This post is one big mess, just to warn you.

Today, I’m not going to write about any adventurous journey to the top of some mountains, neither about swimming in freezing lakes of the Sierras. Yes, I would love to write about going to Yosemite and enjoying the snow but the truth is, and it’s sad to admit, that even I became so busy (and… ehm… broke – thanks to the tax season) to go there for a weekend up until May. Hopefully, there will still be snow in May because that month nothing – and I really mean NOTHING – will stop me from going to the place which is so dear to my heart.

Today, I’m not going to give a book recommendation or write about priorities, neither am I going to write a review on my new shoes.

Today, I’m going to share a piece of my personal life and some dreams and plans for the future. Even I don’t know why I’m doing it. I do have stuff to write about, even adventurous. So why am I bothering you with this? Well, because I think that it is an important part of my journey through this world and this life.

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I’m going to start with a confession; I’m honestly worried about the future of this blog. I know I will try my best to keep up with publishing at least one post a week – and I will probably try my best up until the point when I’m falling asleep on my laptop at three in the morning, despite the fact that I drunk four cups of coffee, trying to deliver something readable.

Why is that?

Well, because after two years of having a quite steady job, I have decided that I want to level up a bit and am going back to uni. Studying what? Journalism. Working part-time. Is it the right choice? I don’t know.

But the time that I used to spend by going on trips, hikes, or preparing articles for you, will be spent mostly by working, studying, and preparing articles for the school. And I’m just a human, like you. Even though I admit, a bit wild, but still human. And, as a human, I am worried. And insecure.

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I can still write a lot. I focused mainly on traveling and writing about my adventures, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. I can write the reviews that I have been procrastinating with for such a long time because it felt like there was always something better to post about.

I can finally write more about what it’s like to live abroad in a country with different laws, language and culture. I can write about the funny aspects and misunderstanding as well as the less pleasant ones.

I will be able to write about studying abroad and I bet it will be a lot to write about. Yes, I do have stuff to write about.

But – will it be desirable? Won’t it be boring? And the most repeated question; will I be able to produce the articles between working, going to school and studying? I admit I would really need at least one person to tell me: “It will be fine, you will do good, you won’t disappoint them – or yourself,” – while honestly believing in it.

I usually have pretty high expectations from myself – and am afraid that people expect even more than I do. That is why I’m sometimes pushing myself too hard, not wanting to disappoint them. And, even now, while writing this, I feel like a disappointment for not being able to deliver an adventurous story or the perfect review, but, instead, whine about all this. Actually, I’m pretty mad at myself. But I feel like this stuff just needs to be said.

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Why am I going back to school? Because I realized that writing is really what I love – and you guys have helped me with this realization, and for that, I am so grateful I can’t even express it.

Thanks to writing this blog – and thanks to you reading it, I am no longer afraid to go study what I wanted to study in the first place. Back then, everybody told me so many times that I wouldn’t be able to make living with writing, and that I should study something “useful”, that I ended up not going to high school of journalism. (In Czech, you choose the subject of your studies when you go to high school, not a university.)

It’s not like that I could make money off this blog, not at all, if that ever happens, it will take much, much more time and effort. But I started to believe that with a little bit of studying, working a lot on English grammar (commas are still a mystery to me), learning more about building a satisfying storyline etc, I could really make it and get a job that would include writing.

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Now, a lot of people were surprised when I said I wanted to study journalism. “But you hate reading the news, you don’t watch the news on the TV!” Why does everybody associate journalism with reporting who got murdered and what our president messed up again? Why does everybody think that journalism is about stalking tragedies and, if there are not enough catastrophes in the world to report about, make even trivial things sound like if they were about life and death? (No, really, hearing the reporter talk about a tourist stepping in a horse poop in Central Park with such a serious voice that you would think the poop tried to murder said tourist and somehow take over the world – that makes me cringe so badly I want to rip my ears off.)

No. I don’t want to write about politics, tragedies, all the bad stuff that is out there. I don’t want to write lies, I don’t want to be a part of this system that can influence so many people in any way governments want them to be influenced, I don’t want to write about fear and war in the manner big news companies do.

If writing about fear and war, I want to write about it as it is. I want to know how the “ordinary people” really feel about it. How they build their lives around such a thing like war. I want to know the bad AND the good and write about it all as it is. If there’s one single bit of hope, I want to include it in my writing.

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For example – my personal experience – when writing about refugees. There’s a lot of bad stuff about refugees, right? They make us fear them. At least in my home country, – and I am very sad and ashamed to admit it – our current president made the nation fear refugees by using mass media. And then, through sweet talks about how he was going to “save us from them”, he used that fear based on the worst things they could say and report about refugees, to win the people on his side – and won the election. This is very basically and easily said, but in general, that’s what has happened. Twice. For your information, throughout the “refugee crisis” as they called it, my country took in not even a hundred of them.

Now, trying to have an open, civilized discussion about refugees in Czech is a task almost impossible. So much people are ruled by fear. My own mum, after touching the subject, and me only SUGGESTING carefully that not all refugees are bad, yelled something like: “Well, you can come to talk to me about it after you get raped by one.” My own mum.  And even though I know and see her point of view, that one really hurt.

Right now, I LIVE with a family of refugees. I’m just going to refer to the mum as my host mum, which is the term generally used for people who take in somebody like me. My host mum is Vietnamese. Her parents, her siblings, and she, they ran away on a boat. They were in a refugee camp for two years. And then, they were taken in by the US. They worked hard. Really hard. She got into Harvard to study medicine. And today, that refugee saves lives and helps bring new lives into this world.

That is, of course, put very simply, but you get the image. Here are two completely different images people can get about refugees. But which one is the one mass media feed us the most?  Yeah. The one that spreads fear. Why. WHY.

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I admit this article is one big mess. If you made it all the way here, I honestly admire you.

I know a lot of people will think, maybe even maliciously, something like “Just wait for it, you naïve girl, the real world is gonna bring you to your knees, you’re just delusional.” But, is it only me who is delusional?

You might call my trying a waste of time. Because, trying to bring people to think something else than what their fears make them think, is, really, almost a waste of time. But, if that’s the case, then, for me, it’s the right way to waste time.

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In Czech, there’s this travel magazine, Koktejl. Known and sold internationally, there’s National Geographic (we have it even in Czech, too!). And there are many more magazines that publish the stuff I would love to write about.

I’ll get there, I’ll write about all the stuff that I feel needs to be said, I’ll write about stories of “ordinary” people, cultures, I’ll write about beautiful places as well as places destroyed by war or natural catastrophes, I’ll try my best to experience both the good AND the bad and write about it in a perspective of somebody who gives chances to both the emotional AND the rational parts of the stories of these events, places, people, nations.

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I want to thank you for sticking with me till the end and beyond. I promise I’ll do my best to keep up with this blog, to write more adventurous stories, reviews, recommendations, experiences, and thoughts. I promise I’ll try to always stay a bit naïve. I promise I will always try to see as many sides of one situation as possible.

Thank you for getting all the way here.

Love,

Pina