I’m so tired. I feel like I’m being pulled apart. All these things that I want to do. All these people that I want to meet. All the planning that I do. The last couple of days, weeks, I feel like I haven’t had time to breathe.

I’ve had people over for dinners and parties and couchsurfers and all this student council business.

I feel I would like for someone to take care of me for once.

I know I shouldn’t, though. Feel. I should ask. Let other people do. And I do have. People. Lina made me breakfast yesterday. Jessica told me on Saturday that I was weird and that it cracked her up and then she sent me a text that was too sweet to repeat.

On Saturday night, Lina and I took the couchsurfer out dancing, not really succeeding to give him a good taste of the Stockholm nightlife. The club turned out to be kind of off, but the last hours on the hip hop dance floor stuck. The base so deep it made the small hairs on my arms tingle. Almost as if someone was lightly, lightly touching. I noticed, and afterwards Lina confirmed that the men were circling us like sharks. I was there to dance, but that recognition. Rejection always feels less acute when there are other men around who show you they’re willing to take over.

Mostly sleep though. As a solution. And singing. I need this pressure to leave my body.

I woke up early this morning. The sun was shining in through my curtains and I couldn’t stay in bed. I went for a walk. Autumn can be so beautiful.

I have an exam tomorrow, on ecology, and all my classmates are freaking out on Facebook. But I just can’t seem to pick it up. The panic. I can’t even bother to study properly. Instead, Natalia came over and we made brunch and watched three episodes of True Blood. I (kind of) feel I know ecology well enough.

I’ve become such a slacker. I just can’t be bothered. There are so many other great things to do in life than remember things for an exam. Like autumn walks and Sunday brunches with good friends and Veronica Maggio’s new album and long meandering discussions about life with new classmates while teaching them to bake Swedish cinnamon buns.

That will probably show on my grades for this module too, unfortunately.

I’ve started a book club together with a couple of friends (yet another example of us having become older). I’ve chosen a book, and in a couple of weeks, I’m going to host the first meeting. Cook dinner, moderate the first book discussion. Time will tell if it’s going to be something lasting, or just a passing idea.

The first book for the book club is a Swedish novel called “Spill” by Sigrid Combüchen. It got the most prestigious Swedish literature prize a couple of years ago, and it’s been on my to-read list ever since. It’s mainly about these two women. An author and a very old lady who used to live in a house that is used as the home in one of the author’s novels. They correspond about life and the past through letters. In a passage where the old lady describes her daughter’s marriage, she writes (my translation):

Young women should not fall in love with beautiful men. They are and will stay most infatuated with themselves.

I’ve borrowed the book from the library, and the last sentence of the two above has been underlined with pencil and someone has written YES! in the margin.

And I think I must agree. I also have to admit that my weakness for beautiful men never has led me into anything constructive.

As a teenager, I blamed photography, that I liked beautiful faces because I wanted to photograph them. Now, I don’t know. I just get these obsessions, a face with the right proportions between nose, shin and cheekbones is hypnotic. I imagine them being incredible human beings as well.

Mostly, though, they disappoint me. They’re just as flawed and possibly even more self-possessed than the rest of us. I should have learned by now. I’m not that young anymore.

Dear reader. Except for alcohol (which I seem to have a pretty high tolerance level for), my body is very sensitive to any kind of intoxicating substances that people in general seem to be able to consume without any major consequences. Drinking black tea sometimes makes my hands shake. Once, I couldn’t sleep after eating 50 grams of 70 percent chocolate. Coffee simply gives me a temporary personality change.

I know this, and still I sometimes act against my better judgement. Today, I must have been woken up at a particularly bad time in my sleeping cycle, because I never felt fully awake – and once my student council related meeting with professors and other important people started after lunch, it became almost impossible for me to stay awake. It’s not that the meeting was boring, I just kept on having to close my eyes. So, during brake half way through, after two hours of massaging my temples and eyes and pulling at my hair, I poured half a cup of coffee into a mug, filled the rest up with milk and drank it all. The rest of the meeting, I was all ears, making notes, feeling smart and important.

I really like the taste of coffee. It’s just, I can’t handle it. After the meeting ended at five, I found a table, ate some leftovers from my lunch box and started reading articles on biodiversity. Answering e-mails. Searching on the Stockholm Resilience Centre website for researchers doing interesting research, that is, potential supervisors for my master’s thesis. Things just kept on popping up in my head and I couldn’t stop doing them. When people I know walked by, I talked fast and probably incoherently and most of them simply didn’t get the chance to reply. It’s fun, this fast flow of words and ideas, but it is not sustainable. I didn’t leave the university until after nine, and then it wasn’t because I was tired, but because I knew I would need to go to sleep eventually.

