on graduating

This is my chosen theme tune for my graduation. Hopeful, wistful. Beautiful. 

I graduate tomorrow.


I can't believe how fast those three years passed, and how much I managed to grow in that crackle of time.

So allow me a few moments of nostalgia. 



The past few months have been all worrying over exams and summer jobs and everything that comes after graduation, after our lives are blown apart. After the end of mapped-out, planned-ahead life.

The past few days have been tears and rehearsals and disbelief. Cleaning and cooking and receiving far too many cards and flowers.

But the past few years. Three to be exact. They have smashed me into pieces and helped me build myself up again.

I have become a better writer, I think. A better student, maybe. A better friend, certainly.




These are the things I will miss.

My teachers.
The classrooms and the corridors, the stages and the stairs.
The performances. The endless enthusiasm, the constant outpouring of ideas.
The buzz beneath the mundane, the excitement of being a part of something.

That sense of belonging.
 
The streets of Kallio: the drunks and the hipsters, the cafés and the dodgy bars, the flowers and the vomit stains, the erotica shops and the beautiful library. The trams and the seagulls.

And, finally. My friends.
Because the friends I have found in and around Kallio, the people we've gathered into our mutual orbit, these are the people I don't want to let go of. This is the most difficult, terrifying thing about graduating. This fear of loss.

(But I think my fear is mostly unfounded. A bit premature. We have all summer, after all. These three glorious months.)



Before I start crying: I think these are the years I might miss later on.

When I was little, my mother said about missing things and people: It's how you know you care. It's how you know you had a good time. It's a sign of love.

what we're afraid of when we talk about anne frank

Last week I went on a school trip to Auschwitz Birkenau. This is my final essay of the course (and also my final essay written for school ever). I thought some of you might enjoy this. Here goes. 

What We're Afraid of When We Talk About Anne Frank 

"Because of a religious education, my sister and I were raised

 with this idea of a looming second Holocaust. We would play the 

Who Will Hide Me game, or the Righteous Gentile game." 

Nathan Englander (Guardian Books Podcast: Anne Frank, 24.2.2012) 

"No, it's not a game. It's just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank." 

Nathan Englander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, 2012)

In the short story, two Jewish couples engage in a macabre thought experiment: in the case of a second Holocaust, who would protect their family. Who would hide them, bring them food, who would face the risk of death for their sake?



I had been thinking for quite a while about my feelings regarding the Holocaust, this interest bordering on the obsessive, this umbilical cord I've built between myself and the victims. It is of course understandable that Western culture keeps returning to the Holocaust in art and in research. But what about it reels us in, us as individuals? Why do we flock to cinemas to watch the latest Holocaust film, why do we keep reading the latest books and articles? Why do we keep talking about Anne Frank?

According to author Nathan Englander, we treat the Holocaust as a symbol. ”What we’re talking about today is the legacy of the Holocaust, the idea of it. It’s not just that there’s the historical thing, the genocide; there are these pathologies behind it, this idea of how fear works. People were comfortable in Berlin and in Paris [during the Second World War]. Your world can snap at any time and just become a world of betrayal.” 

The Holocaust has become the ultimatum of our capacity for evil, ground zero for immorality. We use it as a measuring stick for our own moral integrity. This comes down to two questions that we could call games if they were not so endlessly serious. We have Englander's question of who would save us, and we have the possibly more dangerous one: who would we save, and would we really?




And in the end, it is not about who would help us, but about who would not. It is not about who we would help, it is about the possibility of remaining passive, of being a silent witness -- and worse still, of becoming a perpetrator, a killer. 

Talking about the Holocaust hands us anger, fear and sorrow. These are the feelings we acknowledge. There remains a feeling we rarely address, a feeling that hides so deep within us we rarely notice it: guilt. 

When we talk about Anne Frank, who has become a symbol of purity and innocence, despite her unabashed mischievousness, we feel the same secret guilt. We fear our own darknesses, our own weaknesses. We fear the way we cling to our safety, our loved ones, our comfort and our routines, over helping the persecuted. We fear the version of us who avoids the gaze of the homeless man asking for money, who stays silent when a person of colour is treated to a round of verbal abuse on the bus, who does not join Gay Pride parades, who cannot converse casually with a physically disabled person. We look at the smiling young girl in the black and white photograph, and in her eyes we find an accusation we have no answer for. 



