I’m very satisfied with the way my life is going right now. I have an amazing new job, a beautiful new apartment, and even a new love interest. All this after years of living in a horrible underground hellhole working a job I hated and feeling lonely every day. But despite my happiness, I’m finding that I’m getting really overwhelmed, and I could use some help managing the stress until I develop new routines.
I’m very happy with my life, but I’m overloaded. Can anyone recommend ways to manage/reduce stress, or based on the following details, things I can change without giving up the happy life I’ve built for myself?
Apologies for the wall of text, but I’ve tried to include only the most important details.
1. Work: I now work mornings and midday at a bilingual (Czech/English) preschool, then in the late afternoon I have private English lessons with some of my old students. I have no breaks to speak of and I often work 12 hours in a day (including travel time between jobs). In addition, the kids at the school don’t speak English. I have to understand their Czech and respond in a mixture of English, mime, and basic Czech to communicate with them. It takes a lot of concentration to process Czech all day.
I know the obvious solution here is to simply work less, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. I have about 30 hours per week at the preschool, plus 5-8 private lessons (they cancel a lot). Working at the school makes me happy and I wouldn’t want to work less even if I could. I’ve had my private students for years and I can’t just abandon them. I certainly don’t want to stop teaching all of them, since I need the money (the school pays ok but it’s not quite enough on its own), and the students all know each other so it would be very awkward to drop some but not others.
My basic weekday schedule right now is wake up at 6:30, go to work, come home at 7-8 pm, eat dinner, go to sleep.
2. New Flat: I’m living completely on my own for the first time. I was nervous at first but now I really like it. I’m very happy with this place, but it has its stresses. The landlord is this nice but talkative old Czech man who keeps trying to give me furniture. He makes it so hard to say no that I now have several cabinets stacked up in the corner that I don’t know what to do with. When I see him, he talks on and on for ages and there’s no easy way out of the conversation (NT friends have confirmed this). I’ve been fighting the internet company for 3 weeks to get it connected (fortunately it should be ready by the end of the weekend, at last). I also have trouble keeping the place clean since I have so little time. This place is tiny, but after nearly a month here, dust is starting to build up in places and I know the carpet needs to be vacuumed. I need a vacuum cleaner but I haven’t had the time to actually go buy one, and shopping is, of course, its own mountain of stress.
3. New Love Interest: We don’t know each other very well yet but I really like him and he’s giving off signals so clear that even I pick up on them that he’s interested. I’ve been single nearly 6 years though, and I have no idea what I’m doing. He’s clearly interested, but he doesn’t keep in touch very well and doesn’t usually answer phone messages (phone calls in this country are prohibitively expensive and everyone just uses texts). He prefers to communicate via Facebook, but as I said before, I don’t have internet yet. I know there are rules about how often to contact someone before you have to wait for them to contact you, otherwise you look desperate, but I don’t understand the rules at all. Worse still, the only times we’ve really talked have been when I’m drunk and therefore not so shy or awkward. I’m afraid when he gets to know the real (sober) me, he might not like me so much. Being nervous makes me awkward, which makes me say and do stupid things. I know I shouldn’t worry so much, but it’s just been so long since I’ve been with someone and I’m really tired of feeling lonely. I don’t want to f**k this up. It’s on my mind all the time.
I’m really proud of how far I’ve come in life and how independent I am. I know I can do just about anything if I work hard enough, but I’m starting to lose it. I had a meltdown a few weeks ago for the first time in a very long time, and every night when I get home after a full day of worrying about social rules and managing my interactions with the world, I start to lose it a little bit. I spend all my time before bed rocking back and forth, practicing talking to people who aren’t there, worrying about the next day, etc. I’m getting headaches every day and it’s getting tougher and tougher to act normal all day. Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks so much in advance for any help or support anyone can offer. I’m not ready to give up. I know I can do this. But I might need some help to make it work.
05 Nov 2011, 8:36 am
