People speak English (though not all the time).
Most of the girls are pretty and some of the guys are too.
There are Sulo bins.
It’s not very big
You meet people who know people you know all the time.
You see people you know all the time.

The last two similarities are the freaky ones.

Yesterday I was catching the train back from Kirkonummi where I’d been visiting Salla’s parents’ place and I happened to start talking to this young guy about Australian wine and Finnish public transport. After finding out that almost all blogs in Finland are about knitting or taxi drivers’ anecdotes, we started talking about what type of education we’d had. So it turns out that he, like Salla, went to a theatre based high school in Helsinki. Anyway, Juho (who commented the other day) sends me an email today and yes it does turn out that he knows one of the 3 other people in Helsinki that I’m friends with.

Freaky.

But things got even weirder today. I was hanging out at work just before the Italy – Australia World Cup match was about to be shown on the big screen. And I looked across the bar and there was this really familiar guy talking on a mobile. It looked like someone I knew, but I couldn’t be sure. And I kept on looking and looking.

And it was Rich, one of my old bosses from Ratbag.

Very, very freaky. But so very nice to randomly hang out with someone I know from 15,000 kilometers away.

by .

When invited to a Midsummer Party I neglected to find out which day of the week it was. I presumed that as there was an entire weekend devoted to the longest day of the year, Saturday would be the night of the Juhannus Party.

So, today being Friday I organised to go to the bar and help them clean up the construction before the opening on Monday. Only to find out that Salla’s party is tonight. D’oh. At least there’s going to be a barbecue (with Coopers) and a chance to hang out with my new workmates.

Anyway, tomorrow is the Midsummer, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and the shortest day in the South. That means that in Australia, you can stop feeling so cold, as the days are going to start getting a little bit longer.

In folk magic, still well known but no longer seriously practiced, midsummer was a very potent night and the time for many small rituals, mostly for young maidens seeking suitors.
Wikipedia

Well, I’m not actively seeking suitors as I’m still hopeful about a boy riding around Germany on a monster. But I am actively seeking happiness and an opportunity to forget about the negative things that are holding me back.

So I’m marking my own Midsummer ritual and I’m going to write down all the experiences that I regret, the things which make me scared, the excuses which I keep on turning to. And then I’m going to burn them. Those feelings won’t hold me back anymore.

Then tomorrow I’m going to write down a list of the qualities that I want from life and a list of the people and activities and experiences that make happy. I’m not burning that, I’m going to keep it. I’m also going to write a letter using futureme.org describing how I want to be in a year’s time.

And you know what, I am going to be that happy, capable, stress-free, beautiful person that I want to be.

[I've every belief that Midwinter would be just as good a time to have your own ritual in Australia. So if you do have a symbolic burning or something, please let me know how it went.]

• The Sun
• New friends who make up for the fact that old friends aren’t here too.
• Helsinki’s not Adelaide
• Helsinki is more like Melbourne
• Almost everyone wears bikinis no matter what their body shape, so I had no excuse to not buy one.
• Most people speak English.
• Finnish sounds cool even though I can’t say anything useful yet.
• When the berry season is here you can go into the forest and pick and eat as many raspberries, lingonberries, strawberries, blueberries and blackcurrants as you can find and eat with out getting sick.
• Green plants everywhere
• The drying cupboards which hang over the kitchen sink.
• Recycling.
• Moomins
• Bicycles

They started gathering bones together along the shore.

Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and everyone of them has its own structure.
, Tove Jansson

Somehow, everything that I’m looking for is coming to me.

Sunshine and gardens and green and flowers. Friends in the same country and my best friend on the same continent. I have a room to stay in for the next month and a potential room to rent for July and August.

And three days after I started actively looking for work, I managed to get myself a job. Which in a country with 15% unemployment and a population of job seekers who speak both Finnish and English, is pretty much a miracle.

Thank the fates for a bunch of Kiwi and Aussie guys opening up a new Aussie Bar in the middle of Helsinki. Thank them especially for the offer of a job as a blocker (translation: glassy) based on conversation and confidence alone.

