I would like to write something about my life.
What kind of adventure it was when I decided to leave Croatia behind.
Let me start with the present situation and then I will jump into the past and bring us to the present.
I am currently working and living in Switzerland in a hotel's kitchen as a dishwasher. Although I get relatively a lot of money for what this job is, in the last few years I am suffering with such a debilitating fatigue, depression, everything seems so hopeless. The job is very monotonous, every day the same thing and 99% of the people who come to work here are very dysfunctional. I don't see will I ever be able to leave this horrible place, that makes it particularly depressing.
Today I read a post of @SteveSteel about his beautiful daughter, outside the sun is shining and this has somehow sparked some motivation and I started to think about my past and how life was much more interesting back then so I was thinking to share it with you.
Ok, on to the past:
It was 2017.
I have been working for 5 year in my home country Croatia, similar job like now, it was very depressing.
After 5 years I told myself, if I don't leave now, I will never leave.
So one day, it was winter, snow, I was walking around, I stopped behind a building, looked into the distance, there was an open field, forest in a distance and I felt such feeling of inspiration and excitement how I am going to leave this nonsense behind me.
So I spent about 6 months researching and buying stuff for my trip(half of the stuff I bought I just dumped along my way cause didn't need it).
After 6 months I told my boss I am leaving. He was looking at me all confused when I told him that I will be using workaway.info to volunteer and travel throughout Europe.
I contacted some people on workaway.info, we made skype call, arranged everything and the last day of my life in my hometown I had only a bed which I slept on, the whole apartment empty and me terrified if anything is going to go wrong. I sold everything.
So my first workaway experience was with Dutch-Kenyan couple. They bought an old farm in a remote village which had only 15 inhabitants, they had two very young boys. I have done a lot of work for them, they were really nice people, but after 5 months I decided that things are going stale for me and I need to start moving.
I don't know what was I thinking, I found a job in a nearby town as a kitchen help in hotel. After a week they told me this is not a job for me, I was to slow and to confused. I spent another week there working on a reception, had a diarrhea for a whole week, have seen some beautiful waterfalls, but quit and started moving up north.
And so I hitchhiked from Croatia to Slovenia to another workaway place. It was also an old farm on the hill, beautiful view, the owners were over 60 and said: we are doing it just to meet new people.
It was nice, but after 1 month I had to leave because they had a 20 year old cat who would pee around. It peed on a French man's bag, under his chair and on the end on my jacket which was on my bed and since the owners were very protective of the cat and dismissive of the workawayers I had to leave.
I hitchhiked to Austria to another workaway place. It was a "spiritual", new age community. It was exciting for me to be in a Germanic speaking world, something very new and in my Croatian mind very famous for prosperity.
After some months of volunteering I started to live there, paying the rent and being an equal part of the community.
At that time I had no clue what did I get myself into, that being a "spiritual", new age community, basically all the creazies flocked and collected there.
That aside, I was going with a bicycle every day to the nearby town of Villach to play a guitar and sing on the street. I figured I could use my skills to pay the rent. That was a difficult, but rewarding experience.
After a while, there was a yoga festival there and two girls from Salzburg came. One of them really liked me and was really determined to get into my life. I was not so enthusiastic, I did not find her all that attractive and I smelled codependency and dysfunction so I pushed back until her persistence broke through and filled my hollow chest.
She invited me to come to visit her in Salzburg and I had already had enough of stupidity happening in that community so I decided to go and visit her and also to make some music in the town square.
Little did I know what was about to happen in the following days. She had an alpha type, very angry and aggressive boyfriend with whom she just recently broke up, the apartment being actually his...
So I hitchhiked from Villach to Salzburg, lived with her in the apartment for a few days, played some music, until one day, as we were laying down on the bed, half naked, after you know what....we heard a door knob turning, door opening, she, in a distress, swallowing heavily and saying silently: It's him!
So we jumped up, she pushed me into to the bedroom, as we were on a couch in a living room. We heard firm steps throughout the living room, nearing the door of a bed room, she trying to hold the door, but he pushed and opened the door.
When he saw us, he immediately turned to her, started yelling "you whore!!" and many other things. I slowly slipped by and went back into the living room, being half naked, to put my pants on, my heart racing about what might happen.
There he comes storming towards me, reaching and giving me a hand, saying: you both have 15 minutes to pick up your stuff and leave!
He told me to wait outside while he deals with her, so I didn't want to cause more trouble, I just stepped outside and was waiting in front of the door.