I’m just afraid I won’t be able to. I still feel like a Duracel bunny hitting the cymbals together in super-speed. My body is tired, but my brain can’t stop thinking. Seven hours after I drank that half a cup of coffee.

I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight, which means I will be tired tomorrow, which will make me feel I have to drink coffee tomorrow too, which will make me unable to sleep again, and on it goes in a viscous cycle until I can make myself just be tired for one day. Ah, the troubles of being alive.

I spent the weekend in the Stockholm archipelago, eating crayfish at Jens’ family cottage.

It’s been a long time since I was in the archipelago. I had forgotten how clean and soft the air smells there in autumn.

 

The idea was to have a traditional crayfish party. And I think we succeeded, with the crayfish and the bread and the schnapps and weird hats, even though people didn’t get very drunk and the conversation mostly revolved around things like gender roles and internet habits and how our taste in music might or might not change as we get older, with Swedish jazz playing in the background.

    

When all the crayfish were eaten, we moved into the living room, and while some of us started roasting marshmallows in the open fire, Puccini’s heroines were singing out their heartache in the background.

Roasting marshmallows and listening to opera. We’ve certainly become older, even though we might not really want to admit that to ourselves yet.

The results of my first ever croquis workshop:

 

Who would have thought sketching a live, naked model for 0,5-2 minutes per pose would be such a rush. I’m hooked!

I went to aerobics class tonight. While buying the membership card, I realised I haven’t been to an aerobics class since January 2012. I’ve been traveling, and I tried running for a while, and then came that terrible thesis that completely pulled me apart.

But now I was back there, jumping around with all the middle-aged women. Sweaty and exhausted, breathing heavily. And still, I rarely feel as sexy as when I’m doing aerobics. It’s the hormones, I guess, physical activity and the happy chemicals in the brain. I feel strong and even though I’m in no way a musical genius, I do have the ability to move to the beat of the generic pop music (which is more than can be said to quite a few of the other exercisers). In that crowd, with the blood rushing in my ears, I feel beautiful.

Unfortunately, the few men at the class were just as middle-aged and out of shape as the women. The only bad thing about going to a gym in Skarpnäck. No-one to pull me down from this illusion of my own irresistibility.

Afterwards, I baked a chocolate cake for the master’s program potluck tomorrow, and left far too much batter unbaked to have as dessert. I feel heavy and drowsy. Totally worth it, though. Totally worth it.

I have a new classmate. Her name is Jessica. (To be honest, I have 18 new classmates, but for this particular story Jessica is the only one who matters.) She’s loud and intense. And when I come to a lecture feeling grumpy and not in the mood to joke, she draws small sketches of me in her notebook.

And to practice her Swedish (she’s from Belgium), she composes small poems about me on post-its that end up on chairs in the SRC lobby.

Maybe not a masterpiece, but doesn’t it just make your heart melt? I think I’ll make it through the coming long winter too, having to spend almost every day with Jessica and the others.

I’m so exhausted. I hosted a dinner yesterday, and there are wine glasses and bread crumbs all over the apartment, but I couldn’t motivate myself to clean them away. Instead, I felt like staying in bed. So that’s what I did. Sleeping, watching old Swedish TV shows from the Swedish Television’s open archive. Eating leftover salad, bread and brie.

My new classmates are going out dancing tonight, but I just can’t get myself to step into the shower. I don’t understand where all this exhaustion comes from. I feel empty.

I’ve recently started a master’s program at Stockholm Resilience Centre, and it’s been quite a shock. I walk around feeling exhausted all the time and kind of lost, like I don’t know where I’m going and what I’m doing. Like I’m holding on to a string, being pulled in high speed toward something, but I’ve got no idea where. Maybe it’s the whole thing about starting a new master’s program, meeting all the new people, having to adjust to new ways of learning, different expectations.

Or it might be this whole resilience thing, and all our lectures about the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries and how we’re more or less screwed, in general, as a species, in the world, more or less. Of course that’s not what our teachers are saying, they are not that fatalistic, but it kind of feels that way.

It’s probably a combination of both. I find myself feeling annoyed by people. Not because they are annoying, but because I need to talk to them, and I have nothing to say. Create a common language. The study load is heavy, and all the others in the program are so ambitious and on top of things. And then this what’s-the-point-feeling rushes over me and I have no idea of what to do with all this knowledge.

I’ve read a book, though. And right in the beginning of it, there is a passage that makes things, if not clear, then atleast clearer. A sort of explanation for what resilience is, and an outlook that I hope to acquire during the two years of my master’s.

Resilience thinking is a way of looking at the world. It’s about seeing systems, linkages, thresholds, and cycles in the things that are important to us and in the things that drive them. It’s about understanding and embracing change, as opposed to striving for constancy.

(Walker & Salt 2006: “Resilience thinking”)

That, I like. So maybe there is hope for me yet.