Computer games programming at Ratbag may not have been my ideal occupation, but luckily it gave me an awful lot of experience at hanging out with boys and talking back cheekily. I think that this job is going to be fun.

In fact, this job, this summer, this life is going to be chilled and fun.

That boy happens to be blogging at The Kevin Bacon Experiment.

Go give him a virtual hug. He needs one just as much as I do.

It’s been a very strange and difficult week. Actually it’s been a difficult month, and if I look back, I would say that ever since November, when I had a breakdown because of work and then work majorly broke down, things have not really settled down.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have left Australia when I did. The time between the Ratbag closure and leaving Australia was a blur of driving across the country, good intentions, telemarketing and packing. Just at the time when I really needed to calm down, save money slowly and do things that would make me happy, both at home and while working. I mentioned it, but to have acted on that would have meant not starting to travel at the same time as Dan. I’d have envied his travel and missed him. I was scared of losing him if we both did our own thing for a while. I was scared to do anything.

It’s amusing to see how things have worked out. I’ve lost him because I haven’t been doing my own thing! Despite the ache in my bones from missing Dan, it really is quite funny. All along I’ve been needing to make this space for myself and I didn’t pay attention to the signs. I can’t beat myself up about it, it’s in the past, but I can smile to myself and learn.

So often I’ve written on Battlecat what I intend to do (I’m going to make this, study this, go here). Then either I convince myself to not do what I need or I really am too busy. Ultimately I end up beating myself up about what I didn’t do, especially because I’ve written the intention down in such a public arena. When I next want to do something I tell myself – Oh, you didn’t do thing X last time – what makes you think you’ll get this thing even started? It’s a bad pattern.

I can’t say anything about how I’ll feel tomorrow, but today I want to write about things I already have done, some things that I’m proud of.

A List Of Things That I’m Proud Of

I have worked for a company that I dreamed of working for. It didn’t work out, it wasn’t right for me, but you know what? I got that job and I kept the job – I was doing something right, even if some days it was just smiling and talking to people and making them smile back. I made good friends who are now scattered around Australia and the world. I had a lot of fun.

After losing Ratbag (the community and the job) and feeling relieved and guilty and overwhelmed at the same time, I got a job doing telemarketing. It wasn’t a particularly cool job, but the people I worked with were friendly. Sure, I had to sell lottery tickets over the phone, but on two or three occasions I made very strong connections with the people I were speaking with – they shared stories about their lives with me. I really appreciate that. I earned money to live on and realised that I could do something apart from what I’d been trained to do, and I did it well.

I have some awesome ideas. Even if I don’t implement them, they are still good ideas.

There are times, even when it feels like my world is falling apart, that I can still make a joke. And sometimes, the jokes are very funny.

I made the Rock, Paper, Scissors badges and my zine Duck, Duck, Goose.

Applying for work is hard enough, but doing that in a strange country where there’s 15% unemployment is overwhelming. Yesterday I did something that scares me to bits, and I started asking around Helsinki for some work.

I have been honest with Dan. Hopeful but not expectant. I have embraced this opportunity to look after myself. It would be so easy to run and hide.

I’m making new friends. As with all my other dear friends, they like me for who I am.

I can touch type. Even when I’m crying.

I’m not crying right now. I’m smiling.

I dyed my hair a colour other than red. And I’ve been waiting to do that for about 8 years! And guess what? It looks good.

by .

It’s so hard to admit weakness. To admit that something that you’ve tried to do has failed. Especially when that something was the relationship you had with the most awesome person you know, your soul mate and best friend.

Because I’m not happy, because I’m unsure of what to do with my life, because when I think about trying to do something I talk myself out of it, just because of all this and more I’ve realised I’m not truly myself yet. That’s frustrated me. There are moments, days, weeks even, when all of the insecurities disappear and I am happy and confident and attempting to do things I want to do. Then that happiness gets covered up by all of the insecurities and bad experiences again. Confusingly for Dan, he fell in love with me at one of those high points, and has been so confused and frustrated when the rest of the time I’m a different person.