There was yelling, screaming and after a minute she flew out of the door in a hallway. She looked at me and went back inside.
I decided to leave the building so I just waited in front of a building's door and after a 15 minutes there he goes out, telling me I should go back in and help her. I was a bit scared and wondering what am I going to find when I go back in.
Luckily, only her neck was a bit hurt. Knowing such men I figured he is going to kill her, rape her or similar, but it went relatively harmless.
Me and her, went to her friends apartment and lived there for about a week and in the mean time, with help of her friend's boyfriend, we went back there with a van to pick up all of her stuff.
To back up just a little bit, before that horrible experience, I went with her to attend a wedding of one other friend of hers. That was really fun and interesting.
So after that last week, living with her friend, I hitchhiked back to Villach, to the community. She visited me one time there. Forgot to mention that she had very crazy and controlling parents, especially her mother and her father, kind of more docile, but acting on her mothers craziness. They even called the owner of the community asking is their daughter there. How did they even found that I live there and even more the number of the owner, I have no idea. What was the most shocking to me, at one point this girl showed me a picture of her parent, me looking at it in shock, how exactly do they look like my grandparent from my mother's side. Coincidence or?
Anyways, I had enough of those crazy people in the community so I found a new place to workaway in Germany, very close to Salzburg, so I can visit her sometimes.
To back up a bit, at some point I hitchhiked to München also, to play music there in the city center. I earned very little money since the competition was very fierce. First night I slept in a park, thinking that might be a cheap way of staying there, but of course I didn't close my eyes at all, and it was to cold, so I ended up going to a hostel. I met a girl there who also visited me in the community in Austria, but that friendship was short lived.
Anyways, I was visiting that girl in Salzburg for a few months, now being in Germany, and after 8 months in total, she said she doesn't know where is this relationship going to so she broke up with me. It was very exciting and fun for me to be with her, but it left me in ruins. My health, physical and mental, started to decline, I started keto diet, thinking its going to help me. It led me even further into degeneration.
That was sometime in 2019.
I didn't have any money left cause I spent everything on that girl from Salzburg so I decided not to volunteer anymore, but to find a real, payed job.
I found a job in a nearby town. It was a night bar, made inside of a cave. Very interesting. The owner needed somebody to do some easy repairs and construction. I was promised to have a stable job and room in the upper floor which was under construction. None of that came true. Haha
There was already one guy living there, Florian, from Germany, doing the same thing. Very intelligent and capable guy, we spoke of Jordan Peterson and lots of other stuff...
I have done some work there, but the owner kept coming 2,3 hours later after designated meeting time and when he did come, a lot of times he told me, there is nothing to do today. All this time complaining that I am not doing anything when he in fact didn't give me work.
I had some verbal and almost physical confrontations with this guy. He was a nice guy on the outside, but very disturbed and aggressive on the inside.
In that time also Corona virus started. He had an older mother living there, so he demanded that everybody go away and he has put the biggest pressure on me, but that was more because he didn't like me.
He even denied me access to the bathroom so I ended up going with a bicycle once a week to that previous workaway place nearby to have a shower. Crazy, no?
In the meantime I found another job nearby. Mounting doors and windows on construction sites. Father and son needed a helper in their business. Very nice German people, but as everything was shut down because of Corona I could not continue there.
Being faced with having to live on the street, homeless, I posted a picture on my Facebook if somebody could offer me a shelter until better times come. The owner of that community from Villach, Austria, sent me a message do I want to come back?
In the meantime the owner of that bar, where I was currently living, found me a job up north, where they needed people to pick asparagus on the fields, because seasonal workers, from Poland mostly, were denied access to Germany because of Corona.
I had a choice, to go north to work on the fields of asparagus or to go south, back to Austria to live in that community again. My health was in decline, there was a lot of existential stress going on so I decided to come back to Austria, mainly because of familial atmosphere and comfort.
I am thinking now, if I would have chosen to go north my life would look like completely different now. I wonder should I have made that choice instead?
So, after 6 months in that bar, corona starting, I needed to find a way how to come to Austria. Everything was blocked, highly controlled. There was special police all over the place, with rifles. Now looking back they checked pople on the street, but mostly people with dark skin. It was kind of a state of terror.
I booked a ticked from Traunstein, Germany, where I was, to Villach, Austria.
I was going with a train. After I arrived to Villach, I had to do a quarantine for a week. I had done it in a bar which was also owned by that community's owner.
