What am I doing here?

It's been a long time since I started logging my trains of thoughts, deep internal debates and ideas that resonated with me, and here we are, sharing them with some cute pictures⁰

Today's picture is a plate of Spaghetti Aglio e Olio, that was the dinner my Italian flatmates prepared and share with me because I forgot to eat today and they took care of me. Lots of love to people who cares about you and feed you.

I'm not sure where to pin the beginning of this endless path of thinking, re-thinking and re-re-thinking almost everything in my life but I can certainly point one of the biggest changes in my life as a major factor, to not only as a starter/continuer of the process, but the fast track to the current point, I moved abroad with my favourite player #2, M.

Two years ago I was living the dream, dream job, dream guy, dream hair, what could possibly go wrong? In fact nothing went wrong, I just found a great partner with great plans that matched with mine, just very very far away from home. And there we were, fighting the bureaucracy and the expectations when we finally landed in UK.

It was very exciting but very challenging, all the courses, tests and video-games on earth can't prepare you to encounter the Scottish accent for the first time, it feels pretty much like this. But at least we were only trying to find a flat, a job, friends and discovering a whole new world in another very cryptic language at the same time, not too bad¹.

The real challenge started once we settled and the real "routine" hit, too much time to think, not enough friends to hang out, the worst weather 24/7/365. What could go wrong, again? and again, nothing went wrong, suddenly my 148 songs playlist was not enough to deal with 8 hours shifts and I found myself swimming in the very very very deep ocean of podcasts learning about design, movies, history² and TED Talks. This definitely started the spark for the deep conversations with M.

About M, he's the most curious and rational person I've ever had the pleasure to share daily meals with, he's really into debates and proper arguments, is a serial questioner and he proved me that everything can become a serious debate if you try hard enough. So he was also enjoying all those random deep conversations about random topics, I seriously think everything started then.

Back then, I was just trying to pass my time but I encounter feminism, environmental crisis, complex and flexible relationships, vegetarianism, good habits and mental health. In a very short term I was buying books, following very interesting people (unfollowing a ton of very non interesting people, as well), reading blogs, watching videos, changing habits, stop eating meat, doing exercise, meditating and basically surrounding myself, and M in the process, with a lot of new and challenging ideas.

So here we are, two years later and tons of notes, post-its, to-think lists, to-discuss lists, and a Notion page later, ready to start sharing most of those ideas and the trains of thoughts behind them and also my go-to resources in a lot of those topics, I hope you find them interesting and hopefully engaging enough to want to start a conversation about them³.

See you next time,

Annie

Very important PS: I have an important disclaimer to make, the text above may sound like all the path to move abroad, growth as persons and have the opportunity to sit and think about different matters has been easy for us but it has not, I'm fully aware of the risks of creating unrealistic expectations to the people that interacts with your content and my intention here was to keep it simple and engaging, so please keep reading the content with that idea in mind.

That said, I'm also fully aware about how privileged we are, we had plenty of great opportunities, an amazing and supportive network and we both know is not the same for billions on people, that's why we are also committed to help and give back, if you want to know more about all this please visit the philanthropy and altruism section. Thanks for taking the time of being here.

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⁰ All the images are free stock images, a least for now

¹ Very bad joke, for some reason people in UK never answer "I'm doing well" for them everything is "not too bad"

² Shout out to Diana Uribe for keeping me sane for so long

³Yes, that's the idea behind the name, and also a catchy/cheesy idea I had for a job interview that didn't end well but I least I have my blog name, the glass half full of bad jokes.