Why Am I Not Producing? - Letters From Slovakia

SIDENOTE: I meant to publish this about two weeks ago, but I forgot. Whoopsie. Just imagine this is Steven from late October talking.

I survived a full week of classes. Well, not exactly a full week. We have the next five days off for All Saints’ Day, and out of the 24 classes I had scheduled for my first week of work, one cancelled, so I don’t think I’ve hit an actual workweek yet. My first week of classes involved all sorts of learners, from small children to adult learners, and from beginners to advanced. I’ve had young people offer their opinions on my beautiful long hair. I’ve been told twice by my older students to watch Squid Game, which I’ve been avoiding because it looks like a total bummer, and the idea of poor people putting their lives at stake to erase debt is not a novel idea to me because I am aware that the US Army recruits at college campuses. And I’ve heard all about the last teacher, the teacher I’m replacing, and how I’m doing a better job or a worse job or an equal job to him already. It’s a wild ride.

I notice I’m not investing much time in my professional development, outside of teaching during the day. In the morning when I wake up, I play RuneScape and watch Seinfeld and just in general waste time. At night, I’m so tired after the long day of teaching that all I want to do is wrap myself in blankets and do the exact same thing. There’s a lack of willpower, and I’ll tell myself that it’s because I’m jetlagged, or because I haven’t actually moved into where I’ll spend the next eight months (since it wasn’t ready when I got here, so they moved me into the flat in the basement instead), or because I’m just now getting acclimated to the environment of smalltown Slovakia. But at the end of the day, what are all those things really? Excuses. Maybe all I need to do is just sit down, even for ten minutes during the day, and work on myself. Read a book. Lift some weights. Lift some books. Read a weight. Get work done so I can develop and promote my writing for money and self-esteem.

Before coming to Slovakia, I told myself that I would invest twenty hours every week into my craft. That’s twenty hours of research, reading, writing, language-learning, and maybe even exercise. If I’m going to fancy myself a writer, perhaps I should at least do it part-time, after all, and twenty hours feels reasonable. But now that I’m out here, dealing with the pressures of a job and the isolation from the outside world, perhaps it might feel too ambitious now. There’s only one other native English speaker in this whole city, and I work with him. Outside of that, the only genuine human connection I get are conversation lessons with the more advanced English learners. I should be thankful that I get paid for that, but this is the exact opposite of how I lived in Ukraine, where I was in a small community, but almost everyone in that community spoke English.

So ultimately, perhaps the loneliness is driving me to reconsider my ambitions here. Perhaps writing the next great expatriate novel is not in the cards because of the vague emptiness I’m feeling most of the day, and my sole comfort in the world as of right now is staying in bed and eating M&M’s while my character on RuneScape kills spiders and cooks salmon. But I acknowledge that my experience here in Slovakia has barely begun. I’ve not even worked a work week, I haven’t traveled very far outside Zlate Moravce yet, and I haven’t even spent a full week in Slovakia. So, yes, maybe I just haven’t acclimated to the new environment yet, and I inevitably will as I become more comfortable in my role as an English teacher and expatriate writer. It’ll just take a little bit of effort on my part. But my blankets are so warm.