Anxiety/stress management tips

[Pennycat 880]

Well, tomorrow I'm off to visit my boyfriend and unless there is some HUGE change in plans, expect to come back "officially" engaged! Yay! (Well, I mean, that's also kind of "yikes!" but that's the good kind of nervous).

Question though: I am already pretty much at my wit's end over this K-1 process. Hahaha, right? For the record, I have been doing a TON of reading things around here and elsewhere and trying to get things lined up, documentation together etc etc so it's not like I haven't started. I guess it all just seems like a huge mountain right now, and so many places to mess up. And expensive (which I can handle, although between saving for travel, paying down loans twice as fast as planned to start marriage debt-free, and a supremely flaky roommate, it is not a financially stress-free situation either).

I've looked at the checklists, trying to boil it down into one-step-at-a-time chunks and...nope. Not helping. If anything it's more of a "and I have to pay to get all this translated too?! Where? Who? How? and WHY"? For Chrissake, I'm very familiar what it takes to become a Foreign Service Officer and have been in that process myself (I took a break in perusing the career because I wanted to be married first, looong story there). I know several people, from close friends, to casual acquaintances, to internet-only friends who work as Counselor Officers abroad. I live right by the Foreign Service Institute, where FSOs spend months or *years* at a time to learn foreign languages. As their full time job--language learning. I know that there is a hiring preference for bilingual people. These people speak Spanish at *minimum* an intermediate level. Why, then, does a *birth certificate* which even I, a total dope when it comes to the Spanish language, can read clearly? And don't even get me started on the medical exams. They *do* realize that not everyone lives in San Jose, right? And that other major cities are a full day's travel away? And that most people have these things called "jobs" from which it can be very difficult to get time off? And that people called "doctors" exist in other parts of the country, too? GAH.

So....question time? How in the world do you keep your cool through all this? Stop worrying about the timeframe and let it take as long as it takes--RFEs and all? Knowing that you *could* be on Step 7 but you can't get a day off work to go get a freaking flu shot from a very specific doctor 6 hours away from your house so you have to wait until next month? How to you manage knowing that if you're on top of your game and really lucky, this could all be over in 4 months, but seeing that the way you're doing things it'll take a year? Any tips at all? Anything you wish you'd brought on your "last visit" that could have helped speed things up?

[N-o-l-a 7,168]

I'd say you just have to roll with the punches. Have everything prepared, but also be prepared that things might not go as planned, but that you'll work through those times too. We had our medical on one side of one country on like a Tuesday afternoon, drove through the night (my husband ended up falling asleep and running the car off the road in a snowstorm) all the way up into another country and barely made our interview time for the next morning there. Oh, and we totally froze waiting in line because Sweden is like super cold compared to Denmark and we didn't have enough clothes on.

We had other issues too - USCIS sent our unapproved I-130 to an embassy that doesn't even process immigrant visas because some idiot thought that all countries still had DCF, etc. I came here on VJ, I ranted, I solved my problems and it all turned out ok in the end.

Oh, and our first flight was cancelled on POE day because SAS apparently doesn't have planes that can fly in fog, so we had to race to another airport to make the next 2 connecting flights!

See, will go wrong. Definitely. You just kind of got to accept it.

[Pooky 3,825]

Sorted.

[Transborderwife 4,666]

Exercise is a great stress buster. I also have personally found a lot of peace in meditation. It doesn't have to be religious, just a time to let go of the negative and draw in the positive. There's a great app called buddhify on iTunes.

[Pheebs1201 269]

We just approached it with a "one step at a time" mentality. Fortunately we were together whilst we assembled the i-129f package and that alone took seven hours of organising, checking and re-checking before we were satisfied. I just broke the process down into mental chunks and didn't think about the next one until the previous step was complete. It may sound like an over simplified approach but it has worked for us so far, and thankfully, we've had a smooth journey thus far.

Wishing you lots of luck with your journey and remember we are always here to answer any queries or just listen if you need a rant!

[TBoneTX 45,851]

This one is for perspective:

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/410945-k-1-journey-completed/

This one describes the stress at the END of the process:

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/382775-mrs-t-b-the-citizenship-test/