I do not know if there are people in the world for whom being good comes naturally. I do not think so. Doing the right thing is a choice. The Righteous among the Nations recognised in their reflections their capacity for evil, they looked their own darknesses in the eye and turned away. There are no good people. There are only those who are courageous and honest enough to do the right thing, and those who are not. 

It is dangerous to think of people as either good or bad. It is just as dangerous to use the Holocaust as our moral thermometer. Remembering the Holocaust is vastly important, but we should not let it overshadow the discrimination and the disadvantaged of our time. It is too easy to repeat the mantra of Never Again and neglect our mistakes and our hidden persecution. It is too easy to light candles at Holocaust memorials, to read Anne Frank's diary until the pages crumble, to cry furiously during the end credits of yet another film, it is too easy to beg for forgiveness for sins we have not committed. We have the responsibility of recognising the sins of our time, so that the generations to come will not have to feel our guilt.

  

thoughts on failure

I feel like I'm writing about the same things over and over again. Which is why I haven't posted much lately. But there are heavy thoughts I need to kick around a bit. So bear with me.


This spring I failed to get into university.

Right. I said it.


Obviously I don't know what you think now, but I doubt it's Oh my goodness what a pathetic little girl, probably the most witless of all the witless, why am I even reading this idiot blog, if I saw her I'd point and laugh. (If this is what you're thinking, please do not consider it necessary to inform me.)

But this is very much what I think.


I am bad at failing. For the past month or so I've been holding my breath. Waiting to wake up.
So far I haven't.


I haven't talked about not getting into uni with anyone at all. I didn't want to. Still don't. I just went out and bought the books I need to study for the entry exams of the University of Helsinki. And remade my plans. I've done the mature thing and still I feel more like a child than in ages.


My worst fear all along has been the pity. The pity, the surprise. The disappointment. I have feared the reactions of my friends and family because, and I know exactly how irrational this is, I thought they would no longer love me if I failed. So I've kept it all to myself.

Can I be completely honest with you?
I'm really lost with my life right now.
And it's terrifying.



Also, it's good. In that annoying self-help kind of way, that disgustingly cheesy rebuild-your-life, have-a-gap-year, figure-out-who-you-are-and-what-you-want-to-do way.

I'm not going to lie, not anymore: it's a constant gruelling uphill battle with a voice in the back of my head calling me names. It is no fun.


But it is necessary. It is, on that self-help level, good.

I'm drawing up a map from scratch.
No, not from scratch. From everything I know about myself. I will find my way.



After all, what I needed to hear was that the people who love me still love me.
And guess what?
They do.

(Also, a friend of mine sent me this video, in which the brilliant 

Hank Green answers questions about growing up and adulthood. 

Someone asked, How do you get past your insecurities?

Hank's answer: If you fail, I will like you more. 

Which was exactly what I needed to hear today. )

confessions

I cover the floor of my room with essays and textbooks and old postcards. I always leave my scissors on the floor and I never step on them, not even when I stumble out of bed at six in the morning in November, with eyes screwed shut and creaks in my bones. (I don't know how this is possible.)

Sometimes I scare myself with my carelessness, carelessness to do with both people and possessions.



I alternate between hating my hips and sneakily loving them. Some nights I stand before the mirror and I look at myself and I think about what Meg wrote, about how my hips will "hoist groceries and children" and in those words and in those moments I am filled with appreciation for my body and everything it can bring.

(This is a recent development, this forgiveness that I seem to have picked up somewhere, at some point. I can forgive myself my hips and I can forgive myself for loving them; how grown up, how necessary.)




For the first time in years, I've spent a solid period of time without fancying anyone and without wanting a relationship. It's been a long enough time to mark this as significant, a good few percents of my life so far. For me, this is an achievement, something I've worked on, something I've given to myself initially as a punishment and then as a gift: here is your life, here is the person that is you, now learn how to be without the chronic hope of an anchor, a mirror, a buffer.

And I think maybe I have, at least a bit.

3 a.m.

Last night I couldn't sleep. All around me my friends had closed their eyes and evened out their breathings and there I was, eyes wide open in the pitch black.

