Endings and Beginnings
The hard truth about starting a life abroad with no work experience? You might have to take jobs that don’t quite match the environmental engineering degree in your hand. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with working in a hotel but it still hurt that I couldn’t use the brain cells I had spent the last four years warming up.
Making beds, scrubbing bathrooms, cleaning up after guests. That was my life for the first few months in Ireland. Then I moved on to working as a Technical Customer Support Specialist, which meant almost every day, I’d wait at the bus stop for an hour—in the windy, rainy, dark outskirts of Cork.
Big traffic jam, and hey my shoes are soaking wet, again..great.
I’d get home and press myself against the radiator, like a hug I desperately needed. And my partner? Nowhere. That was the norm.
And I questioned it, why did I move here?
To be wet, miserable, and lonely?
Without friends.
Without family.
Without anything familiar.
It’s hard, especially in the beginning. So if you’re reading this and you’ve ever felt lonely or moved to a new place, please know that maybe we felt the same things, at the same time. And there’s something comforting in that.
Like in a movie, where the camera zooms in, on me, at the bus stop, drenched, staring at the headlights in the dark. And then it zooms out… and zooms in on you. Somewhere else in the world, maybe just as lost. Connected, somehow, through the very thing that makes us human.
And here’s another picture:
Teardrops rolling down both sides of my cheeks. Eyes closed. But still, the tears find their way.
It’s deep winter, and I’m at Himalaya Valley Yoga Studio, for the second time that day. At home, there was no one. But here… at least I could meet myself.
Imagine a public place where you are unafraid to cry because you feel held.
That’s how I felt.
Even in the midst of chaos and loneliness, yoga opened up a space where these tears were welcome. A space where endings and beginnings were not failures but elemental parts of being human.
And this is something we were never taught at school.
What life is.
What life really is.
Endings and beginnings.
(To be continued..)
December 2019, Cork: just a few steps away from the Himalaya Yoga Valley Studio that held space for my sadness and grief ❤️