I stayed for another year in that community. A lot of new pople there, everybody expecting they have discovered America, but I knew how rotten it was there. The owner was, by the way, a woman, and 95% of inhabitants were single mothers...but anyways, it was comforting to be there.
As corona regulations released a bit and businesses started again and I found a job in family holiday resort as a dishwasher in the kitchen. It was owned also by the the owner of the community.
It was a nice experience there, but as I got back up on my feet again, I left the community and found another job as a dishwasher in a music academy. They had a restaurant.
To back up a little bit.
As I was still living in that community there was another girl whom I met there. She was a stewardess in an airplane company and lived in Vienna.
She came to the community as a volunteer, just as I did before, to be around people during a lockdown.
As she went back to Vienna, I visited her there one time, but I wasn't going to do the same mistake twice, like with the girl from Salzburg, so after some time we just broke up. She was a very intelligent woman, no doubt about it, somewhere on my level, sometimes I even felt intimidated, thinking her intelligence is a bit to much for me. She was also a bit crazy and neurotic.
Onwards with my new job in a kitchen of a restaurant in the music academy.
Spent there one summer, but since they are not open during winter I found a new dishwashing job in far west of Austria, very close to Switzerland.
It was a big, big hotel with 500 sitting places, another 3 dishwashers already working there. Was really nice there with the mountains peaks all around, but very inaccessible.
At that time, Austrian government threatened with vaccination for every person living there so I decided to escape to Switzerland, as it was nearby, a bit more pro individual freedom and I just learned about bitcoin and how it is already implemented in some regions as a legal tender.
So I found the same type of a job, this time in a 5* hotel, nearby Luzern. This is where I am now.
After some months my health declined even more, huge amounts of stress, chief dishwasher being very aggressive, alcoholic, mentally deranged, 60yo, living with his mother, no wife, no children.
Had to complain for a few months to his superiors, them finally putting him down with a threat of loosing his job. It got better, but he is still very deranged. I stopped keto, things are going little bit better, trying to heal with help of Ray Peat community, I see the light on the end of a tunnel going on and off...hope for the best.
Thank you all.
What an adventure so far.
I think I will never be able to heal if I don't get away from this type of work.
Thinking about making music again somewhere. Would love to travel USA.
Wau, almost 15000 words.
Cheers :)
What kind of adventure it was when I decided to leave Croatia behind.
Let me start with the present situation and then I will jump into the past and bring us to the present.
I am currently working and living in Switzerland in a hotel's kitchen as a dishwasher. Although I get relatively a lot of money for what this job is, in the last few years I am suffering with such a debilitating fatigue, depression, everything seems so hopeless. The job is very monotonous, every day the same thing and 99% of the people who come to work here are very dysfunctional. I don't see will I ever be able to leave this horrible place, that makes it particularly depressing.
Today I read a post of @SteveSteel about his beautiful daughter, outside the sun is shining and this has somehow sparked some motivation and I started to think about my past and how life was much more interesting back then so I was thinking to share it with you.
Ok, on to the past:
It was 2017.
I have been working for 5 year in my home country Croatia, similar job like now, it was very depressing.
After 5 years I told myself, if I don't leave now, I will never leave.
So one day, it was winter, snow, I was walking around, I stopped behind a building, looked into the distance, there was an open field, forest in a distance and I felt such feeling of inspiration and excitement how I am going to leave this nonsense behind me.
So I spent about 6 months researching and buying stuff for my trip(half of the stuff I bought I just dumped along my way cause didn't need it).
After 6 months I told my boss I am leaving. He was looking at me all confused when I told him that I will be using workaway.info to volunteer and travel throughout Europe.
I contacted some people on workaway.info, we made skype call, arranged everything and the last day of my life in my hometown I had only a bed which I slept on, the whole apartment empty and me terrified if anything is going to go wrong. I sold everything.
So my first workaway experience was with Dutch-Kenyan couple. They bought an old farm in a remote village which had only 15 inhabitants, they had two very young boys. I have done a lot of work for them, they were really nice people, but after 5 months I decided that things are going stale for me and I need to start moving.
I don't know what was I thinking, I found a job in a nearby town as a kitchen help in hotel. After a week they told me this is not a job for me, I was to slow and to confused. I spent another week there working on a reception, had a diarrhea for a whole week, have seen some beautiful waterfalls, but quit and started moving up north.
And so I hitchhiked from Croatia to Slovenia to another workaway place. It was also an old farm on the hill, beautiful view, the owners were over 60 and said: we are doing it just to meet new people.