And despite knowing I could reach out a finger and poke them into the staying awake with me, despite knowing they would gladly talk and listen, I just crept outside to look at the stars.


And it was so quiet I thought for a moment that I had gone deaf.

I don't think I have ever felt as lonely in my life. Not in the summer weeks spent alone in a house too big for me. Not on the deck of a ship in the middle of a sea at four in the morning. Not ever.





But there are the things so much bigger than three-in-the-morning loneliness.

There is winter sunshine and there are nights in bars and in the almost-countryside. There are upcoming birthdays and early mornings and cafés and midnight confessions.

There is this gruelling, grinding, endless uphill battle of trusting. It might be the most difficult thing I have ever done but I refuse to stop trying.

I will forgive myself these insomniatic weaknesses. I will forgive myself, and others, and I will go on. And the next time I'm awake at 3 a.m. and I feel my ribs closing in on my lungs, I will wake someone up so I don't have to look at the stars alone.

smoke and mirrors, etc.

Yes, I am still alive and kicking but weeks pass by too quickly for me to notice and certainly too fast for words. Sometimes I catch myself in the mirror and barely recognise myself, almost like I've forgotten my own features. Or maybe I'm growing up too fast to keep up.

I don't really know what it is I want to say, except maybe this: I feel younger and sillier than before and yet it feels as though there's something emerging in me, breaking to the surface, some half-baked form of a grown-up. And it's everything I never thought it would be.

It's not calm or all-powerful, it's not offering me answers as much as questions and it's certainly not as organised or capable as I'd have hoped. In fact, I feel more like I'm reliving a sort of childhood. The childhood of my adulthood, maybe.

I'm curiouser by the day and feeling things in the deep, rooted way children do, in my belly and my spine. I'm overpowered by chords and words and the everyday, every day. I'm breaking out of my self-imposed limitations. I'm maybe trying to accept my ignorance when it comes to certain things, I'm asking questions, breathing the world in and exhaling it in tiny bits, leaving something always to be dissected within my lungs.

I'm not looking back, this is not the nostalgia of leaving childhood behind. 

This is something to do with looking into my own eyes like into a stranger's.

self-help, or, giving up and not feeling bad about it, or, i'm not quite sure what i'm doing with my life, but it's okay, i think

I  have given up. I have given up a huge dream of mine.

If you know anything about me, you will know that I do not give up. I just don't do it. Because to me, giving up means failure, and failure? Failure is the worst possible fate.

So here I am giving up and still breathing. I haven't raged, I haven't hurt myself. There has been some crying, but it's been the kind of quiet, civilised crying that you don't mind others seeing because it's not all puffy eyes and snot everywhere.

In fact, it's all been a study in self-help. Very calm and very fashionably downshift-y.

How did this happen?

Ever since August I've been doing some of the most scary and important things I've done so far in my life. Final exams, university applications, along with everything else. I've been going quietly crazy, losing my foothold on real life one toe at a time.

Every day I've had to tell myself over and over that I am capable and worthy and every day I've been feeling less so. I've set myself ridiculously high goals and I've sacrificed a lot of my friendships, a lot of sleep, a lot of my stability for all that. I won't go into too many details but let's just say, applying to British universities while studying in Finland? Not the easiest route to take, no matter how prepared you are.

When my stress levels get high enough, I lose my sense of perspective. Whoosh. Gone. 

I enter a second dimension of my own making where I believe it's completely normal to be this stressed out. To be so tired and to feel so worthless that sometimes, for weeks at a time, I would arrive home in the evening and cry. Some days I could feel the tears building up all day. Some days all I could do was wait until I got home. 

Yes, I actually looked forward to getting home so I could have a good cry and crawl into bed afterwards and hope for sleep. That is exactly how crazy it got. And I still thought it was normal and somehow okay. 

It took me a lot to get to this point, this point where I'm actually lessening my load.

The doubt crept up gradually, in the form of questions. Why am I doing this? Is this worth all the pain? Can I go on like this much longer? Why doesn't the future excite me anymore, why does it make me feel apprehensive instead? Why are my dreams making me feel worthless and undeserving, when they should give me hope?

