My layered self and how friendships shaped me into what I am today

Escaflowne - because it was one of the first animes my friends shared with me

Today, I decided that I’ll just go through the personal layering topic. While usually when I go talk about layers it tends to go on a rage about the layers I have to peel of the dutch people until they trust me enough to open up… this time I’ll actually talk a bit about my own layers. Which when I actually analyze them, there is actually a very long line of them (I'll still rant about everyone's else layers however because I decided that fairness is for pussies).

Everyone has a bit of layering on them. Layers which we use to disguise our insecurities and weaknesses. Most of the times these layers exist because there was a social or an environmental response for them to be created.

And since this is me, I obviously made it in levels with silly names.

Do you see things in pictures?

And after a nice week with work and the elf fantasy fair. Back to the weird up questions.

The title question was actually something my college supervisor asked me while he was having a meeting with me and my supervisor from work at school. This was connected to the talk about me having some issues with structuring my chapters and what I did with them.

The actual question was “I understand, you are a bit chaotic. Do you have your thoughts in words or in pictures?”

I said at the moment pictures, because the question had never occurred to me before but the only thing I was sure was that my thought most certainly didn’t come in sentences. So pictures was a more accurate thing.

Yet, as almost everything which I absorb which is new, it got me thinking… Or better, analyzing how exactly my thoughts came into place.

Unorthodox study methods

Lance - Nameless: the route I am currently on.

As usual, as someone almost finishing her studies, the last exam semester holds quite a new level of stress for me. Since it involves having to pass exams which might cause delay to your studies.

To cope with the stress, I somewhat re-used a method which my bestie taught me which is 30 minutes of fun, 30 minutes of work days.

This usually works good if you don't have a huge working load and you have still sometime.

However, I discovered a tiny problem in my method while playing the visual novel "nameless" (which I should have guessed since it is from the same studio as dandelion).

30 minutes of nameless which hit the part of the path which starts bringing tears

30 minutes of calculations which i hold the tears up.

30 minutes which give me loud sobbing and now actual tears.

30 minutes which I am now sobbing loudly while calculating stuff, my notes are getting tears on them and I have formed a sort of a surrounding wall of handkerchiefs.

20 minutes to go to the kitchen to make food and my landlords go like "are you sick?" me: "Ah, yes..." /TRIES TO HOLD TEARS AND NOT SHOW MY EYES WHICH ARE TOTALLY RED.

List of things which I miss and not miss from my youth friendships and list of things which I like about today's friendships

Kyou Kara Maoh! The series which made me realize how much google depended on America for images (nowadays its different XD But at the time it took ages for the american fans to pick this anime up).

This is actually something which has been sort of bugging. For someone who dislikes to look back on her life, having this sort of happiness ghost lurking and somewhat putting holes in the new friendship process is a bit annoying. While I have the tendency to hold up to good memories a bit too much, I find that accepting that things change is also a necessity if I am to accept the world progressing in different direction.

This applies specially since I am not only in a different decade (jesus, I am old) but also in a different country, as such, it makes me a bit more narrow minded and less prone to enjoy the benefits of the new ways of interacting if I keep holding up to the amazing feelings of the past.

So, in order to make a bit of a memorial to those feelings/memories, here goes the things I miss the most from my youth friendships:

Decided to try to continue my blog

Wow, it has been a while.

My 26 years old existencial crisis

Return home anxiety

Okay, so it has been a while since I wrote here. Which funny enough, it is more related to not knowing what to write down first than not having anything to write about.

Last post I might have mentioned that I would write about cultural differences, but I came to the conclusion that that will be the biggest tl;dr I’ll ever write about, since there is just so much to write about it that I don’t even know how to start… so I decided to leave it for later when I find the correct mindset to face the task.

Meanwhile, I would like to talk about something that somehow, I never see it written or blogged about. However, according to my older sister, she also has that. I came to call it my “Return home anxiety” since I lack of a better name for it.

What is this? Well, you are outside of your country, busting your ass (okay, this semester this hasn’t happen that much… but usually it does), and you are counting the days to return home. Be with your family and friends, relax…

Except that there is no relaxation part, since you have pretty much your whole social life (AND I DON’T HAVE IT THAT MUCH) waiting for you to return. Suddenly, you see each day which you are in your home country as a jewl, something so precious which you must share it with someone. And you have so many people to meet that you make appointments everyday to meet someone different.

When you return home, your little brothers start to complain that they never see you. So you schedule a day at home to spend time with your family. Yet, they have lives too, and spending every second of their day with you it’s sort of too much… However, you start feeling anxious because you are wasting precious minutes of your time in Portugal and you aren’t sure they are being well used.

So yeah, in summary, Return home anxiety is the anxiety which one feels when they feel the need of giving a purpose to all the days of your holiday. And when you don’t. You get extremely anxious about it.

The good news is, over the years, you get the hang of more or less controlling it. Plus somehow, your friends most of the times, after 3 years begin to get used to it. It’s somewhat odd about friends, but mine I have that thing that even if I don’t see them/talk to them for a longgg time, somehow, I never feel weird when I meet them again. Like, sometimes, there is some strangeness, but it dissipates quite fast most of the time.

So I now just do plans as time goes. Like, if I feel like it, I schedule to meet people. If not, I chill at home. But yeah, there is always the priority which is, making sure I see my family (which means both my father and mother side) enough during the holidays (and not too much that I want to kill someone xD).

But yeah, have no idea if this is just a me and my sister thing or if there is more people (then again, most people I know just go for 1 semester or a year… they don’t have 4 years ahead of short holidays). 

But anyway, this is my comment about holiday returns. The worst ones are also the x-mas ones. Since the holiday is already traumatic enough without the time issue.