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.

small joys and freckles

An eternity ago in early May, as a consequence of sunny lunch hours spent on the school lawn, I discovered a smattering of freckles high up on my cheekbone, near the thin blue skin beneath my right eye.

It was just a light dusting of them, an area I could cover with a few clustered fingertips. But there they were, improbable and exciting and new.

Blandly blonde, with a complexion the colour of skimmed milk, I have always longed for skin like a star chart. Back in playschool I had a friend with skin as pale as mine, but an explosion of rust-coloured dots scampering around her face. She was spectacular, with her polka dot eyelids and misty hairline, and I was desperate enough to paint clumsy circles onto my cheeks with a brown felt tip.

So there they were, my first true freckles, proudly pointed out to all of my friends. My mother, who nonchalantly sports freckled arms and shoulders every summer, calmly remarked that my pigment must have altered with age.

Freckles suggest days spent in the sun, a certain carefree je ne sais quoi. An entirely different attitude, a better life. Freckled people are infinitely more beautiful than the rest of us, it seems, a group somehow more adept at life.

Or so I thought, naive as I was.

Although my collection of freckles remains small (in addition to cheekbones and nose, a few flocks have settled onto the backs of my hands, my forearms and my knees), I have lost my delusions. There's always a gut-wrenching nostalgic sadness in watching childhood dreams flicker and die, and even more so when they were dreams of eventual happiness.

Because last spring, although sublime in many ways, almost convinced me of freckles being the shadows of tears. And along with the steady accumulation of the little brown dots, although this summer has proven to be better than many of the ones before, has come the realisation that no amount of freckles will result in happiness. (A silly notion of course, but a solid one.)

And still there's the small pang of joy every time I notice them, a fleeting glance into a mirror every morning, a jolt of energy in my veins. Small joys build up to happiness, after all, so maybe the constellations of my skin will eventually show me the way.


Drawing by the always wonderful Daniela Henríquez.

notes from an island

So there was the sea and the smooth cliffs pouring into it.

There were sunsets to warm the bone to its marrow. (Sunsets I mostly spent on the phone, because sometimes you need more than beautiful views, you need tangibility.)

There were small cold waves to dive into and lots of books to read. (I mostly read Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's been years since I've last read it cover to cover and it's very different from what I remembered. And I might have outgrown Fitzgerald, oddly enough. He's too melancholy for my state of mind.)

There was a lot of thinking and even more writing. Pages upon pages. Most of it utter nonsense but sometimes there's no need to judge. Not right now.

There was a huge bed to lie back on and listen to my breathing during the nights when sleep didn't come. A small lamp to light up the walls made of wood and outside the steady sighs of the sea.

peonies

Peonies are possibly my favourite flowers. (I say possibly because I can never truly choose between peonies and lilies of the valley. And lilacs.)

(Today is one of my slower days. The house is quiet and nights are again growing darker. I think I'd quite like not to have to be alone tonight.

Sometimes my courage dissipates and my hands begin to shake again and the only thing I can do is wait for a new morning, a new beginning. But by now I've learnt that mornings do arrive on time, and there's nothing to worry about. Not really.

And peonies help, with their heavy flowers and slim yet sturdy stems. There can never be anything sad or wistful about peonies. Which makes them my favourite, for tonight.)



Photo from Matchbook Magazine, found on Lolita.

a love letter of sorts

To my city.

Because stepping off that train and breathing in your sun-tinted air, lying down on the freshly cut lawns of all your parks, bringing my tired feet to rest in the folds of your sea,

it's home.

More at home than I've ever felt.


I have broken my heart in your arms, I have cried too many tears of frustration, and yet you are the skin memory of my youth. There are few streets not blotted with moments gone, few tram routes that don't have me glancing up from my book to smile at a certain corner, a certain window, a certain someone.

And however far I end up going, I promise to come back. Every now and then. When you are at your best, during these summer months made of sunsets and cobblestones warm beneath bare feet. When one can stumble upon a young man playing a grand piano in the middle of Senat's Square, when the sunlight hits the golden domes of Uspenski just so.

something someone said

A few days back I was sitting on the pier at one in the morning, cold and exhausted, and I asked a friend

Why am I not happy when there are so many things in my life to be happy about?

