how i want to live

In a small wooden house in the woods. With a rickety bookshelf and sunlight through the branches. With a little darkroom and all the tea I can drink. Rain on the roof and lazy days in bed. And pillow forts and nights by the bonfire. Biking to the nearby seashore, because I need need need the sea, the sharp waves breaking brittle against my legs.

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.

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.)

what i want

(Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)


"We love you so much! We'll protect you!"

What else could one wish for, what more than love and protection could one possibly want? Well, I do want more. I want to be able to trust in that love and protection.

Like Oskar in Safran Foer's novel, my life isn't lacking in people who love me and care for me. What I lack is the strength and courage to believe it is true.

The factor is not whether or not the people around me are trustworthy or not, because I know most of them are. I have every reason to believe my friends and family when they tell me they love me, when they tell me they want to know how I'm doing. And still, it's the unsurmountable feat, my ultimate downfall, my lifelong struggle. I doubt, I run, I hide. I open up a little and then shift into reverse, for fear of - what, exactly?

Maybe the problem isn't my inability to trust. Maybe it is instead that I do not want to trust. Or maybe I just don't know how.

Trust is not automatic. Trust is not passive, and it is not up to choice. It is intuitive, but maybe not for me. And I am okay with that. This is my personal Achilles heel, having never learnt to allow myself to trust the people I love.

But just last Sunday, when I was feeling scared and sad in a panicky way, I reached for my phone and almost automatically called my friend. Intuitively, almost. Because I needed help and I allowed myself to ask for it. Because I trusted.

dirty glasses

I only notice how dirty my glasses are when the sun starts shining again. (Sometimes I think it's counter-effective, glasses improving my eyesight and the dust motes impairing it again.)

Look, I made you a mixtape! (It's called Dirty Glasses & Futile Devices. Enjoy.)

Rosie Thomas and Sufjan Stevens: Say Hello
Mumford & Sons: Awake My Soul
The Weepies: Take It From Me
Laura Marling: Ghosts
Sufjan Stevens: The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!
The Maccabees: Toothpaste Kisses
Sufjan Stevens: Futile Devices

march means spring

After the good times comes the return to normalcy, which I always manage to take hard. So I remind myself to breathe and haul my heavy bones to school, to friends, to lessons. And I get by, I really do. I take neat notes and tilt my head towards the skinny winter sunlight, I arrange my books into piles on every desk I sit at, I listen to people talk.

And suddenly I find myself talking too. For a while it sounds shrill and forced, but then I slide out of myself and into the world, remembering how things feel when they're easy.