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...

 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 ...