This is my last night in Sweden

I should do something. It’s past 11 p.m., I have no alcohol in the house and I will not put on pants, so I guess writing a blog post is the only thing I can do.

I’ve been fairly miserable a lot here. Not depressed but miserable because of miserable circumstances. My job stopped being challenging after the first two months and started to get truly frustrating after three. ‘Small town suck!’ is something I am now saying with both big city girl arrogance and small town living experience. I got along with everybody I worked and lived with but I made zero friends. This is mostly my own fault since I am extremely slow at making new friends but also, those clichés about the Swedes being a polite but guarded people are kind of super true.

However, I’ve been wanting to live in Sweden for a decade and I managed to do it. It was not all loneliness, all the time. I discovered that I really like cooking from time to time, I learned how to make pizza dough, I collected blueberries on a whim and I found out that I like taking pictures. My Swedish is still not fluent but it is a lot better than six months ago. Most importantly, I can survive in a foreign country when, a year ago, I wasn’t sure if I could survive on my own at all. That’s an achievement. Living in Sweden has been a dream of mine for a very long time and I’ve accomplished it. Not in an ideal way but I did it.