Much stress about nothing

Today the blog writer is not well on this beautiful Sunday in the exotic city of Sydney, suffering from a headache caused by tension neck and feeling entitled to feel cranky and miserable. She just wants to stay in the bed she shares with the bedbugs (nasty beasts, I'm full of bite marks and consequent bruises cause by scratching the itchy bite marks. Not cool, man!) I've had a headache since Wednesday and it reminded me of how I used to be scared of having a headache. In my family we have the gene of having intracranial hemorrhage (fancy name for the bursting of a vessel inside your head) and I was scared I'd die of it as so many people before me. I was so stressed about it that for three years the thought occupied my mind almost every day. What a waste of time to worry about something that might never happen!

Remembering this led me to write about stressing about many things and how different people see stressful situations. The writer herself confesses to be prone to stress pretty much about everything. There isn't such a small matter that it wouldn't create a stress reaction in me because I'm the master of making a mountain out of a mole hill. I stress about being late, sleeping, eating healthy food (I don't eat healthy anymore, being too tired to cook I've started eating a lot of junk food), well, everything. I'm the exact opposite of most of my roommates who seem to take life as it comes, day by day. So let me introduce some of our differences.

Enormous stress attack, one piece is missing!

1. Eating and drinking

I try to eat healthy, I really try. I always try to make filling, nutritious meals and avoid eating too much sugar and fat. It horrifies me to see that e.g. Italians I've met here ate chocolate cookies for breakfast and drank a couple of glasses of wine almost every day. Unfortunately I've comfortably started to slip to this kind of ”eating sweets and drinking wine”- cuisine. Maybe enjoying life keeps Italians healthy and increases longevity but in my case the effect is the opposite cause I stress about not eating according to generally accepted guidelines.

You can start drinking wine in the afternoon. Once I asked my Argentinian roommates if they think it is appropriate to drink wine in the afternoon. The answer was ”what is time?” I had to go and lie down for the rest of the afternoon and think, because this scattered my worldview. Yes, what is time? Does it really matter if you drink wine at lunch? Some people are drunk as a skunk at eight o'clock in the morning.

2. The power of ”together”

Face it, Finnish culture is quite discriminating. We form groups with people we like, and only with those people. The ones who do not fit in the group are left outside without a second glance. Maybe it is living this backpacker hostel that makes people more open, but it is also a fact that some cultures are more collective than the others. When our Italian and Argentinian roommates go somewhere, they automatically ask everyone who seems to need some company to come along. It's not so important to be the very best friends with everyone, or get along like a house on fire. It's important to do things together, spend time together. Once I went to the beach with my Argentinian roommates and they wanted to play beach volley. I didn't want to play because I seriously suck at every sport possible except maybe yoga (if that counts as a sport). My roommates said they don't care if I'm good or not, that's not the point. I sa the rest of the afternoon on the beach, feeling disturbed. Of course people are supposed to be interested in the level of skills! Or maybe it's just an old trauma from physical education classes. Everyone there was all too interested in the level of my skills.

3. Planning and being late for your own funeral

Finnish people tend to plan ahead and be early for everywhere they go, that's seen as a virtue in our culture. A rough plan for the week is typically ready on Sunday. I've said bye bye to that. If somebody asks what I'm going to do in the evening I got anxious because well, the evening is so far. We even tried to explain to a Finnish girl who was staying here that no one makes plans for Friday night. It just happens when the time comes. Relax, man!

Actually planning too much can be a negative thing, too. I planned my trip to Hunter Valley for too long and the prices went up. ”Why do you think so hard about spending a hundred dollars? If you have enough money for food and accommodation, you are basically doing OK”, said my roommate. There is truth in that statement.

Otherwise I've kept my Finnish habits. If I'm supposed to start working at nine, I'm there already 8:40, to avoid being late. (In my country being late is a severe offense punished by decades of forced labor.) In the free time we are all so slow that if we are supposed to go somewhere at two, at three the even the last of us has brushed his teeth and changed to something more comfortable. We would all be ate for our own funeral. My great grandmother used to say that if my great grandfather was to be sent to fetch his own death, he'd live forever, he was so slow. I can see same kind of pattern here, too.

4. Screwed it!

I make a lot of mistakes and forget to do a lot of things I am supposed to do. One morning at breakfast I suddenly yelled ”oh f***” and my roommate asked what's wrong. I explained I was supposed to send a confirmation of payment to the language school in order to enroll on a course but I forgot. ”Well, things like that happen, why are you so upset?” said my roommate. Indeed, when I checked my e-mail that afternoon on the way home, the language school had confirmed the payment for me and thanked me for enrolling on the course. Once again I made my blood pressure shoot sky high for nothing.

I often feel I'm bat shit crazy when I talk with my roommates, especially with the once from Southern Europe or South America. I wish I could be that relaxed but I'm plagued my discomfort if something is not quite like it should be. One day I complained that someone left their bike in the narrow corridor to block the way. Later that night I couldn't fall asleep and my Argentinian roommate asked if that's because the bike is in a place where it shouldn't be. Well, maybe. Difficult to relax if the order of all things is not right. I love to label, categorize and analyze everything but here I'm the only one with those tendencies. I sit quietly and learn about life. Why do I take everything so seriously? I'll end up in early grave if I can't relax and just shrug some things off.

5. Stress at work

Before Christmas we were so busy at work we hardly had time to breathe. Being blue in the face we fought against time to finish all the orders on time. I was so stressed but my Chinese colleague was more philosophical. ”It's the busiest time of the ear and we are only two, trying to do the work of three. We are fast, so every day we can finish what needs to be finished”. That's right. A couple of hours of overtime is not even much if two persons are doing the work of three.

6. Rules and regulations

Finns are very law obedient people. We take rules and regulations seriously. We went for a picnic on Christmas day and New Year's eve, both venues being strictly ”no alcohol”. The loudspeakers kept repeating this message every fifteen minutes and my Italian roommates saluted to this with their glasses of rum and coke. One day one of our Italian roommates had come from Coles with a small bunch of cilantro in his shopping bag. Anna had asked where he'd found such a small bunch, usually cilantro is sold in bigger, 3 dollar pots. The Italian guy explained, perplexed, that he just took some of the coriander out of the pot, because he doesn't really need that much, so buying the whole pot would be waste of money. Hearing this, my Finnish heart huddled into a small, tight ball and ceased to exist.