And he looked at me and said It doesn't work like that.

And he asked me whether there really are enough things in my life to be happy about. 

He told me that happiness will come when there is reason to be happy, and it will be effortless.

This is possibly the single most helpful/hopeful thing I have heard in years.

away

This week I'm staying with my father's family.

Walking along the river bank all the way to the castle near the sea, dancing around the kitchen while cooking, running around this vast green garden with my siblings, reading reading reading on the grass beneath the apple tree.

Watching a bulb of tea drenched in steaming water open up into an artificial flower, seeing the skin between my fingers grow paler in comparison with my steadily darkening tan.

This is everything I've been needing, that longed-for perspective. Watching my life from a distance, a physical distance. Home is but a place on a map.

Yesterday I took the bus into town by myself. I know few people in this city and so I could walk around without having to watch out for familiar faces. I ate at a restaurant by myself, reading Ondaatje, then sat on the river bank for an hour or so as the sun made its slow descent. It's been a long time since I've last been this peaceful.

I return home tomorrow and I'm hoping to bring some of this with me, some quiet and calm. Because there are things to be done and no matter how easy, there are only so many times I can think I can't do this before I begin to believe it.

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.

a hand to hold

 

Some days it almost destroys me. Some days the disappointment settles into my chest with the weight of several anchors, dragging me down.

Some days I need a hand to hold and a tummy to lay my head on, and some days I need other people to believe in me.

Because although I'm trying to learn to feel better without needing to constantly rely on other people, some days are too heavy with tears. Some days I just need to be told who I am and why I am worth keeping around.


(Also, this Noah and the Whale thing is getting out of hand. How can a band singing I do believe that everyone has one chance to fuck up their lives and accompanying that sentiment with violins expect me not to fall head over heels in love with them?)

i'll do anything to be happy

In the middle of all this progress I've been making, a bad spell. A blue spell. A smattering of maddeningly slow and sad days, days that make me wish I were invisible.

It creeps back, silently, the hopelessness I've been curbing. (Everything I dream of seems too big and unachievable and I want to forget it all and live in a state of no dreams. But then the not-dreaming turns out to be impossible and even worse than the original hopelessness.)

It creeps back, and all I can do to control it is to lie on the floor of my room in a slice of sunlight and stare at the ceiling. Maybe read a bit. Slow down my existence, my heart rate, my too-quick thoughts. Write silly lists to keep my mind off things, sit in class and doodle, lie down on the grass during recess and tilt my head back to look at the sky.

It creeps back and I don't notice it at first. I chalk it down to another bad day, because bad days come and I try to welcome them and believe in tomorrow.

But then comes the time when I'm on the train going into town and suddenly a tear drops onto my lap. And then I'm crying silently but uncontrollably, stuck in public without a single tissue, wiping my cheeks with the backs of my hands and trying to calm down. Embarrassed and kind of scared.

Eventually I do calm down, tears still running down my forearms. I cradle my head in my hands and just breathe. (My therapist has told me to focus on my breathing and I'm finding he's not just being New Age, there's some truth to it.)

These things happen and I just have to weather the storm. At least I'm learning that there are far worse things than breaking down in public, there are far worse things than my body telling me something is wrong. I will feel better, at some point. Until then I'll listen to this song and try to believe.

may

And so, a new month.

When May began, around midnight, we were walking past a rave under a bridge. On our way to catch a bus that ended up driving by and leaving us stranded without batting an eyelash. (Not too surprising, considering buses tend to lack eyelashes.)

The stars had just come out then. We were tired and cold and heading to a friend's place after an eveningful of drunken shenanigans and surprise encounters. Two different parks, pink hairspray, a stray dog, Communist songs, missed trams, iloveyous, dinosaurs, silly games of footsie.

A hopeful beginning for this month.

(Also, last Friday was one of the good days: an exhausting yet incredibly helpful therapy session, a park, friends, running downhill simply because being young in April is rather nice a feeling. Also a royal wedding which I unabashedly enjoyed.)

