Hello all, I wish you all a happy and healthy 2017. It has been a while since I wrote and it is time.  A beginning of a new year, the end of a year that was mediocre (yet better than the previous) and I am full of resolve to make this year count.

This time of the year sees many people making resolutions and bold statements and I have decided to do so.  I would like this year to be a year during which I develop a sense of contentment (at least, it would be good to head in that direction), become more productive and engage a bit more with people (especially those with wit who can make me laugh).

Enough said, time to start working towards these goals – they may not be achieved in their entirety (highly likely that they won’t be), however, it would be nice to take some steps towards them.

Let the games begin.

Ciao for now, SpaceCadetinAthens (currently enjoying the delights of Sydney),

hello 

One thing that we are not taught is how to accept failure.  We are brought up to please our parents, do well at school, be kind, well-mannered and generally, to bend over backwards to appease others.

So, when you realise that the people that know you well really don’t like you, when you hear “if it wasn’t for the fact that you are my daughter and I feel an obligation,..”, you kind of wonder what it is all about.. I have managed to disappoint my family, alienate them, friends are not there, things are tough.. How do you turn things around? How do you stop being the person that your family dislikes, the person that friends “tolerate”? A way out/a change is all that I want… I move countries to try to start again and fail – it is true, you cannot escape from yourself – but your family and friends can escape from you – they are the lucky ones…

Why do we bother with anything? I have, during the last 10 months, for the first time in my life tried – that is, I have made attempts to meet new people, make friends, work, be open to people and, I guess, it has been a bit of a success.  It has also been a bit of a failure. I have made some acquaintances, started to question some friendships, enjoyed myself at times and survived some thoroughly demoralising experiences.

What have I learnt from all of this? I would love to say that the good experiences outweighed the bad  experiences but, I am not sure that is true.  I learnt that people can be really mean – now, I am not a person that has led a sheltered life, but I have recently been surprised by the fact that people are mean as a way of passing time – a hobby even.  Some people play tennis, do yoga and some people toy with others – do they realise that they are mean and manipulative or do they think that their behaviour is normal.  Is this what we have become as a society – a society where “manners” are “ideals” and treating someone with respect is akin to a miracle taking place?  How has it become acceptable to abuse people? Why don’t we all matter? Seriously, what does one have to do to fit in and be loved?

Hello, it is me again.   Things have been up and down since my last blog where I wrote a little about the pain that someone I mistakenly considered a friend caused.  It turns out the pain is still here – I really wish it would go away as it all belongs in the past and I am tired of feeling pain for something that really did not exist (except in my imagination).

Anyway, let me tell you about my Saturday, which turned out to be a great day.  Ok, the day started off slowly and it was cold.  I had invited some friends over for dinner – it was the first time that I was to cook for people in this apartment which kind of haunts me as it is the apartment that I moved into as things became dark and depressing and most of the memories that I have of the apartment are negative.  I decided that the apartment should become a different place, a place of fond memories.  So, I was going to cook (and order in) and people were going to come over and we would all have a good time.

It kind of went better than planned – I think that they had fun.  I realised that although I feel alone and isolated much of the time, I spent Saturday evening surrounded by kind, interesting, fun and beautiful friends.  They are all relatively new friends and, after the last 18 months, i am terrified of letting them become close.  Although I hate instruction manuals, I wish there was something to tell me what I should do.  Letting go, relaxing and just going along with the flow sounds good but the last time I did that, it had dire consequences for me.

Anyway, I am not sure what tomorrow will bring – all I know is that I have spent the last 3 days in bed with a chest/head cold.  Something will have to give, maybe, as the song goes, “the sun will come out tomorrow”.

Ciao for now, SpaceCadetInAthens

Hello, are you there? If so, it is me again.

One thing that I have been grappling with for the past year or so, is disappointment.  You see, it had been years since I had been disappointed.  I was the model of independence, resilient, dealing with my own problems by myself, not letting people in – I had designed a fortress around myself which was both protective and defensive.  I had all of the characteristics of a strong person – the fortress that I had built had served me well, yet when push came to shove, for the first time in my life, I decided not to follow my instincts and intuition (which had guided me very well up until then)… and this led to disappointment and my unravelling.  I had always been a bit wary of people, new acquaintances especially, but I was always able to make a quick judgment about a person and I was generally very accurate.

However, after years of criticism from a couple of sources – criticism about the fact that I did not allow many people close to me, I decided to be brave (yes, that was the term that I used when discussing this with a close friend of mine in Sydney).  We both resolved to be brave and help each other – my friend was to be brave in the purchase of a new property and I was to be brave in letting a particular person (for the purposes of this post, let’s refer to him as “Atimos”, which in ancient greek means, “without honour”) become close to me as a friend.

