You may have forgotten about this blog, I almost did myself. But I'm still here! The truth is that quite unexpectedly I got a job, moved to a different city and everything happened at once, so any drawing related matter got put aside.
I generally don't share much about my personal life online, other than an occasional silly camping story, but this experience has been quite... hm... interesting, and quite important, so I decided I'd like to document it in some form.
I won't get into much detail and I haven't drawn a lot of pictures for this because it all feels like a (mostly) unpleasant blur. So I'll start from the beginning.
After graduating I was looking for a job for a few months and when it felt like it was never going to happen, something came along. We were looking to move anyway and it was in Glasgow and everything seemed perfect. To save on commuting I decided to stay in a hostel for the days I was working. It was far less glamorous than I had imagined it. There was a lot snoring, the springs in the bed were digging into my ribs, the kitchen smelled bad and I very quickly switched to eating ready-made meals (which is great as a guily pleasure, but not as a weekly routine), and I felt really lonely being away from Paul in a new city where I didn't really know anyone.
We soon started looking for flats and again, what I thought would be quite an exciting experience (I mean who doesn't like having a nosy in other people's homes?), turned out to be a lot more complicated. Juggling flat viewings and a full time job is not particularly fun. I saw some shitholes, but I also saw some really lovely and homely flats and we even applied for a few.
Unfortunately me being new in my job and Paul not having a job at all didn't make us the most appealing tenants. And the more times we got rejected the more down I felt. It honestly felt like it was never going to end and this brilliant song by Belle and Sebastian became a musical representation of my state of mind *please play the song in the background for full effect*. I think about four weeks in I did totally lose it. I got into my dorm room after the first day back at work after the weekend. I was hungry, there was a big, fat man snoring in his bed at 7pm, his feet were dangling dangerously close to my face because the room was tiny. I sat on my bed, still in my coat, and shamelessly sobbed for an hour. My bunk neighbour came in and he must have thought I was mad, but I was too tired to care.
Normally in these kind of stories you'd expect a solution coming along when it's most needed in the most unexpected form. It didn't quite happen like that, we waited and looked for another little while. I finally met an honest real estate agent (doesn't sound like a real thing, right?) and he told me that essentially without offering a few months of rent upfront we had no chance to get a place. Obviously that sounded completely ridiculous, but my sister swooped in and saved the day by lending us money. We finally got a flat, it was nice, with a good agency, right next to a park and it was the most surreal experience. The first solid memory I have, after I think 5 weeks of all that maddness, is sitting down on the floor (because we had no furniture to sit on) in our new flat right after we had signed the lease and the agent had left. We nothing to eat because when choosing what essentials to take we forgot to pack food... So we just sat there sharing a snack-sized bag of hoola hoops because that was everything we had. We went to Ikea afterwards and stuffed our faced with Swedish meatballs, so all was good in the end.
At this point my job was done. I still went back to the house where we were staying before to clean and pack, but that was it. Paul made the whole move happen. It was hardly smooth sailing and our plans were failing every step of the way, but very slowly we got furniture, moved everything over and one day, quite unexpectedly, we realised we had fully and completely moved to Glasgow.
I wanted to write about this in case someone else is in a similar situation. Not necessarily with a move, maybe you're just trying to achieve something and everything is telling you to give up. If you keep trying you will make it happen. Or at least I'd like to think so.
I know it was just a move and a few weeks of missing home, but it feels like a big achievement to me. And the way Paul put it, when we were living together before it was out of convenience, but this move was a big life step. I'm pretty certain this was the right decision and I am where I should be. And I'm very excited to see what will happen next.
Okay, bye!
