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This week

• We returned from a weekend in Stockholm (where we went to the ABBA Museum(!), among other things);
• On Th, Aug 14-Fri, Aug 15 we had our Rover Orientation in Oslo!

My Fulbright contract to live and work in Norway officially started this week (Aug 15)! To kick us off, we had our Rover Orientation at the Fulbright office in Oslo where we learned what our roles exactly are. We have been told, and what I’ve been telling others, is that we are to conduct workshops about American culture and history for secondary students, their teachers, teachers-in-training, and their teachers. That’s all true! But there are rules about travel, logistics about how to input our visits and reimbursements into the system, rules about per diem. There’s a travel agent to contact when we need to book flights and hotels. And we each have our “sales regions.”

Two of last year’s Rovers sent a video, perfectly timed, to offer some guidance on scheduling workshops from requesting teachers. Our Fulbright supervisor had told us that these two Rovers went above and beyond the number and frequency of workshops, and they looked awful by November. November. At that time, the supervisor asked them to make a video about how they were feeling, but they were too busy. Lolz. So they made one in August and sent it over right when, unbeknownst to them, we were having our orientation. 

My takeaways from their video were

• They were still recovering from their Rover year and it was August
• That we needed to “protect our time and energy”
• That there was more to our experience as Fulbrighters than the workshops
• That we should “enjoy it and soak it in”
• That we should “preserve [our] time”
• That we should enjoy Norway

After doing some practice travel scenarios, I wrote down the following key idea: Get to as many visits as you can while maintaining your energy and preserving yourself.

The idea of doing “as many visits as I can” and “maintaining [my] energy and preserving [my]self” feel in tension for me. I have a hard time doing what I can for my job and maintaining myself. I don’t know what it means to “protect [my] time and energy.”

In the last dozen or so years of my teaching, I have been working on preserving myself and my time while doing my job. If you know me know me, you know I keep detailed spreadsheets of how I spend my time and that I organize my calendar in blocks. Jeremy jokes that if you want to talk to me, get on my calendar. He’s joking, but it’s not a joke. And I don’t like being so busy, so that family and students are fearful that they’re disturbing me when they just want to talk to me. Especially my family, who want to talk and hang out. Everything feels subordinated to my work. I don’t like feeling so tired at the end of the day that even getting the requisite number of hours I need to feel rested (7-8 hours) doesn’t feel rested because I am overtired when my head hits that pillow. 

I feel like I have tried so many ways to pull back, do less, say no. And they haven’t been successful. I think it’s partly because I’m a perfectionist. It’s partly because I fear that others will view me as incompetent if I’m not exceptional at my job. It’s partly because it’s a habit I maintained from K12 teaching to prove to everyone that I could be an exceptional English teacher even though I don’t have a BA in English. It’s partly because I normally live in the US, where we take pride in grind culture and always being busy and glorifying how busy we are and how little rest we’re getting. 

But now I live in Norway. And overworking and being continually busy is not celebrated. In fact, it’s looked down upon (actually, so is standing out). You are defined by more than your work, the society seems to say. And there’s so much to experience in the day than work, like hiking. Seriously, Norwegians spend more money on hiking paraphernalia than any other European country, I have been told. 

I’ve been working for years to preserve myself while doing my job. And boundaries will be especially important this year, as I’ve got my Fulbright work and stuff from CSU so that I can retain my benefits for me and Jeremy—isn’t the American system the dream? Living in Norway this year, though, I wonder how I might set up boundaries and develop mindsets, habits, and strategies that can offer me more time to preserve? How can I learn to trust myself and the excellent work that I do? I’m looking forward to growing in this way while I’m here.