I going to feel like in Reykjavik? Am I going to find a job there? Am I going to stay there for 2 more months and go back to Poland or is it going to be a longer-term thing? 

Somehow I'm becoming less afraid of questions like this, maybe I'm slowly starting to feel comfortable in this seemingly uncomfortable state of uncertainty.

Will see what happens next.

2 months

When I came here, I was captivated. The peacefulness, the otherworldly landscape made it all feel a bit like a dream. Then the reality of being stuck in the middle of nowhere in a suffocating small "family business" situation hit me and for a while I was quite of a mess, there was a lot of anxiety and some issues started popping up. 

Right now, after 2 months, I’m still moved by the beauty of this land. I appreciate that I am able to work here with something I’m passionate about which is cooking. I’m also grateful that this whole experience allows me to rethink some things about my life and inspires me to make new plans for the future. With all this in mind, it’s so much easier to accept and overcome some drawbacks and obstacles I'm encountering. There are moments when I’m thinking that I should give up and maybe go back to Poland sooner than at the end of July. But it all passes. 

I guess it’s important to allow yourself to feel everything, the whole spectrum of emotions we have as human beings. For me, it gets tricky, cause at times I feel as though I’m on an emotional roller-coaster and the intensity overwhelms and confuses me. Here, I can observe all of those thoughts and emotions arising inside of me more clearly, without being pulled away from myself by the outside world. Cause it’s so easy to get out of touch with yourself while living in the city with all of its speediness and distractions.

Here you have to face everything head-on, cause there’s nowhere to run, not so many things to distract yourself with. Basically you’re stuck with yourself and you have to work with what you have. 

Everything is so unpredictable and changeable here. I’m watching the ocean, how it changes along with the weather. Sometimes calm, sometimes agitated. Sometimes the wind comes and blows everything away. After couple of hours it passes, the air gets warm and you can lie down in the sun on the mossy grass, enjoy the moment. 

This is how life is and I have to let go of the urge to have everything under control. Some things I can control, but most of them I just can’t and I need to accept this. 

emotional landscapes

Month and a half. After a period of relative peacefulness, last week this land decided to teach me a lesson.

I got my first glimpse of the more severe aspects of being stuck in the middle of nowhere. 

There is so much space around and at first it was very welcoming. It allowed me to breathe. Yet suddenly, for a while, it became hostile and imposing. The fog came and covered the mountains forming a milky wall of endless nothingness. What could be hiding in this fog? At the same time the ocean became agitated, heavy waves crashing - majestic and angry-seeming at the same time.

this is a photo of a light fog, when it gets heavier you can only see an infinite white abyss on the horizon

For many days I didn't leave the closest area of the guesthouse where I'm working and the house where I'm sleeping. It was even difficult to go for a walk because of the heavy rain and wind. 

In such circumstances it is so easy for the mind and the emotions to go astray. 

The emotions and moods I experience sometimes go overboard and it has a potential to wreak quite a havoc in my life. This duality confuses me, because on the outside I seem to be calm and emotion-less and then all of a sudden I start freaking out or acting in a really weird way, I do and say bizarre stuff. For a very long time I wasn't even aware that there is something different in the way I experience and process emotions, as compared to let's say "normal" way most of adult people do. I had and probably still have a tendency to act on extreme emotions in situations where it's not the wisest thing to do and repress or not act on them in situations where it could be beneficial. This is an issue I'm working on and probably will for a very long time. I even consulted this with a psychiatrist at some point, who told me a very important thing - when it comes to mental health, we are all on a spectrum, it's never black or white. There are very few people, if any, who are perfectly sane or perfectly insane. Majority of people experience some abnormalities in one or more aspects of the way they are functioning, while the other aspects are working just fine for them. Just because I experience emotions more intensely than what is considered to be the norm, that doesn't mean that there is something "wrong" with me or that I'm "crazy". I have to accept that this is the way I am and only then I can start working with what I have, try to find a balance, not to hurt myself nor other people because of this. This also has a positive side - experiencing intense emotions and being hyper-sensitive at the core of my being is a great source of creativity for me and I think this is why I am able to be creative in some fields without having a lot of skills for it, to be honest.

lonely, vulnerable alga

So yes, my mind and my emotions went into a weird spiral last week. I got stuck on some negative thoughts and couldn't find a way out, blowing mild issues and misunderstandings completely out of proportion which resulted in a breakdown. Thankfully, someone pointed out that I'm being irrational and right afterwards I got a chance to leave the area for the first time since many almost identical days spent doing almost identical things in the same environment of the guesthouse. We went on a trip to the town of Stykkisholmur, which is 50 km away and has a population of 1195 people. Looking at the landscape along the way and then doing the shopping felt truly amazing and extraordinary. I felt like a child in a candy shop.

the view from the car during the trip

This seemingly random, but for me very important trip allowed me to find some new energy. The crisis defused and now I know that in order to feel better when things get stuck, I just have to do something that will allow me to look at things from a different perspective. I have to change the rhythm once in a while.

Stykkisholmur

It's interesting how here, in this situation of being in a remote place far away from everything, many issues I thought I had already put behind me or dealt with, they start popping up unexpectedly. There are still demons and ghosts haunting me. Maybe instead of fighting I should become friends with them, so they become something that is going to help me and push me forwards instead of getting in my way and dragging me backwards?

the view on the way back to the guesthouse

What other things is this land about to show me and teach me?

first month

It’s been almost a month now. 

Am I living the dream?

I have to say yes, I am. But it is a strange dream, not the kind where everything is nice, easy and comfortable all the time. That would be boring. 

my favourite place to go for a walk, it's only ~15 minutes by foot from the guesthouse

I’m making my teenage fantasies come true. 