And so I'm letting go of a big, unrealistic dream of mine because now is not the time for me to pursue it. Not when I can't take care of myself.

Although the disappointment is, at times, crippling, the relief more than makes up for it. I don't yet know how royally I've fucked up. I don't know if I'm a fuck-up at all. I honestly haven't wrapped my head around all this yet. 

No matter how much I'd love to be the person I want to be, the person who Never Screws Up, Ever, and is never weak or scared or tired or on the brink of a collapse - well. It's not entirely realistic, is it.

Because I have to be who I am. Weak, scared, tired, sometimes. On the brink of something or other, always.

And I'm eighteen, for crying out loud. I do believe everyone has one chance to fuck up their lives, as sung by Noah and the Whale. And to be quite honest, I hardly think this is my grand fuck-up. 

A grand give-up, maybe, but that actually doesn't sound so bad. Giving up.

Phrasal verbs are lovely because when you split them up, slide apart the verb and the adverb or preposition, there are whole new meanings to dissect. 

This is what my Oxford Dictionary has to say on the matter:

give, verb cause or allow (someone or something) to have or experience (something)

up, adverb towards a higher place or position

And that doesn't sound so bad after all.

So, through the minor panicking and the occasional feeling of disbelief, I'm gathering up my scattered pieces. I will trust my heart, or more likely my guts, with this and I will believe the people around me who have been kind enough to tell me I'm doing the right thing.

Deep breaths, now.

a new kind

This is a post that was difficult to write.

Again and again I drafted it in my head - when brushing my teeth or skipping down the library steps, I would think, Yes, that's what I want to say.

Then sit down and stare at the blinking cursor for a while. And after a few futile attempts at catching the edges of my thoughts, give up. And repeat the following day.

You see, lately I've been bored with myself. And that's not a nice type of boredom.

(I would consider myself quite proficient at dealing with boredom. There are so many things to be done and people to be met and books waiting for their spines to be cracked. But looking in the mirror and feeling distinctly disenchanted, that's another thing entirely.)

I've reverted to the point where I can't write a single thing without bringing on a mental avalanche of criticism. I look at myself or listen to myself and all I see and hear is hopeless inadequacy. (James Dean once said that if he were to be put in the same room with himself for five minutes, only one of them would come out alive. There is that.)

Of course, this is really nothing new. Self-loathing is to me as natural and indispensable as breathing.

But last spring my therapist urged me to start treating myself with kindness. To address myself with patience and, most conspicuously, with mercy.

And so I tried it out.

I would pick my heavy limbs up in the morning and say, Come along then dear. I would look into the mirror without cringing and I would pay attention to the things I did manage to do right. I would shrug my shoulders at my own infuriating habits. I would allow myself to be tired and needy, because we all are tired and needy sometimes, and it's essential to remember that these are not signs of weakness.

I took long walks and made sure to get enough sleep. I wrote. I was happy in a vacant way, afraid of breaking my fragile construction of calm.

And now, of course, we are back on track. There's nothing quite as belittling as endless university applications and crippling hours of exam revision. To be quite honest, I feel like a failure.

I know that right now I am taking a very narrow path very close to the edge. It would be all too easy for me to slip into my old habits of infinite self-hate again.

But quite frankly, and forgive me my narcissism, I deserve better than that. And luckily enough, I now also know better. I've seen the flip side and I know myself to be capable of kindness, of practicing a new kind of mercy.

on learning

See that picture? That's what I wish my life were like right now. Balcony railings to lean against, striped shirts and flowers.

In fact I'm treading through the final exam week of this school year, revising (or thinking about revising while actually being a genuinely great procrastinator) on trains, in cafés, in the library.

And since this is my tenth exam week and the days seem to be running through my fingers like powder, and because I still haven't learnt how to sit down and open my books and shove some smarts into my brain, and because I just want something to do instead of studying French for tomorrow, I thought I'd give you a look into what happens to me during exam week.

Ready? Here we go.

Every time an exam week traipses along, I plan to windmill kick it in the face. I make smug revision timetables and plan on spending hours at the library. I feel confident. I can do this.

Then come the distractions. Non-school books are never as good as during exam week. Baking is never as much fun. The weather couldn't be better for photography. It couldn't be more high a time to clean my room. And the blogs I follow never seem to post quite this much.