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."

tuesday blues (and a bit of hope)

My hands shake when I'm upset these days. Upset or nervous or sad or anxious or just in need of some kind of reassurance. Generally the fits last for most of a day and they tend to make me feel even worse. Sometimes the shaking spreads, making my teeth chatter and my throat feel thick with impending tears.

So my hands shake in my lap and they shake around my pencil and I clench them into fists to make it stop. And I try to laugh it off and complain about it but really I'm just terrified, because it's scary to see your feelings manifest themselves in something so physical.

But then there are friends to hold my hands still and to hug me close. There are hopeful text messages and a bit of wan sunshine. And gradually it eases. The knots I've twisted myself into begin to unkink. I spread my fingers out in front of me against the spring wind and I can hold them still again. And I breathe out and close my eyes.

tiny green things

Listening to this song, because last night I dreamt of a road trip. Running out of petrol at sunset and climbing onto the still-warm roof of the car to watch the stars appear like blots of ink. I think I'd like that. It was one of those rare dreams that linger after you've woken up, their remnants etched into your spine for the rest of the day.

I've been nervous all day, my hands shaking and my teeth biting into my lip on their own accord. Trains being late and pens choosing to malfunction in the middle of an exam have been pushing me to the edge. Some days are like that. I wish it stopped raining.

But then there are the better things as well, like cute elderly couples on the train and quiet libraries and unexpectedly running into friends. Like the first hints of green in our garden. Like James Blake performing at Flow Festival in August.

enough now

 
Today I woke up and thought enough now. Enough of this nonsense, this self-indulgence, enough tears and enough of the blues. Enough oversleeping, enough lip-biting and fidgeting. Enough staring out of rain-stained train windows and enough of this wallowing.

Well, things didn't turn out quite that way. (It's Murphy's Law, isn't it? Bad things coming in clusters, spreading like an ink blot on wet paper.) And so my mother looked at me and said, It'll Get Better. And went on with Look at All the Good Things in Your Life.

And as pep talks go, that wasn't bad at all. Like tearng a plaster off a healed cut. It stings for a while and then you quit rubbing the burning patch of skin and go on with life and forget. Sometimes the scars remain but mostly things pass unnoticed, time rolls on too fast for words to keep up.

(I'm not quite sure what I feel today, I feel a bit sloppy and blurred around the edges, runny eyes and tired skin.)

words are futile devices

Last week has been one of the most difficult ones. Possibly ever. Full of worry and fear and endless crashing waves of pointless guilt. (See this post.)

Time assumes a strange quality in times in times of crisis. Hours pass by in a fog, punctured by sharp, craggy moments of absolute clarity. I've been stuck in my head and in my heart, neurotically clutching my phone like a lifeline.

For the past seven days, everything in me has been focused on my friend. For someone as invested in my own mental health and my own issues, it's astounding to see all of that cease to matter. Sometimes shit so huge goes down that there's nothing left to do but forget myself, in a way.


But I've been coping, I've gone into a kind of a survival mode. Forcing myself to eat, to sleep, to talk to my friends and to allow myself some tears. It seems almost as though I've turned into a shell with feelings inside and nothing on the outside except whatever is needed to display the inside. I'm like a tuned radio, unable to turn myself off, keeping a running commentary of my thoughts, of all the panic and fear and hurt and sadness, and also the perpetual undercurrent of relief.

I'm normally quite proficient at hiding how I feel, but this past week I have been able to hide absolutely nothing. As my therapist said, that's really the only thing to do after a traumatic event. To get it all out there.

And things are calmer now, things are okay. I really think we might all pull through, my friend and myself included.

(And yet again a huge thank you to all my friends and family and also to my therapist.)

my heart won't stay entirely in this rib caging

Sometimes I feel like we only see each other in glimpses, in unguarded moments. We're all shut off from others in our own bodies, our own minds, our own separate realities. Some people I can easily synchronise my reality with, but mostly I just feel cut off, uncompatible. For years, the single thing I have searched for in everyone I meet is understanding. Someone who could read me from every lip-bite, from every eyebrow raise, from the very dilation of my pupils.