You may ask “whether making friends requires bravery?”.  I guess for me, friendship is really a lifetime commitment and it does not normally require bravery.  In this case, my instincts were advising to tread carefully (they were screaming “head for the hills”) – and, for the first time in a long time, I did not listen to my instincts.  Hindsight is great – 20/20 vision.  So, now, I can tell you that I regret allowing myself to override my instincts, allow myself to become Atimos’ friend and, what I regret most, was believing that Atimos was my friend and Believing him when he would always say “I am not going anywhere” (being a space cadet, I thought that meant that he would be by my side, the reality was that he really was not going anywhere out of his way to be a friend).

I do not want to go into all of the detail, it is boring to me and no doubt, it will be boring to you as well.  So, to cut a long story short, SpaceCadetinAthens, who was new to Athens and did not have network of friends in Athens and had to hop on a plane to Paris or London for support, believed that Atimos would be there if she ever needed him to be.  Well, that was my biggest mistake – Atimos is the type of person who is great company for a drink, going to the beach or whenever he finds an audience to listen to him talk about himself (this was brought to my attention by a friend who, after, Atimos joined us for a drink one night, spent the next three hours talking about himself and the stories where the same well rehearsed versions that Atimos had told me, my mother and whoever else had the patience and good manners to sit and listen to him).

What I did not realise what that Atimos was not so great when you actually need a friend, when you are slipping into a depression that will later be diagnosed as an episode of “major depression”, where you cannot see any light in life, lose your self-worth and where you are falling down into a dark abyss.  It was great to be told by Atimos that I needed to be “happy” and “light” again.  It was when, at his invitation, we started to work together, I finally (albeit in a depressed way) saw the light.  This was the beginning of the end – it was in his everyday life of a minor celebrity in Athens that was disappointing – Atimos was an insecure BULLY and ABUSER, the abusive and cruel manner in which he treated his employees (especially women), colleagues, family and friends, the depth of his mean streak, the envy that he hostility towards people who were more successful etc – seeing all of this in someone that I had thought was a happy and balanced person who was able to deal with stress and day to day life was traumatic… his self-importance, inability to empathise, callousness, arrogance and other narcissistic tendencies that became apparent to me when dealing with him daily (and not on a social basis) was a HUGE reality check.

Anyway, months of self-righteous abuse and cruelty followed, Atimos projected his flaws onto me – I was accused of a “manipulative bitch” amongst other things  – it took me a while to pull myself out of the depths of depression and despair to realise that this was all of his baggage (and boy, does he have a lot of it) and that I made a mistake – the mistake was not letting someone in but the mistake was letting Atimos in (that is, I let the wrong person in) .. and the consequences of that mistake have been dire but slowly, I have started to come out of the cave and while, it is hard and sometimes a daily struggle to motivate myself and believe in myself (especially when the reality is that, in the past, I had never considered anything to be a challenge or difficult).  This is the journey that I have started, everyday is a new day and hopefully, a step in a positive direction towards being able to accept my mistakes, not beat myself up for everything that has happened – sometimes, it really is as simple as the fact that i allowed myself to open up to and, become close to, a mean, vicious, selfish, damaged and ultimately, damaging person – I made an error in judgment that has cost me a lot (both on a personal level and in terms of time wasted and lost).

Where to now? Onwards and upwards -one day and one step at a time – life is too short to dwell on people who pretend to be a friend.  Things will continue to get better as I start to be kind to myself etc – I have always been very hard on myself and kind to others – it is time now to be kind to SpaceCadetinAthens (which is harder than one would think)

That is all for today.

Ciao for now, SpaceCadetinAthens

Hello, it is me again.

After the huge success of my first post (yes, it did not go viral), I decided I would venture out into the world of blogging again.  So here it goes… finding a topic that may be of interest is not that easy – I have found that in life, the people that are generally found to be interesting are those that tend to make other people feel that they are the centre of the universe (or the conversation).  In other words, by showing an interest in someone else’s life, I would become more interesting to them.  Ok, well, I have a huge number of followers – yes, 1.  You know who you are, I have decided that, given that we have been friends for years (and, it is on that basis that you have become my UNIQUE (code for “ONLY”) follower), I have decided that we can by-pass such protocol.  I will pretend that I am already interesting.

