It’s Sunday evening. I’ve had a nice weekend, really, I have – but still. The frustration. My arms and shoulders are aching and I keep going over scenarios in my head. What I would say if. What I should do to.

I went bouldering on Friday, for the first time in my life, it was a spontaneous thing, I ran into Lina at university and she was going with a couple of her classmates and I turned out to not suck at it. With any kind of sports activity, that’s usually what I do. Suck, I mean. But, I think, being an ex-rider and show jumper, with a weakness for the young, wild and slightly crazy horses, has left me kind of fearless for heights and speed. It’s the same with my downhill skiing – I’m crap, but god do I go fast. It was fun, the bouldering. I think I will go again.

And yesterday, Frida had her birthday party and I danced with her and Cecilia and Isak and Axel and Jocke until three in the morning. How did I ever manage to get so many great friends.

But here I am, Sunday evening, with a slight headache and sore forearm muscles, waiting for something to happen. Not like I could expect anything to happen. I haven’t put anything in motion. Things don’t just happen.

I’m listening to Mozart’s piano concertos and reading my old poems. I used to be such a teenager. And in many ways, I still am.

I’m listening to Chet Baker and feeling weepy. Not that I’m sad. The world outside my window is just so foggy, like a 19th century painting and trumpet solos are just so much more melancholy than what a Sunday evening can take. 

I have an economics exam on Tuesday, but all I want to do is get lost. What a weird post this ended up becoming.

I used to take a lot of photographs. Once upon a time, I even thought I would become a photographer. Then I didn’t get in to the photography school I wanted to go to and I went to Bolivia instead and fell into geography. Since then, my photographic outings have become more and more rare. Now, except for when I’m traveling, I almost don’t take any photos at all.

Not even in social situations. Before, I was always the one with the camera, but now everyone has a smartphone and everyone wants to photograph all the same things and it becomes just so tedious. For everyone involved. So I don’t bring my camera along anymore. Despite the fact that the quality of a photograph taken with an SLR is just so much better than one taken with a phone. I don’t take photos anymore. It feels sad.

Maybe going out in search of photographs could help me get out of this frustration hole I’m in right now. Maybe I should dust off my old Canon EOS 400D. We’ve been through so much together, after all.

The house where my cousin Jonatan lived for a while last fall.

 

While lying in the dentist’s chair, with my mouth crammed full with hooks and mirrors and saliva suckers, watching the snow falling outside the window, I had the weirdest realization. I actually enjoyed this. Getting my teeth checked up, having someone poking around in my mouth, making my gums bleed. And to think that there are people who have so serious dentist fobia that they actually have to get anaesthesia in order to let someone work on their teeth. And here I was, enjoying myself!

I have a 1000 word paper due in three hours, and at the moment, I’ve only written ten. And it isn’t even that I don’t know what to write, I know exactly what to write, I have extensive notes – it’s just. So hard. To find the words. Concentrate. When –

The sun is shining in through my window. I ate breakfast to candle light while the snow was falling heavily outside, the world slowly getting lighter. Both ground and sky.

Now the preschool children are playing in the snow outside and for some reason, writing a report on management for resilience of the Näätämö river in northern Finland doesn’t seem that pressing. Not when the sun is distracting me.

It’s like that poem by Bob Hansson, I’ll try to translate:

like the man who calls work, says

“can’t come today, the sun is shining…”

and their’s “Are You Out Of Your Mind,

are you only able to work if it rains?”

“no, that’s just the problem,

I like the rainy days

even more…”

Snowing always makes me feel like I’m in love. Forget spring feelings, I have snow feelings. And we all know how being in love makes concentration an incredibly hard thing to muster. The Näätämö river salmon will just have to accept that.

 

My great aunt Birgitta waving goodbye to her brother, my grandpa.

There’s snow outside my window. At last. Wind and fakes falling.

