On Not Bitching

Some circumstances in life merit emotions we often consider negative. When you lose someone important to you, I would be worried if you didn't cry. Likewise, certain injustices should inspire great anger. I would never tell someone who is still job searching not to worry because everything will naturally turn up rosy in the end. When you are separated from your friends and family, it's ok to feel homesick. These emotions are all part of being human in tough times.

Other times are different. Unhappiness stems from a combination of suboptimal circumstances and a bad attitude. The situation would not truly be so bad if you didn't focus on the negative, or if you worked harder to change what you do not like. These are the times where I would like to say, "Quit bitching."

I've needed to repeat this mantra to myself more often than I'd care to admit these last few weeks. Some things I've dealt with are legitimate... I'm allowed to be cranky when I've spent several days violently sick to my stomach, and I tell myself it's understandable that it's tough to focus on the positive when you spend a lot of time cooped up because of said stomach illness. But these legitimately bad circumstances seemed to have opened the floodgates for me to fixate on the suboptimal circumstances with which I should be generally able to live.

"I miss my family, I miss my friends, I miss being healthy, I miss being able to converse easily with those I meet" quickly turns into "I miss soft toilet paper, I miss Kleenex, I miss fresh fruit, I miss being able to drink tap water, and on that note I miss having running water every day, I miss air conditioning, hell, I miss ceiling fans, I miss American washing machines- even the dorm ones, I miss having a dryer, I miss fabric softener, I miss California's anti-smoking laws, I miss living in a building where the hallways are not constructed from exposed styrofoam, and I miss living in a building where you don't have to worry about stepping on glass from the broken windows or nails from God knows where, I miss not having people constantly trying to rip me off, I miss this, I miss that, I miss, I miss, I miss." Granted, it would be great not to need to miss these things. But that's besides the point. I'm in a situation where I have to do without, and some of it isn't even that big a deal. The "something needs to change" moment came when a friend of mine who is also here for the summer asked me, "So what's your favorite part of living in Ukraine," and I needed to stall a few minutes before thinking of things that I even liked about living here. That's not a good sign.

Moving to a better neighborhood might fix some of my woes, and I've given the director of my program a polite talking-to about sending a five-foot-tall, 22-year-old FEMALE foreigner with limited Russian-language skills to my particular neighborhood (especially once I found out where other students in my program were living). I've also figured out that it was my yogurt that's making me sick, so there's light at the end of that tunnel as well. I am working on changing my own circumstances, but the rest of my woes won't go away, so it's my attitude that must. And in the mean time, I'm going to keep reminding myself, "Quit bitching."