It was nice, but after 1 month I had to leave because they had a 20 year old cat who would pee around. It peed on a French man's bag, under his chair and on the end on my jacket which was on my bed and since the owners were very protective of the cat and dismissive of the workawayers I had to leave.
I hitchhiked to Austria to another workaway place. It was a "spiritual", new age community. It was exciting for me to be in a Germanic speaking world, something very new and in my Croatian mind very famous for prosperity.
After some months of volunteering I started to live there, paying the rent and being an equal part of the community.
At that time I had no clue what did I get myself into, that being a "spiritual", new age community, basically all the creazies flocked and collected there.
That aside, I was going with a bicycle every day to the nearby town of Villach to play a guitar and sing on the street. I figured I could use my skills to pay the rent. That was a difficult, but rewarding experience.
After a while, there was a yoga festival there and two girls from Salzburg came. One of them really liked me and was really determined to get into my life. I was not so enthusiastic, I did not find her all that attractive and I smelled codependency and dysfunction so I pushed back until her persistence broke through and filled my hollow chest.
She invited me to come to visit her in Salzburg and I had already had enough of stupidity happening in that community so I decided to go and visit her and also to make some music in the town square.
Little did I know what was about to happen in the following days. She had an alpha type, very angry and aggressive boyfriend with whom she just recently broke up, the apartment being actually his...
So I hitchhiked from Villach to Salzburg, lived with her in the apartment for a few days, played some music, until one day, as we were laying down on the bed, half naked, after you know what....we heard a door knob turning, door opening, she, in a distress, swallowing heavily and saying silently: It's him!
So we jumped up, she pushed me into to the bedroom, as we were on a couch in a living room. We heard firm steps throughout the living room, nearing the door of a bed room, she trying to hold the door, but he pushed and opened the door.
When he saw us, he immediately turned to her, started yelling "you whore!!" and many other things. I slowly slipped by and went back into the living room, being half naked, to put my pants on, my heart racing about what might happen.
There he comes storming towards me, reaching and giving me a hand, saying: you both have 15 minutes to pick up your stuff and leave!
He told me to wait outside while he deals with her, so I didn't want to cause more trouble, I just stepped outside and was waiting in front of the door.
There was yelling, screaming and after a minute she flew out of the door in a hallway. She looked at me and went back inside.
I decided to leave the building so I just waited in front of a building's door and after a 15 minutes there he goes out, telling me I should go back in and help her. I was a bit scared and wondering what am I going to find when I go back in.
Luckily, only her neck was a bit hurt. Knowing such men I figured he is going to kill her, rape her or similar, but it went relatively harmless.
Me and her, went to her friends apartment and lived there for about a week and in the mean time, with help of her friend's boyfriend, we went back there with a van to pick up all of her stuff.
To back up just a little bit, before that horrible experience, I went with her to attend a wedding of one other friend of hers. That was really fun and interesting.
So after that last week, living with her friend, I hitchhiked back to Villach, to the community. She visited me one time there. Forgot to mention that she had very crazy and controlling parents, especially her mother and her father, kind of more docile, but acting on her mothers craziness. They even called the owner of the community asking is their daughter there. How did they even found that I live there and even more the number of the owner, I have no idea. What was the most shocking to me, at one point this girl showed me a picture of her parent, me looking at it in shock, how exactly do they look like my grandparent from my mother's side. Coincidence or?
Anyways, I had enough of those crazy people in the community so I found a new place to workaway in Germany, very close to Salzburg, so I can visit her sometimes.
To back up a bit, at some point I hitchhiked to München also, to play music there in the city center. I earned very little money since the competition was very fierce. First night I slept in a park, thinking that might be a cheap way of staying there, but of course I didn't close my eyes at all, and it was to cold, so I ended up going to a hostel. I met a girl there who also visited me in the community in Austria, but that friendship was short lived.
Anyways, I was visiting that girl in Salzburg for a few months, now being in Germany, and after 8 months in total, she said she doesn't know where is this relationship going to so she broke up with me. It was very exciting and fun for me to be with her, but it left me in ruins. My health, physical and mental, started to decline, I started keto diet, thinking its going to help me. It led me even further into degeneration.
That was sometime in 2019.
I didn't have any money left cause I spent everything on that girl from Salzburg so I decided not to volunteer anymore, but to find a real, payed job.
