Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 The last year of my university studies before the eventual collapse of my mental health and subsequent suspension of my studies was an extremely wild one. It goes without saying that uni and college culture is more or less focused on partying and getting wasted, but I would argue that the Finnish university students take this mentality to a new level. There is not just a lot of alcohol involved, drinking has been mobilized by capitalism and turned into a money-making machine that pumps out artificial student traditions that you have to take part in and, most importantly, get shit-faced in.  It was my third uni year in a row, and I was in a depression pit so deep I'd forgotten what the stars even looked like. I wasn't eating properly, I was in a constant state of dissociation, and I had just started taking anti-depressants again after a two-year break. Nothing seemed to fill the void my mental agony and the never-ending stream of literature and linguistics essays created in my...

 I think I was around five years old when I first heard Kaija Koo's song "Tinakenkätyttö". I was hanging out with my then-best friend, and she had the song on her tiny Sony Ericsson mobile phone. She played it for me, and I fell in love with it instantly. For some reason, I only came back to it years later, when I had already entered elementary school. I rediscovered the song through my mom; she's a huge Kaija Koo fan, has been as long as I remember. We used to listen to her albums in mom's old Peugeot car that had a CD player. One of those albums that mom had was the record where "Tinakenkätyttö" was initially released on. I could feel myself traveling back in time, to my best friend's tiny bedroom, sitting on her bunk bed and kicking air as the crackly speaker played the song for us. A simpler time, I thought. I think I was around ten at that time. When I was a kid, I struggled a lot with understanding what words meant. It was frustrating because I...

 I think men are amazing. Some of the most important people in my life have been men, and only a few of my abusers have been male. It has usually been other girls and women who have hurt me the most, which is why I have this general feeling of fear and distrust around them. In my eyes, men are more trustworthy than women, so I've naturally gravitated towards them.  It took me a very long time to realize that I wasn't attracted to men romantically or sexually, because I have always felt the need to be close to them and form meaningful relationships with them. I am not the stereotypical lesbian who does not think about men and wants nothing to do with them; actually, I would argue that I think about men far more often than women. It might seem really backwards, but the reason for that is the fact that there are more types of attraction than sexual and romantic, and I experience those very strongly for men, in the same way I experience romantic and sexual attraction toward women....

 How much pain does one human being have to endure in their life for it to be considered "too much"? When is it justifiable for that person to give up and not want to keep fighting anymore? Why is it that some people in this world are forever cursed with the worst kind of luck, with the worst kind of pain, and then just expected to keep going like it's nobody's business? My body has been rebelling against me big time recently. That is one of the reasons I haven't been able to work as regularly as I'd like to, both in terms of art and writing blog posts. It actually physically pains me to see that the last time I was active on this blog was in early July, and now we are already done with the first week of August. Sometimes it is really had to be forgiving of yourself, even though you know that the reason for lack of work is, without a doubt, extremely valid. I guess it's a combination of my own attitude and the general misunderstanding of my condition on a ...