The Anxiety Thermometer

[cimorene]

I spent most of the last year, from May 2012 to March 2013, in the same Finnish class, with the same group of people. It had its up and down sides, and by the end I was more than done with it, but one of the benefits was that by the end the school and the routine associated with it had become familiar places, and all my classmates however irritating had become familiar people, which made my anxiety a lot lower. I'm an anxious person and new situations and people are my least favorite things.

February I spent in a work practice at a daycare, which was not enough time to get over the new place anxiety, even though the people there were nice enough. April and May I spent at the more recent work practice at the after school program, and I had acclimatized enough to be happy and excited about going there in well under a month. It didn't get as familiar as the school, of course, but it was also a more fun, entertaining, and engaging environment. I suppose actively liking the place helped reduce the anxiety, even if I still had to be more 'on' and alert there.

So now I'm doing Summer Finnish. I've only been there for five days so far, though, because of my trip to London last week - it made me miss a week where the subject theme was sports, for which I am grateful because I hate sports. I like the teacher, and I like the size and makeup of the class group better here. They assured us that they didn't divide the summer course into groups by ability level and we're all using the same materials at the same speeds, just with slightly different emphasis, some groups doing more exercises than others. Although this is only conjecture, I suspect that I'm in the "hardest" group in the sense that it is made up of the students with the best mastery of and the quickest speed at Finnish grammar, but with a comparatively weak vocabulary. Most of the students in my group have been studying Finnish a pretty short while, but all of them are determined, motivated, quick, and diligent. It's deeply soothing to have everybody doing their work and taking it seriously, with none of those assholes who were always sitting around whispering or yelling in their native languages, goofing off, skipping half of the class, etc. This class is also not moving too slow for me, which, with foreign languages, is a huge thing. Actually, it's literally a first for me. The amount of explanation that the teacher provides is always really close to the amount that I needed to grasp the concept, as opposed to the 2 to 4 times as much I'm used to.

BUT. I don't like this class. All weekend, starting Friday, I've been close to tears every time I thought about going back on Monday. And I'm not sure why. I've got my friend, Nariko, and I like the teacher, which is good, but...

• The bus trip. It's over half an hour. I sit with Nariko and our lunch buddy Anna, but Nariko gets carsick and it's crowded and noisy, which mostly precludes soothing and pleasant conversation. I don't like crowded and noisy situations.



• One morning on our first week I overheard at least 20 minutes of racist ranting from a guy who's in one of the other groups and I still get nauseated every day when I catch sight of him.



• One of the older ladies in our class interrupted me with an impatient, exaggerated fake-sigh of exasperation when I was speaking in a class discussion 2 weeks ago. Before that I liked this lady and she probably doesn't remember it anymore, but rudeness is bad enough without being personal and I always take things personally. I'm now afraid and mistrustful of this lady and don't want to talk in front of her at all, which is difficult to accomplish.



• A different lady disparaged the Finnish attitude to child-rearing (which I agree with) by saying that in Finland she's "always afraid" that she won't be able to raise her son effectively because in Finland you aren't allowed to hit children. The aforementioned lady that I'm now afraid of did a champion job of arguing her into submission, but not before she provided a spurious anecdote about how someone she knew saw a kid misbehave on a bus and his mom claim that she "doesn't believe in forbidding things" as supposed proof that Finnish child-rearing is bogus, even though that sounds like bullshit and obviously Finns do, in general, believe in forbidding things. I pointed out that that wouldn't even be possible, because even the most permissive parent will have to forbid their child from playing with kitchen knives or running into the street without looking, because things can be dangerous. This lady eyerolled in response and huffed "Uh-huh, 'dangerous'." I don't fear her as a result, I just dislike her intensely.



• Since the first day of class I have come out a bunch of times, as is my habit now, by simply allowing Wax to come up in conversation whenever is natural and referring to her as my wife, and answering any direct questions about her. When I was first studying Finnish, it was Finns who would stop and question me, thinking that I meant 'husband', because my grasp of Finnish led them to suppose it was more likely that I had got the wrong word than that I was gay. Now that my Finnish is better I've never come upon the slightest hesitation or surprise from a Finn, not since, oh, Christmas or so. I guess that's when my Finnish got that good. But since I got to this school, I've gotten double-takes, eyebrows, and what I take for cold stares three times, from three different older ladies, two of whom were Russian and one Ukrainian. One of them stopped me and said "Wait, did you say your parents?"
  
