this is an introductory post

I was waiting for my crêpes in Paris and my face was doing something weird.

I've been putting off writing an introductory post for weeks. It's high time I grabbed myself by the neck, as we say here in Finland, and churned it out.

Hello. My name is Iida (pronounced ee-duh), I am eighteen years of age and I live just outside Helsinki. I'm Finnish but I was born in England, and I'm bilingual. I attend a high school focused on the arts.

I write, I read, I take photographs, I sail (tall ships, not yachts). I listen to quite a lot of music, jazz and 60's pop and this thing called indie. Pretty much anything with a bit of banjo and whispery vocals.

I am scared shitless by most things in life. I'm a perfectionist to the most ridiculous degree. I'm also inherently lazy and prone to procrastinate.

I'm chronically awkward and ridiculously self-indulgent. It's my second nature to keep a running record of my thoughts and feelings. Like most of us who write, I feel a desperate need to catalogue and define my existence, to pin down my life for fear of forgetting.

My mother wanted to photograph me in front of La Fontaine Médicis and my face resorted to weirdness again.

I've been seeing my therapist for about a year. I've been having a hard time coping with my (truly terribly low) self-esteem, my perfectionism, my difficulties in social situations, my self-harm. It's nothing you haven't heard of before but I have the misfortune of having to live through it. The good thing is that these days I find it much easier to be hopeful about my future

(And the most important thing about me, the reason I write this blog, what it all boils down to: I'm learning to be honest.)