Today’s topic was going to be about the frustrations of living in downtown Athens but then that could be a long conversation (and one-sided, as only I am writing).  Instead, I will write about a thought that I had this morning while trying to banish Greek morning television programmes from my mind (to be fair, there is one program at 10am called Live U which does not fit the mould of the mill mind-numbingly dumb programmes).

My thought was that Greek television, while seemingly harmless and sometimes jovial, is actually doing the Greek population a disservice.

To set the scene, Greece, 2 and a half years after entering into a programme of austerity measures imposed by what is referred to as the “Troika”, many people (namely, the poor and elderly) have suffered unnecessarily (from this group, let’s carve out the fraudsters who, for example, are claiming pensions for people that have already passed away or are in Zakynthos and pretending to be blind).  Much of the middle class has been eliminated and Greece is showing signs, from a socio-economic perspective, of becoming a third world country.  However, unlike third-world countries such as India that possess highly educated people, Greece has an education system ranked as the worst in Europe (and this is a ranking that Greece has maintained in the past – it is not a one off ranking) and in global terms, it is ranked alongside countries such as Mexico and Indonesia.

This is a crime against children and the future generations of Greeks, however, this is not the only crime when it comes to education and information provision. Watching the news in Greece is tantamount to having root canal therapy for most people – it is consistently bad across all television channels – there is no independent reporting by educated journalists, there are merely a lot of people (generally without an educated opinion on the topic at hand) talking over each other.  Watching the news is Greece causes one’s blood pressure to rise – not because of what is being reported but the hysteria that the manner in which the news is reported causes.

And it just keeps on getting worse – most Greek television programmes (especially the programmes between 10am  and 6pm and then again from 10pm to 1am) apart from notable exceptions such as Live U and Radio Arvila,  are aimed at the lowest common denominator – and not in the good sense. Instead of providing content that is interesting, meaningful and informative and which may inspire people to develop ideas/independent thought processes, such television programmes, when combined with high unemployment (and therefore a huge number of people idling in front of a television) are doing the exact opposite, it is spawning a society of people who will become increasingly misinformed, intellectually lazy and uneducated.

This is a great shame – Greece cannot just rest on its laurels from 2000 years ago and the people cannot continue to be brainwashed by the media which, understandably, has its own agenda. Do not get me wrong, I am not a left-wing anything, and I believe in capitalism, entrepreneurs and most non-politically correct or non-socially democratic institutions.  It is just that Greece, as a nation, has so much potential – it is time that people took some responsibility for their own lives and stopped talking about conspiracy theories, international interests, austerity measures (seriously, the only other option was for Greece to go bankrupt – Greece (through the politicians elected by the Greeks) opted to not take this route, so Greeks, please move on) etc.  It is a cycle that needs to be broken and such cycles need to be broken at the most grass root level, including things that we take for granted such as television programming.

In Greece,  it is almost as if there is a “reverse” mind police regime and the effects are exponential – as many programmes are repeated (I guess this is as a result of budgetary constraints) and also because a 10 minute segment of, dare I say, stupid content on one programme will then be replayed on other programmes turning the 10 minute effect into one of at least an hour where such stupid content is, depending on whether the programmes are in competition, on the same channel, etc, either praised, or maligned, even further.

I have ranted enough for today (and maybe tomorrow).

Signing out for now.

Ciao from SpaceCadetinAthens

Hello and welcome to my first post.   I will endeavour to neither bore nor tire you, however, I am a beginner at expressing my thoughts and feelings in general and it may be a bit of a bumpy ride.

Ok, so it has been suggested that I start writing in order to get back into the swing of life as I once knew it although, having known life as it once was and finally appreciating it for what it was (or, rather, wasn’t), I would like to get back into the swing of a different life.  I am at the beginning of this process, having moved back to Athens and now taking the steps that I should have taken last year.

What can I say?   At times, I am grateful for the pain and anguish that I have been through during the last 12 months – I have learnt a lot and have become even stronger but seriously, I would be lying if I did not admit that I would have preferred to not be as strong not be aware of the fact that I have not been in tune with/kind to myself as I should have been and have avoided the experience of the last 12 months.

Anyway, I am now going to consciously make the effort to work on liking and being kind to myself – apparently, that is a fundamental step to leading a meaningful life (remember, happiness is fleeting and also, to an extent, a chemical effect).  By starting this blog (is this a blog?), I think that I have effectively set the wheels in motion – I cannot procrastinate anymore – I will now have a paper trail (albeit, a virtual paper trail) of my progress or at times, there may be a lack of progress.

So, let the journey begin.  I will be in touch again soon.

Ciao for now, Space Cadet in Athens