  "No, I said wife."
  
  "Your - spouse?"
  
  "Yes, and she's a woman," I said.
  
  Then there was an awkward silence. And the stare. Am I just projecting because of what I know about Russia? Maybe. Still. Uncomfortable.

So am I just dealing with an elevated baseline anxiety temperature to everything for social reasons, because of the people in the room I am wary of? Or maybe due to some completely unrelated cause, like hormones? Or was I still this nervous on my third week at AKK too, and I just don't remember it anymore because I got over it after?

I'm no longer too tired to make dinner, but on the other hand we've been living with the flat so messy for a while that I'm starting to want to throw away like, everything except the furniture, but I don't really have the energy for it. Which is probably a good thing because I would miss many of my possessions later. And I don't really know what to do about the kitchen. I'd kind of like to seal it from the rest of the flat and open it to the vacuum of space, which would take care of the dishes, food in the fridge that I keep forgetting to remove when I take out the trash, and mysterious, suspect smells all at once. On the other hand, it would also take the tea set that pierydys brought us from Taiwan before I even got a shelf adequate to display it on. So I guess it's also a good thing that I don't have access to the vacuum of space. Bummer.

Comments

[laughingrat]

Wow, this all feels really familiar. Obviously not the same experiences, but the general feeling of badness around a place or situation because of multiple smaller incidents or stimuli. I really sympathize. Stuff like this has helped keep me off-balance with other people, kept me from adjusting well to classes and work environments, etc. It's really difficult.

I hope posting about it helped you in some way. Reading it was actually helpful for me. I know I'm anxious, but tend to beat myself up anyway for experiencing what you describe. Seeing that someone else goes through nearly the exact same thing is--the closest word is "refreshing," I guess. But I am sorry you're going through it. It sounds like the class might be okay otherwise if it wasn't for this.

[cimorene]

Well, that's good. It's always reassuring to me, too, to know that other people struggle with the same things that seem embarrassingly silly inside my own head, when it's just me.

Anyway, I have been trying to just keep my eyes on the prize (i.e., I really NEED to learn Finnish!) and accept that I might have to suffer disliking the place. I've done that before at places, I know, it's just a bit painful to go from places where I've been comfortable into one where I'm so un-.

[princessofgeeks]

I am sending you good thoughts!

[vass]

Oh man. This is all so familiar. (The filthy house, sadly, is familiar from RIGHT NOW.)

If it were me, the unfamiliar environment would be the biggest factor - that and the lack of backup. I can deal with people I feel wary of a lot better if I know there are people who'll stand up for me, and if I'm somewhere I generally feel safe. Take that away and it's like there's no ground under my feet.

And also I find that if I don't have a reliable model for what 'okay person' looks like in a particular group of people, I find it really hard to put my finger on 'really awful person', and end up second-guessing myself and telling myself that people are not so bad and I'm being intolerant, when later it turns out that actually they were shits all along.

For that reason, if it helps then you have my full permission as a stranger on the internet to dislike and distrust any of your classmates you choose to. Maybe you're wrong about them, but so long as you're still as polite as they are or better, you don't owe them your liking.

The home environment thing suggests that you're not getting enough space to recharge when you're outside class.

Do you have specific self-care things that are particularly efficient at restoring your cope? For instance, for me there's a close correlation between existential despair and whether I've washed my hair. Also bugs - if there are bugs in the house, I'll start feeling like my entire life is one long unending nightmare, and if I can just do whatever it takes to get rid of the bugs, things are just normally bad/good/whatever. But for you it might be sunlight or making your bed or whatever. And if you can identify what it is then you can ask your friends to remind you.

[cimorene]

Usually I just relax and read when I need to recover, and if not for the state of the flat that would probably have worked this weekend. I am not sure about self-care things, though. aside from that. If only I could think of something that would power me up enough to tackle the kitchen! Monumental untidyness doesn't bother me, but if the kitchen's too messy it grosses me out already and an actual mystery smell is the one-unending-nightmare factor. I was too exhausted this weekend, after having traveled last week, to tackle the task of cleaning the kitchen enough to find and defeat the mystery smell, because I know that thoroughly cleaning that room would take like four hours minimum and the thought of that much possibly-fruitless scrubbing and washing just makes me want to crawl under the bed.