Falling Back Together 1/2
Yesterday I met up with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for two years. We exchanged a lot of thoughts about what has gone down for the both of us during these past couple of years. I told her that these days I was feeling this stronger and stronger need to write, that I desperately wanted to make creative activities a part of my everyday life. I also told her that I had been through a really difficult time during the pandemic. I mentioned the nightmares, the anxiety, the numbness, and the difficulty to do anything after I submitted my master’s thesis. I had now entered a time in my life where everything felt lighter and more in its place, but thinking back to that time my breath got caught in my throat. I thought back to the core thoughts I would have when getting those nightmares: “I am a bad person. I don’t deserve good things. I don’t deserve a peaceful life. I deserve what happened to me”. In that moment it felt like I was back there. It felt weird talking about the improvements I’d made, my hopes and dreams. It made me aware of the fact that it’s all still somehow stuck in there, in my body and mind. But writing makes it better. Sharing about it makes it better. Doing things that prove to me I am not there anymore makes it better.
When I got back from my exchange year, the pandemic restrictions were still in full action in Finland, and pretty much all over the world. I came back to my hometown and would dissociate a lot. I still don’t know exactly what that was about. I tried to enjoy the summer, and I think I did, but I was also wholeheartedly confused most of the time while also being grateful for having been able to spend eleven amazing months on the other side of the world.
Summer came and went and I moved back to Helsinki to continue my studies. I moved to a flat alone for the first time. While I have some golden memories from that autumn, I can also recall really struggling with online school and navigating living alone for the first time. I was also struggling with eating and different restrictions, and with buying myself things that I needed. For a long time, I didn’t have a proper bed. Somewhere along the way I had adopted this thought of surviving with as little as possible, and had had a difficult time buying myself things I needed when I was on the exchange as well. One of my friends lived close to me, and we did fun things with our friend group. Although I was struggling with many things, I think that I was able remain connected to myself because I was still consistently embracing things I loved the most, like books, music, and films.
That was the last year of my bachelor’s, so I was supposed to be preparing to write my bachelor’s thesis in the spring term. I don’t remember much about it, but I remember being perpetually embarrassed. I had studied English, literature and history for a long time, but I was struggling to express myself about the most basic things during online classes and when having conversations with my supervisor. I had a hard time reading and expressing my thoughts about the books we were supposed to read. I was also chronically late for most of my classes, and had a habit of attending courses I wasn’t really interested in because I wanted to “gain as much knowledge” as I could. Unsurprisingly, I did not acquire knowledge about anything most of the time, even the courses I liked, because my nervous system wasn’t in a state to receive any of it. I think I was doing this sort of overcommitting and overcompensating because I was obsessed with the idea of having a long list of things I’d studied in my diploma and CV. No wonder I was embarrassed all the time. I wasn’t being myself at all.
And often times, it wasn't about the things I was doing that were wrong for me. It was about the things I wasn't doing despite really wanting to.
The thesis writing happened and somehow came to an end. Again, I don’t remember much, but during that spring I moved to an apartment that felt much more like me. I was excited about the new area, but I’d spend the summer working in my hometown. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree during some random day in the summer by receiving a verification by email. At the end of summer, I went to the balcony at my mom’s, sat down and called the student health services. I told them that I’d had a hard time ever since I came back to Finland. I still remember how tears welled up in my eyes, how scary it felt to talk about it out loud to someone officially. They told me I could begin having appointments to talk with a nurse when I would be back in Helsinki.
When I went back in September, I tutored international students and started studying in a master’s program. I don’t know why, but that autumn I started to have many anxious tendencies, or if I’d had them before, they escalated to have a more profound presence in my life. I still didn’t have a proper bed, so that might have contributed to my anxiety and general level of functioning. I remember sending messages to my friends in panic about whether my furniture had scraped the floor of the apartment. It became second nature for me to be always worrying about an issue that had no real solution. Thinking back now, it wasn’t anything as serious as OCD for example is for many people. However, it was exhausting, and as I’d find out, masking a much deeper issue.
That autumn I met many amazing new friends that I still share my life with. With Covid slowing down, we would be able to go to cafés and offline classes sometimes. I was still academically quite lost, although I was doing alright on paper.
Back at that time I was slowly starting to realize how much I was depriving myself of, physically and emotionally. There were just so many things I couldn’t imagine myself doing or having. At the same time, I always thought that I was living a very privileged life. I think both can be true at the same time. Living as a young person in Finland in the 2020s can be full of things that my parents wouldn’t have imagined being able to do in their twenties. At the same time, one can be extremely riddled by anxiety and all of the things they’re not doing but would like to do, perhaps because of the circumstances, perhaps because of the past.
At the back of my mind, I knew it was only a matter of time until I'd have to exit that cage I had built for myself. Otherwise I’d burst.