“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

During my time, I have had a lot of answers to this question, each of them feeling as certain as the previous one. But most of those options I’ve had in mind for my future have had one common nominator – language.

I was around 10 years old when I knew I wanted to go to university to study Finnish and literature. As a fourth-grader, I had fallen in love with the subject years prior, and the more I learned about the grammar and vocabulary of my mother tongue, the more intrigued I became. So I just knew I had to go and find out the whole story, everything they didn’t teach you at school. I loved talking about boring things like punctuation rules with my father who was a professor of the Finnish language at our local university of applied sciences. I remember very distinctly several of these instances:

After school, I’d come back home to dad’s place. I was sitting at the dining table, doing my homework, excited for dad to come home. At 5pm, a key opens the door, and dad steps in. I greet him and wait for him to take off his shoes and coat.

“Have you eaten already?” he asked me. I nodded. “That’s good. I’ll make some coffee for myself then. Do you want some?” I nodded again, then said, “with milk”.

I asked dad about his day at work, he told me what kind of subjects he’d been teaching the students, the meetings he’d had with other teachers. I waited for him to ask about my school day. Sure, I could have talked about some other things too, but there was one really specific topic I wanted to ask dad about.

“So we had Finnish and literature today, and we talked about commas and how you’re supposed to use them when separating clauses from one another…”

As the years went by, I stopped having my coffee with milk at dad’s and switched to sugar only. I was a sixth-grader, then seventh, eighth, and ninth. Dad got a bit older, too. But our conversation topics didn’t. Among the plethora of things I’ve liked discussing with my father, Finnish and literature have been the most consistent ones. And it wasn’t just because dad was a Finnish professor; it was because he always knew so much more than me, and he found it interesting all the same, no matter how many times he had to go over the same grammar rules. He taught me so much, and in time, I got even more certain of what I thought had always been the eventual, correct path for me.

I wanted to become a Finnish and literature teacher.

⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅

In 2019, I enrolled into university for Finnish and literature. I started my studies right after graduating from lukio, excited to learn even more about the thing I had dedicated so much of my life to. As I progressed in my studies, I realized that even more than the language I loved literature. Literature has been present in my life just as much as language in general, and in university, literary studies started to interest me more than linguistics. So I switched my major to general literature, keeping Finnish as my biggest minor subject.

But uni was fucking rough. The workload with the subjects I had chosen was overwhelming: the amount of reading needed for a 4-credit book exam in entry-level general literature studies was over 20 000 pages. The constant assignments, long and well-thought-out essays for every single course along with the exams… It was too much for me, and my already extremely overloaded mind started to crack under the pressure. The trauma of my childhood, the worsening symptoms of PTSD, the depression I’ve been battling for years at the ripe age of 19, unstable relationships, new city, constant trauma triggers, unforgiving schedule…

I just couldn’t do it after one point.

But even after reaching that point, I made the mistake of continuing on, pushing through. In 2021, after the traumatic breakup, I moved to a shared apartment with my best friend and continued my uni studies, starting my third year. I passed all my classes, but the scores weren’t great. I was exhausted, burned out, and suicidal. The breakup had been the final push in my PTSD developing into BPD, and the symptoms had taken control of my life by winter 2022. But I still did not stop.

Because I really wanted it to work. I didn’t have anything else. This was everything I had ever wanted, ever worked toward. There was nothing else that could keep me afloat.

Then suddenly, there was an opportunity offered to all Finnish students: working as a part time Finnish teacher for refugees and immigrants, It was voluntary work, so no salary was granted. A requirement was a sufficient level of English fluency, enough for you to be able to teach in English. I took that opportunity.

Teaching Finnish as a second language was amazing, I enjoyed every bit of it! The students were lovely, super motivated to learn since they had enrolled on the course and payed for it too. My time working as a part-time teacher during my uni years was the best thing I ever experienced in that city. It was the final confirmation that I needed.

Until spring 2022 rolled around, and everything came to a screeching halt.

⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅∙∘☽༓☾∘∙•⋅⋅⋅•⋅⋅⊰⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅⋅•⋅

I suspended my uni studies after being hospitalized for the first time. After that, I started living with my dad and mom in my former hometown, the place I had been so eager to leave behind. My health continued to deteriorate, and I ended up on the long hospitalization period that summer. And the rest is how we got here.

During that summer, I realized that I had no other option but to leave everything behind. I couldn’t continue working on my degree, and the thought of going back to a school setting terrified me. This shift in focus was huge for me, equally as frightening as continuing on with what I had known to be my only path. But once you hit the breaking point where you have to make a choice of staying stagnant or keep moving forward in a direction unfamiliar to you, you have to pick the latter.

Now, since almost three years has passed since I started working on the project, I still feel that sense of longing for what I had planned for myself since I was 12 years old. Teaching gave me so much in that short period of time I was able to do it, that the grief of losing it is still very much present. This is a subject I have yet to even talk about with my medical team, and I know I have to go there at some point. But every time I even take a look at the books in my shelf, every time I think about getting my degree out, I start to waver.

Nothing is certain, nothing is stable. My sense of self is so irregular and unreliable that one single sentence a loved one says to me can send me into a deep spiral of questioning my own sense of judgment, my ability to see what’s good for me and what is not. And before long, I can find myself back in the hospital once again, asking the same questions I asked in summer of 2022.

“Who the fuck am I? I don’t know myself as a person at all, I don’t know what I want, what I’m supposed to do with my life. What the fuck is my future gonna look like? Do I even have one?”

I trust myself exactly one percent of the time. BPD makes it impossible for me to stand my ground with my decisions, because I am so easily swayed into the opposite direction, just because someone I look up to said something to me once. It is incredibly frustrating to live with the knowing that nothing I ever feel is right for me will ever be right for me if one single person says something that even slightly questions me and my judgment. Because at that very instant, the castle of glass I have built for myself cracks and breaks above me, slicing my skin open with its sharpened edges. And I’m bleeding again on the bathroom floor.

When you’ve grown up in the world of Academia, the prosperity of living a life of artistry is foreign, even if you have always been an artistic soul. Particularly to the people around you, the shift might seem too uncanny to believe. And I don’t blame them, I’m right there with them actually, even today. But what if this is what I feel like is truly good for me and my well-being? What if art is what allows me to breathe, allows me to keep moving, waking up every single morning now and in the future? What if art has literally become my lifeline, that I am unable to live without it, without creating?

I think in that case, it’s okay for me to close the Grammar of the Finnish language.

With (un)certainty,

ichigonya

Gone Would-Be Me

Life Update: Two Anniversaries