Trauma Doesn't Make You Stronger

 The older I'm getting, the more I find myself liking autumn. This makes it sound like I'm actually old, when I'm literally in my early twenties, but you get the point. When I was a teenager, I used to despise this season. I guess it reminded me of the school year starting too much, so the entire period of autumn got a bad name. But as I am growing and finding what it's like to have your own life as an adult, fall is becoming a time I'm more excited to experience year after year.  One thing I really love about living in Finland is that we get to experience all four seasons – at least for now. They are all very distinct from one another, the flow from a season to the next is seamless and fluent. The nature dresses herself in new clothes every season, the colors of her coats and skirts changing from white to green to vibrant oranges. The air gets chillier, and I can wear my scarfs again. My favorite season, winter, is on its way, and I can smell it in the wind blowing...

 Gender is a very interesting thing. I have, without a doubt, done my own fair share of self-exploration in terms of my gender identity, and it has been a confusing journey, to say the least. Without going into too much detail for the sake of remaining on topic of our current chapter, I will say this one thing: the concept of manhood is very dear to me, and something I feel a strong connection to, without actually identifying myself with it.  I think we don't give language enough credit for what it's able to convey, and it is no different in terms of gender either. Language is a beautiful man-made set of sounds and rules, only bound to each other by some arbitral agreement we as the human race have at some point come to. This translates to gender very heavily, and we are now becoming aware of this connection as we are trying to break free from the gendered norms our language has set for us as individuals and societal communities alike.  As a linguist, I love language for...

 Whenever my girlfriend calls me things like "beautiful", I have a meltdown. Not because I think it's adorable when they say those sweet things to me, but because it triggers the shit out of me. It is so frustrating how my trauma prevents me from receiving genuine compliments, which leads to extremely embarrassing situations. Imagine telling your partner to stop calling you beautiful because it makes you suicidal. There's not a lot of things that I hate about myself more than that. The amount of trauma I have surrounding my appearance is kind of unknown to myself too. It seems like an endless pit of triggers, self-hatred, and disgust; one I can never get to the bottom of. It is hard for me to even talk about it, because the topic is so fragile to me that sometimes referring to it alone can cause an episode.  It would be an understatement to say that I've been made to feel ugly for the majority of my life. The word 'ugly' is a very special one, though, a wo...