Weird title, I know.

However, I think this post is overdue because I mentioned my hitting a real low point in a previous post, yet I only found the inspiration to write it today. All because of a bread making mishap and a French lesson.

It’s been exactly two months today that I’ve landed in Togo.

I’ve had a few really hard months in my life, but I’m not sure they’ve compared to how I’m viewing it now, and it’s really strange to think that life still goes on in my past life in America for me, yet I’m 5k miles away from it. From my home, friends, and comforts.

If you’re kind of following along or gathering what we’re even doing over here, I’m just going to leave it at the title, but if you had an idea of what my life could be, I honestly feel like the allure is just rose colored glasses on what it truly is sometimes. But I guess you never really know, until you know.

Having owned a home, and particularly during the pandemic, while everyone was off making bread, I began following home decor and design accounts and cooking. I had initially made changes to my home, but I think my talents grew once I had time to actually think about them. In roughly a week and a half, H and I renovated the kitchen.

It went from this:

To this:

I must say, that renovation did a lot for our relationship. It was supposed to be under $200, LOL. It was supposed to only take a weekend, LOL. But neither of us could imagine what was behind those cabinets. In a perfect world, it would’ve been an easy removal like I saw on YouTube and Instagram. But no, it wasn’t, it was everything but that. It was ruined plaster, 3 different types of ugly dated and probably dangerous wallpaper, a piece of wood to nowhere on the other side, tile that was cut and uneven because of course the cabinets were uneven. H threw his back out, with a damaged wall now behind the stove area where the plaster is different from any other wall in there, and then my ADHD in overdrive of the potential ways to cover it up, caused frustration.

Anyways, all in all it turned out beautiful and peaceful to me. Exactly how I dreamed it would be without spending an arm and a leg to get a whole new kitchen. It makes me tear up thinking and hoping that other people are enjoying it right now. Because when I look at my current kitchen and how I’ve had to learn how to use it, manage it, and with a lot of my kitchen items still being MIA, I get a little sad.

The whole room is tile, with chunky wood cabinets, a stove that doesn’t fit the stove space and has no degree numbers on the dial so it’s a guessing game (thank goodness I packed an oven thermometer). Oh, and it only matters if I can even turn it on. It’s the tiny sink that we’re supposed to wash vegetables and dishes in, but you can’t do both at once! The tiniest and slowest low pressure purified water spout to ever exist. The less than ideal small appliances that are on loan to us until our actual things get here. Don’t even get me started on cooking.

The house just doesn’t feel like it’s my home right now. Not my furniture, not my style, not my choice. And yet, I spend all day almost every day in it. Having to look at the curtains that seemingly were made out of the khaki pants material, or the glass lamps (which I already broke one on accident) that someone placed on tile floors BECAUSE THAT’S SMART. It’s the tile EVERYWHERE.

It’s also the walls that surround my home that now are getting barbed wire, on top of the barred windows, on top of my very friendly and helpful guards, that sometimes makes it feel like there’s no escape. Because if I was able to, there’s really nowhere for me to go.

When I go out, it’s hot. By the time H comes home, it’s dark. Even if I do go out, say to the grocery store, I have to navigate ingredients in a language I don’t know and hope that my phone has service to check the translation and still be let down because it’s not what I’m looking for. Yesterday for instance, I was looking for lemons. We went to our usual fruit and vegetable stand and they had a bag of green lemons (not limes). We bought them, but associated in my mind are yellow lemons that I know I saw at another stand but we had no way to get there, but then we stopped by the grocery store and they in fact had yellow lemons but were egregiously expensive, along with beautiful red, yellow, and orange bell peppers that you can’t find here and yet I so desperately wanted. I’m afraid to order at restaurants in fear that they’ll ask me more questions than what I know and can reply back with. It’s the unfortunate case during the day when H is gone at work and people inevitably have questions and need answers from me at the house, but I can’t give them the answer they want or need.

I log on to social media and see the news from back home and it’s not positive, sometimes frighteningly triggering. It’s all so depressing, and I feel like I don’t want to bother family or friends back home with this nonsense because I’m supposed to be living my absolute best life. But in reality, this life is nothing but isolated.

I know. You’re annoyed with my complaining. So are Caspian, Stitch, and H. I am also annoyed and disgusted with myself. Because it could be so much worse.

And it is. Right outside these walls all around me. I’m very privileged, and I need to remind myself of that. While my mental health took a very dark turn, I needed to turn to reframe it.

My belongings are on the way. I’m getting the hang of finding recipes that I know have ingredients that exist here. I have even bought seeds to grow my own missing ingredients. I have a French program that I purchased that I need to sit down and work through. I have an amazing person that lives with me, puts up with me, eats all the food I make, and somehow still loves me. I have pets that deal with me, and look forward to when I go into the kitchen at night to take my anti-malarial pill because they know I’ll give them cookies at what I’ve dubbed “Cookie-o-clock” and they each get their treats before bed. I have a few friends here that we go out to lunch sometimes and catch up, explore the city, and share the same experiences and feelings that I described.

So that brings me to today. I woke up, went to the couch, scanned social media, even though everyone back home was still asleep, and thought to myself, let me make some bread.

I had made a few attempts at “bread” that didn’t turn out horrible, I have to refrigerate the flour so no bugs penetrate it, and yeast is hit or miss because everything is imported, not to mention again if I can even start that stove…. So far though, I have made pita, flour “tortillas”, challah, and I now was going to add Italian bread to the mix. I had also simultaneously found a simple “No Knead Dutch Oven Bread” and thought that it would be simple enough to make, since I have since learned that kneading is very difficult when you’re out of shape. Nonetheless, I prepared to make the Italian bread and save the other for later. Then I got further down the recipe, and realized I was making the wrong one…..

So I laughed. And realized that actually I have the optimal situation for bread making since this needed to rest for 8 hours in a warm place. I turned off my AC for the kitchen, sat it in the window, and set a timer. I went back to the couch, rearranged my dinner menu for the week, and got back on social media. Then I got bored (per usual), and said to myself, work on your French.

Previously, I was in the middle of a lesson when I stopped working on it. It got too overwhelming in my early days coming to terms with everything else. So today when I opened it, I went through it, quickly. I only had to replay the exercises a few times because of how fast they were speaking and I need to train my ear to what to listen for in that particular scenario of being at a restaurant. But I realized, I had heard all these phrases before. I know them by sound (sorta) and have even used them myself in a very blue moon instance of me ordering for myself. It made me feel better knowing that I could be more ahead if I actually commit and not wallow.

I think about today, like I did with my kitchen. I had a vision of what it would be like, and not realizing yet the work it would take to get there. The vision of living overseas with the “perks” I would have outweighed the reality. But I am still privileged, and yet I am allowed to have bad days. H and I are allowed to have really bad days. The dough, the bad furniture, the weather, correlate to the cost, the time, the effort, the frustration of renovating the now most beloved place in my house in Memphis, TN. And then there are good days.

Anything incredible in this life is hard at times.

The photo below is from a trip that H and I took to DC. The context of that trip I will describe later, and although we were looking at a politically mess of a city from a distance, I had him, and the potential for great things was there. It still is. And will always be.

If you are struggling with your mental health, address it. Get what you need and seek the resources that you know can help you. Trust me, I’m just not making bread and learning French to feel better, I’m looking into therapy and making deeper connections with people who have gone through the same thing. However, it is wildly important beyond measure that you get the help you need.

You are not alone.

With all my love, Carrie