I found a job in a nearby town. It was a night bar, made inside of a cave. Very interesting. The owner needed somebody to do some easy repairs and construction. I was promised to have a stable job and room in the upper floor which was under construction. None of that came true. Haha
There was already one guy living there, Florian, from Germany, doing the same thing. Very intelligent and capable guy, we spoke of Jordan Peterson and lots of other stuff...
I have done some work there, but the owner kept coming 2,3 hours later after designated meeting time and when he did come, a lot of times he told me, there is nothing to do today. All this time complaining that I am not doing anything when he in fact didn't give me work.
I had some verbal and almost physical confrontations with this guy. He was a nice guy on the outside, but very disturbed and aggressive on the inside.
In that time also Corona virus started. He had an older mother living there, so he demanded that everybody go away and he has put the biggest pressure on me, but that was more because he didn't like me.
He even denied me access to the bathroom so I ended up going with a bicycle once a week to that previous workaway place nearby to have a shower. Crazy, no?
In the meantime I found another job nearby. Mounting doors and windows on construction sites. Father and son needed a helper in their business. Very nice German people, but as everything was shut down because of Corona I could not continue there.
Being faced with having to live on the street, homeless, I posted a picture on my Facebook if somebody could offer me a shelter until better times come. The owner of that community from Villach, Austria, sent me a message do I want to come back?
In the meantime the owner of that bar, where I was currently living, found me a job up north, where they needed people to pick asparagus on the fields, because seasonal workers, from Poland mostly, were denied access to Germany because of Corona.
I had a choice, to go north to work on the fields of asparagus or to go south, back to Austria to live in that community again. My health was in decline, there was a lot of existential stress going on so I decided to come back to Austria, mainly because of familial atmosphere and comfort.
I am thinking now, if I would have chosen to go north my life would look like completely different now. I wonder should I have made that choice instead?
So, after 6 months in that bar, corona starting, I needed to find a way how to come to Austria. Everything was blocked, highly controlled. There was special police all over the place, with rifles. Now looking back they checked pople on the street, but mostly people with dark skin. It was kind of a state of terror.
I booked a ticked from Traunstein, Germany, where I was, to Villach, Austria.
I was going with a train. After I arrived to Villach, I had to do a quarantine for a week. I had done it in a bar which was also owned by that community's owner.
I stayed for another year in that community. A lot of new pople there, everybody expecting they have discovered America, but I knew how rotten it was there. The owner was, by the way, a woman, and 95% of inhabitants were single mothers...but anyways, it was comforting to be there.
As corona regulations released a bit and businesses started again and I found a job in family holiday resort as a dishwasher in the kitchen. It was owned also by the the owner of the community.
It was a nice experience there, but as I got back up on my feet again, I left the community and found another job as a dishwasher in a music academy. They had a restaurant.
To back up a little bit.
As I was still living in that community there was another girl whom I met there. She was a stewardess in an airplane company and lived in Vienna.
She came to the community as a volunteer, just as I did before, to be around people during a lockdown.
As she went back to Vienna, I visited her there one time, but I wasn't going to do the same mistake twice, like with the girl from Salzburg, so after some time we just broke up. She was a very intelligent woman, no doubt about it, somewhere on my level, sometimes I even felt intimidated, thinking her intelligence is a bit to much for me. She was also a bit crazy and neurotic.
Onwards with my new job in a kitchen of a restaurant in the music academy.
Spent there one summer, but since they are not open during winter I found a new dishwashing job in far west of Austria, very close to Switzerland.
It was a big, big hotel with 500 sitting places, another 3 dishwashers already working there. Was really nice there with the mountains peaks all around, but very inaccessible.
At that time, Austrian government threatened with vaccination for every person living there so I decided to escape to Switzerland, as it was nearby, a bit more pro individual freedom and I just learned about bitcoin and how it is already implemented in some regions as a legal tender.
So I found the same type of a job, this time in a 5* hotel, nearby Luzern. This is where I am now.
After some months my health declined even more, huge amounts of stress, chief dishwasher being very aggressive, alcoholic, mentally deranged, 60yo, living with his mother, no wife, no children.
Had to complain for a few months to his superiors, them finally putting him down with a threat of loosing his job. It got better, but he is still very deranged. I stopped keto, things are going little bit better, trying to heal with help of Ray Peat community, I see the light on the end of a tunnel going on and off...hope for the best.
Thank you all.
What an adventure so far.
I think I will never be able to heal if I don't get away from this type of work.
Thinking about making music again somewhere. Would love to travel USA.
Wau, almost 15000 words.
Cheers :)