Every time. Every single time.

I get through my day going, oh look I have so much time left, easy-peasy, no need to worry, I'll get down to studying in an hour or so.

Suddenly it's ten p.m. and I still haven't opened my psychology book and I realise I've left my notes in my locker at school and I really should sleep if I want to do well in this exam and I cram last-minute information into my head until I fall asleep with my glasses still on and wake up in the morning with dread weighing me down, distractedly trying to study on the train but ending up staring out of the window trying to understand how it came down to this yet again.

Then repeat the following day, because I never learn, do I.

on success and why it matters

I'm going to switch into full-on essay mode for this one. Hope you don't mind.

I'll begin this train of thought by recounting a mini-breakthrough from a therapy session a few weeks back. I was frustrated by my slow progress, going on about how I know that I'm being too hard on myself, but I just can't do anything to change my way of thinking. My therapist asked me the same question he's raised several times before: what would happen if I stopped berating myself for everything? What is it that I am afraid of?

And suddenly I had the answer. I'm afraid that if I stop asking too much of myself, I will never achieve anything again.

Breaking it down, that means I choose to live the way I do, constantly berating myself, constantly being disappointed.

It means that I choose to be miserable because I'd rather be successful than be happy.

And still, I am now going to tell you this: I am sick of people telling me that success doesn't matter. 

In the fast-paced highly competitive world we live in, people are constructing dreams of a life not ruled by success, when in fact, a world like that is both impossible and frightening. Yearning for success is base-level human and trying to rid ourselves of it is a perplexing thought. 

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be successful. It is our stilted sense of success that's the problem.

Just think about it. What if being successful was measured by happiness? What if we stopped accepting awry outsider definitions of success and started building our own?

Only during the past few months have I begun to realise how immensely important success is for me. All my life I have been told by parents, teachers and friends to stop being so hard on myself. I expect a lot from myself, always have. There is nothing more embarrassing than not knowing something and there is nothing more scary than failure.

And now I'm beginning to realise that I have been chasing false dreams for eighteen years. For my entire life I have striven for approval, for intelligence, for good grades in school. I have beaten myself again and again over not being good enough, not trying hard enough. I have made my life miserable because I have been running away from failure too desperately to think about other options, other ways of life.

This is not a good way to live. This is not what I want.

Why am I accepting norms of success from society, from people who are not me? 

I am the only one to determine my own dreams. I don't need my life and my happiness to be validated by anyone except myself.

For me, success would mean, for instance, being able to read the books I want to read, study the things I want to study, go the places I want to go and surround myself with the people I love.

These are the heavyweight dreams, the important ones, the things that actually matter. These are achievable dreams and they are all my own. They are dreams that do not scare me shitless, they don't make my teeth chatter out of panic. Instead, they make me feel hopeful.

So, with the risk of sounding like a bad self-help book: close your eyes and breathe deep for a bit and think about what you want. 

And, if you are anything like me, please stop blindly pushing yourself out of fear of failure. Because, as the wonderful J.K. Rowling said in her Harvard commencement speech (which you should absolutely watch because it is one of the most powerful and inspiring things I have ever heard),

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."

why we are who we are

"Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing; that we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying; that, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved."

(Alain de Botton: On Love) 


This, today. I could rattle on and on about Alain de Botton's skill with words and minds. De Botton goes on to speak about how we mirror the people around us, acting according to their expectations, and how important it is to be close to people whose expectations are good for us. "We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around us to show us what we're like," de Botton writes. "Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbors. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well as, and sometimes better than, we know ourselves."

 "The problem with needing others to legitimize our existence is that we are very much at their mercy to have a correct identity ascribed to us. Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to amoebas, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that is has no self-defined shape."

This is something I've been talking about a lot with my therapist recently, my too-sharp awareness of the expectations of the people around me, and my too-urgent need to live up to them. I will act stupid and insipid with people who don't expect much from me, I will retain a happy look with people who expect me to be fine. And inside I feel lost, because I am so inherently unable of acting like the self I know.

It is the curse of humanity, isn't it? "A man can require anything in solitude except a character,"  Stendhal wrote, and sometimes the process of requiring a character feels desperate and even pointless. (But I will get there, I know I will.)