NEEEEEEEERRRRRD!

I moved to France about two weeks after I graduated with my Masters degree. I was all alone, luckily I had a job (I was transferred). I was put up in a hotel by the company for the first month. It was scary, but there were a lot of Anglophones around who I could hang out with in those first few weeks. They assigned someone to me to help me find a flat, but in the end I found my own, with a little kitchen and a bathroom and beautiful high ceilings. Then I was really on my own. It was hard, but at work I made friends, my French improved, and I learned to love the city. Half the time when I had a holiday I went to see my family, the other times I did EuroRail trips around Europe, and had some of the best experiences of my life in Vienna and in Germany. It was a really beautiful adventure, I lived there for 3 years. I came home because my sister was pregnant with her second child and I wanted to know him, as I had missed out on so much of my older nephew because he was born about a year after I first moved to France. I also needed therapy and thought it would be easier to get on the NHS. I miss France hugely. Brexit and T***p in 2016 spooked me, and I wanted to go home because I didn't know that Brexit would take so long. If I had stayed I probably would have had settled status by now, but never mind, that's not possible now. If it helps, I really regret moving back. I got therapy, and it helped a bit, but now I just feel trapped at home with little way out of finding my way out into the world again.

<33

My hours at work have gone from 0-60. I was working Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. But then a load of things happened practically at once: the co-worker who worked Mondays left so I'm doing Mondays too, my other co-worker is off ill so I have to do Thursdays, and my manager opens on Sundays during the summer holidays so now Sundays are part of the equation as well. So I've gone from working 4 days a week to working practically 7 days a week. As the position is part-time it isn't as bad as it sounds, but I'm still already exhausted. Plus my brother's car has been out of commission for over a month, so we only have 1 car for four of us, so while he's at work there's no chance of a lift so I'm walking everywhere. Then on top of that I decided to be a sadist and got up at 6am to go swimming, so I'm sat here with my throbbing feet up, planning to not move for as long as possible.