By Alex: 007

Recently living in Qatar is feeling a lot tougher.

I don’t know why – perhaps I am just feeling down, or a bit homesick – but I am starting to question whether this is really what I want.

Everything seems great. I mean, we are nearly debt free (something that felt more or less unachievable in the UK) and I am currently doing a copywriting internship. We are making good money, I am writing for a living, my husband is really enjoying his job, and we have lots to look forward too.

All the reasons we wanted to leave the UK are coming to fruition. But something about it just isn’t, I don’t know, clicking for me.

Maybe it’s that inevitable anti-climax that comes once you reach a point that seemed out of reach for so long. Maybe it is my reluctance to partake in the ‘Brit ex-pat culture’ that pervades, coupled with the unavoidable distance I feel from the Arabic culture, leaving me in a kind of limbo and giving me an, at times, overwhelming sense of isolation. Maybe it's hormones. Maybe it’s the heat.

Maybe all of these things have conspired, along with my arguable predisposition for depression, to make me feel like crap.

Whatever it is, I am not into it. It really sucks when it is always sunny outside but you always feel gloomy inside. All the good things in my life are just making me feel guilty and causing me to put pressure on myself to just ‘snap out of it’, which in turn just makes me feel a whole lot worse.

Dammit.

I find it quite impossible to talk myself into feeling something different, but this isn’t a pity party, definitely not.

That’s the point, there is nothing to pity. Everything is good!

A month in Europe will cure me, or maybe it will make it worse –I think this is just a wait and see situation.

Maybe I will just give it more time.