I remember being a confused & depressed 15-year old who got so much into listening to music, probably because it could serve so well as an escape from everyday reality. Icelandic music resonated with me back then, apart from Björk I used to be a heavy listener of Sigur Rós and múm (and I wasn't the only one, it’s interesting how a lot of Polish teenagers were super into bands from Iceland). 

I dreamed that one day I could visit this magical land. It seemed like such a far-fetched idea back then, the flights were extremely expensive and it felt so unattainable, remote, located on the other side of the world.

Then I forgot about those dreams for many years, Iceland was no longer priority on the list of places I wanted to travel to. 

Yet somehow I ended up here.

hardships

Time to talk about the difficulties.

Work is always work, even when you’re doing something that you truly love. If you’re getting paid money for it, then it’s inevitable that not everything is going to be pretty, easy, nor smooth. Certainly there are going to be parts of it that you’re going to hate and compromises that you will be forced to take. 

I have a complicated relationship with quitting. I give up a lot. Most recently I have quit a job back in Warsaw. Sometimes quitting and giving up is amazing - it means leaving all the stuff you don’t longer need behind, growing from the experience and moving on. But sometimes it’s terrible and means giving up on your hopes and dreams, sabotaging yourself.

Back in Warsaw, as a hobby I had been organising pop-up dinners almost every month for about 2 and a half years. The last one I organised was in February, shortly before my departure.

Even though there were a lot of extremely hard moments in my bibimbap-making "career", I never gave up on doing this. I couldn’t give up, because I loved it too much.

Right now, I see my cooking at the guesthouse as the next episode in my culinary adventure.

I'm sure I wouldn't be able to do this right now if I didn’t have previous experience with the pop-up dinners, where I sometimes cooked for more than 40 people during one evening. Here, the most so far was 11 orders at the same time. 3 different dishes to make almost from scratch.

.

sanatorium

Proste sprawy, spełnione potrzeby - ma się gdzie spać, ma co jeść, może zarówno pracować, jak i mieć czas dla siebie.

Wokół roztaczają się majestatyczne krajobrazy, a problemy i niepokoje, które miało się jeszcze miesiąc wcześniej zaczynają przypominać rozmywające się we mgle zjawy, które niewiele już znaczą. Powidoki.

Teraz widzę w pełni, jak negatywnie wpływała na mnie moja pierwsza w życiu praca na pełen etat, którą wykonywałam przed wyjazdem. Wmawiałam sobie, że wszystko jest w porządku, że nie mam na co narzekać i że powinnam się cieszyć, że zostałam przyjęta do miejsca, które dodatkowo mogło uchodzić za “prestiżowe”. Być może to wszystko było bardzo lekką formą syndromu sztokholmskiego, być może stał za tym podobny mechanizm psychologiczny w skali mikro. Oczywiście praca miała sporo zalet, ale w pewnym momencie negatywy zaczęły przeważać. Niepokój i niepewność, czy zaraz i tak człowieka nie zwolnią (przy umowie śmieciowej/samozatrudnieniu mogą to zrobić w każdej chwili), władze obiecujące różne rzeczy, po czym niewywiązywanie się z tych obietnic, brak realnych możliwości rozwoju, niekompetentne osoby na wyższych stanowiskach, klimat polityczny. A do tego wszystkiego bardzo smutne poczucie, że to, co się robi i za co dostaje się pieniądze - że mogłoby tego w ogóle nie być na świecie i nie byłoby to jakąś wielką stratą.

Myślę, że “większości osób" taka sytuacja by nie przeszkadzała i mogłyby w niej funkcjonować przez długi czas. Nie dziwi mnie to, bo tak często wygląda nasza rzeczywistość i niby skąd ludzie mogliby wiedzieć, że życie może wyglądać zupełnie inaczej, niż to wszystko, do czego są przyzwyczajeni?

Ja już wiem, że wolałabym więcej nie znaleźć się w podobnej sytuacji. Jednak jestem wdzięczna za to, że miałam możliwość spróbować i przekonać się na własnej skórze. A potem, że zebrałam się na odwagę, żeby odejść.

Dzięki temu znalazłam się tutaj.

beginnings

This was a very good decision.

It's been about a week and a half since I landed here.

photo by Oskar 

I wake up early in the morning, look out of the window and see the ocean. I can hear it too. I leave the house and look at the pink dawning light covering the mountains.

Inhale & exhale, the air is crispy clean. 

It's cold, but not in an unpleasant way. After I wake up, I have to walk a couple of meters through the snow to the main guesthouse. I start preparing breakfast. Simple tasks. Brewing, pouring, cutting. Down to earth and tangible. Material. Then I look out of the window again. Having all this majestic nature as a background to my everyday routine is an experience in itself.

How long does it take for the otherworldly to become common and ordinary? Is this sense of being in complete awe of the surroundings going to last?

The first couple of days were the weirdest - such a contrast between how I was feeling and what was going around me back home to what is happening here, in the middle of nowhere. I guess I feel more present and "in the moment" here than I did for the most part of last year back in Warsaw. 

I'm far away from everything, but I don't feel lonely. I made a new friend (who's unfortunately gone now, but will be back in a month) and there are people coming and going, passing through the guesthouse every day with their own stories. And of course there is technology, wi-fi connects me to the world at large.

There is also something else. A certain spookiness that can be felt especially after the sun goes down. I feel that there is a lot going on here beneath the surface, the energy levels are high. And somehow I'm not scared of this.

At night the stars shine vividly as they always do far away from the city lights. 

The Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis, are here too. Very subtle, mild and not strong at all, but present still. 

These next months are going to be interesting.