When I’ve been at my worst Dan has been there right next to me and he’s held me and tried to help me to break free of everything which binds me up inside. I’ve pushed him away and only called him closer when I’ve needed him again. It hasn’t been his job to fix me up, but he’s tried and it hasn’t worked. The only one who can make me do the things I want is me.

It’s that simple and that scary.

All along I’ve wanted to write about this on Battlecat but I felt scared to. That people would think that I was hopeless. Really, why would anyone who gets to travel the world feel so sad, surely she’s already living the dream? So I didn’t write what I really wanted to, even when writing that down would have helped so much, been a form of therapy in itself, maybe prevented Dan and I from falling apart. Unsurprisingly, the post about biting the Chinese man on the Great Wall, my last real post, pretty much marks the week in which everything began to get really bad. Already I was not able to work things through logically, so I ended up biting a person because I didn’t know what else to do.

Dan is being so sweet, and proves again and again why I love him. He’s trying to help me as much as he can. Even now. Though it hurts to know that I’m not going to be with him. I’m forcing the maybes and what ifs and when I’m better, maybe we cans out of my head. What I really want (but am not sure about yet) and what Dan wants are very likely not going to match up. He wants to spend more time travelling and I think that the things I want to do aren’t that portable. I’ve tried following him when it hasn’t been right for me, I’ve resented him and things have fallen apart in a most terrible way. If he hadn’t travelled and we’d stayed in Adelaide, he would have resented me for preventing him from doing what he wanted.

This situation is a horrible catch-22 . Dan and I can only be together if I’m happy. But I can’t be happy if I’m with Dan. Realistically I have to replace Dan with “A Someone”. Though the thought of anyone else turns my stomach. It just doesn’t feel right to think of anyone but Dan as my lover.

It feels even worse than how I feel about my heart, to think that his heart is breaking because of this. I didn’t mean for this to happen.

It did happen though. On Wednesday, Dan is going to fly down to Germany to catch up with some friends who are going to the World Cup. After that he goes travelling where ever and however he pleases. He can hitchhike, skydive, sleep rough… whatever, I won’t be there to freak out. It’s what he needs and wants to do.

I think that I’m going to stay in Finland for a bit. I like it here. I feel at ease too. I’m making friends with some of the people we’ve stayed with and that is an awesome thing, to make new friends. Whether I get a job here or go off and teach English somewhere else (which seems to be the choice of the lost young Australian) I know that it would be unwise to return to Adelaide straight away. I’d feel disappointed about quitting and worse of all I’d return to a cold, dreary winter and my old patterns.

At the moment, things are just okay. I can survive. I want you all to know that things aren’t just going to be okay, they’re going to get better and then they’ll be good. I’m going to make you all so proud of me, but most importantly, I’m going to be proud of me.

In case you all were thinking that Battlecat isn’t getting updated because I am having so much fun that I’m too busy to write, well that ain’t the case. I get stressed far too quickly, I get bitchy or wall myself up in a silent glass castle and Dan is exhausted from trying to look after me. I could write about Russia and Mongolia, but it just might end up being a list of places and times I freaked out for no justifiable reason.

Being able to relax easily would make everything so much better.

I’m afraid of any challenge. Taking a risk, even meeting a new person makes me freeze up.

When the money runs out, which will happen sooner rather than later, I’m going to need to get a job. And that scares me so much.

I’m afraid to write. Not only on the blog but also in my journal which theoretically no one will read. What happens if it sucks?

I get caught up between the excitement of going to a new place, that thrill which comes when you step on to a bus or a train, and the fear that everything is going to be terrible the next place we go to.

I used to feel like I could conquer the world, but now I think too much about everything.

Now my mind feels somewhat constipated.

Feeling this way and travelling is not a good combination. But going home scares me more.

I really don’t know how to move forward.