A birthday party with hats and dancing until three in the morning. Another birthday party with tequila shots and intense jenga games. A tea party overflowing with clotted cream and laughter. A family dinner with faraway travelers and wild cousin’s children.

And a Sunday morning dream, sincere and tender, leaving me with a feeling as if I was in love. Carried with me the whole day, like a tiny little crystal of secrets.

That was my weekend. Heartstopping, how life can be so full and filled with wonders.

Today, it’s the last day of Christmas. I don’t really feel done with the holiday, but hey, when are we ever? Tomorrow it’s school, diving right into a group assignment on a resilience assessment. Yey.

Another thing that I’ve been doing this Christmas, is to go through some of the old photos that we found in grandpa’s house. There were lots of them. My grandmother was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and she made beautiful scrapbooks with all of them – from before she got married, all the way to when she died. But those photo albums were not the main focus of my Christmas labors. My job was to go through the photos from before she got her own camera.

My grandpa’s grandpa was a merchant and built his own fortune in Sundsvall, but then my great grandpa lost it all in the Kreuger crash in the early 1930’s, and my grandpa had to make his own way and became a prosecutor eventually. However, before the great merchant, my ancestors on that side of the family had all been farmers and tradesmen and therefore not been able to afford to take that many portraits. Therefore, not many photographs to organize there.

Unlike from the other side of the family. Because, as I have learned this Christmas, my grandmother came from a family of lawyers and mayors, merchants and military officers. And they seemed to go get their own portraits after every important life event – there were boxes of them. Counted from me, up to seven generations back. We’re talking the early-/mid-1800’s.

(Don’t worry, I’m not solely some upper-middle class spawn. On my mother’s side, everyone were farmers or crofters or masons from the deep Finnish forests. I have some proper working class blood in me too.)

It was hypnotizing, sitting there, looking at all these faces, long gone and dead, no one alive anymore to remember what they were like. But still, having played such a vital role in my existence, me being able to sit here, looking at their portraits, wondering what they were like. Trying to see myself in them, somewhere, the eyes or maybe the corner of my mouth.

My great grandmother’s grandmother Augusta, my great grandmother Sonja, and me (age 18, taken by Sandra for photography class and developed manually by us in the darkroom). Is there a resemblance, or am I just imagining it?

They are beautiful, these photographs. Everyone wearing their absolute best, in perfect light, so sharp in their shades of grey. Or later on, when people started taking pictures themselves, with personal cameras, in the early 1900’s.

My great grandmother Sonja seems to have been a really dashing personality, being photographed among friends on sailing boats, on beaches and in sidecars to motorcycles. And then she married the navy officer, who during the second world war advanced all the way to colonel, and got three daughters, of which the oldest was my grandmother.

Sonja’s mother in law was also beautiful, in an other way, softer – and I’m sorry to say, I can’t find anything of her in me. But I think this photograph of her is incredible (even though the scan is awful). How the light touches her, and the furniture. Amazing.

In among all the photos, I also found a bunch of cards, you know, of the kind you give a new acquaintance or to inform someone that you’ve been to visit. Only, on these cards, they didn’t have any phone numbers or e-mail addresses. Only the name.

It so triggers my imagination. You know I’m a period drama buff, anything set in historic times and I’ll devour it – especially the 19th century I find intriguing. And here I am, with boxes of photos and cards almost like they were delivered to my by time machine.

I didn’t nearly get done with the sorting and not even started with the scanning, so this’ll be a project that will span over the spring and into summer, I think. I don’t mind. I like old things. And sorting them. And taking brakes to daydream about what the people on the photograph’s lives might have been like.

One of the hardest things about growing up, I think, is not realizing your strengths, but rather, realizing your weaknesses. And then, accepting them as part of you, not necessarily something in need to be gotten rid of.

As a teenage girl in Sweden in the early 2000’s, I was fed from all over by messages about believing in myself, allowing myself to think I was good, being secure and independent. And I guess this is good, that we get to hear it from so many places, because many girls really have trouble trusting themselves. It can be hard, finding that confidence, especially in a world where the pressure on young women is so incredibly high.

