moving
It's a bittersweet feeling, going to another country. Am I going to do alright?
I'm very happy to move. I've been feeling restless. I left the old country again in 2011, and fifteen years on, I feel I need something new to excite me. I've been in the same few places too long.
It's a country I've never lived in, and it's the first time I'm moving on my own. I know what I'm doing, and it is and upgrade from where I am now. At the other hand, it's so easy to go sideways in a manner I'm not sure I can anticipate.
Most of all, am I going to like it? I spent a few days in the area last year, but that's hardly the same as living there. Will I last?
Will the money be enough? I do okay here at home, and my work's quite flexible, but what I make won't go as far as it does here - it hovers just around the minimum people advise to bring home a month.
Then again - what's the use staying here? It's a dying county town. And the cities? It's still the same country, so it feels like same old same old. And people are getting at each other's throats with less and less restraint. It's never been easy agreeing with someone here, but the uninhibited aggression and egotism are becoming overwhelming and it's unsettling how fast. We're like Americans but without guns, and I just can't deal with that much longer.
It may sound alarmist, but I mean the hyperbole. Life in Poland feels like being in a very stuffy room - radicalisation, and national and personal egotism very much on display in daily life and public spaces. Nationalistic platitudes and emotional instability seem to be the order of the day, with adult men standing tall against children.
It's not all bad yet. But I have a growing understanding of how people felt a hundred years ago, and I don't like it.