However, for me, it wasn’t. Hard, I mean. I don’t know if it was because of me being an only child for the first 14 years of my life, or if I just happened to be surrounded by the best combination of family-teachers-parent’s friends growing up, but I have never doubted that I’m good at stuff. I’ve always been encouraged, and told that I’m going to succeed with whatever I choose to do with my life. Trouble is, this far, this is for the most part also true.

I’m afraid, though, that this constant encouragement and boosting and success has led to me having a very low tolerance for weakness. In others, to some extent, but most certainly in myself. I don’t really get happy if I succeed with something, because that was just expected, but if I fail, well, then the world falls apart. And because I can’t stand myself when I’m not at my A-Game, I have trouble believing that anyone else would stand me either.

When I’m not being witty or charming or intelligent or beautiful, when I don’t have the answers to all the questions, when I’m needy and craving attention. When I’m excited and talk too much or too fast or incoherently, or when I’m feeling insecure and am being cold and self-important or don’t talk at all. When I’m not cool and laid back, when I refer everything to myself, when I’m a know-it-all and can’t take being either right or wrong with grace. When I am stubborn or stingy. When I sing. When I’m lazy or tired and can’t even be bothered to be nice to people.

Why would anyone stand me then?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to change things that cause us trouble or in other ways are destructive to us, like addictions or alienating people in our lives. You should know that I’ve done my fair share of at least the second of those. But there are personality traits that aren’t necessarily bad in the long run. They just make us not perfect. Rather, they make us interesting. Or most of the time they at least don’t outweigh all the good parts that we have to offer, to the people that choose stay around.

I’m not saying that accepting your flaws in any way is a universal obstacle when children grow up. I’m sure there are lots of people that don’t mind at all, that they’re flawed, and they know they’re good people anyway, all things considered. I guess I’m only saying I’m having trouble with it, still. I’m a little bit too loud or I tell a bad joke or hold a monologue on misconceptions about climate change, and afterwards I think I’ve been insufferable and fear no-one will like me anymore. Not because I’m not good at what I’m good at, but because my flaws make me less than perfect.

All the incredible people that I’ve managed to collect over the years, all the very flawed, but still so amazingly awesome friends that I have, should be enough to convince me that all those flaws that I carry around, they aren’t really any flaws at all. They’re part of me, and the fact that my friends are my friends means that those less good parts are outweighed by all the other, great parts. And everyone is never going to love me, there are always people that are going to think I’m stiff or brag too much or have a weird sense of humor or am way too loud, but that’s OK. I’m going to have to accept that, as well as my own flaws.

I haven’t yet, though. I guess I’m not fully grown up yet.

I know that I’ve written about her before, I tend to compose at least one post while reading anything by her (and I’ve read quite a few books by her since I impulsively and almost by accident brought one home from the library in 2010) but I just can’t help myself. That playfulness, it’s extraordinary. And I like her adult books, they are suggestive and complex and beautiful – but her Fairyland series, god. I so wish I had an English-speaking child to give them to, or better yet, read them aloud for. I think it would be such an incredible experience, enhanced by the sharing.

As it is, I read them by myself, borrowed from the library as soon as they’ve been bought in, melting already at the first paragraph:

Once upon a time, a girl named September told a great number of lies.

The trouble with lies is that they love company. Once you tell a single lie, that lie gets terribly excited and calls all its friends to visit. Soon you find yourself making room for them in every corner, turning down beds and lighting lamps to make them comfortable, feeding them and tidying them and mending them when they start to wear thin. This is most especially true if you tell a very large lie, as September did. A good, solid, beefy lie is too heavy to stand on its own. It needs smaller, quicker, more complicated lies to hold it up.

Catherynne M. Valente, of course. From The girl who soared over Fairyland and cut the moon in two.