If someone had told me years ago that I’d be here, finishing up my bachelor’s studies, writing my thesis in English studies, after learning not only about history, languages, and society but of myself and life in general, I’d be surprised but relieved. I knew I wanted to do something with books, words, and people, but it was still a confusing time trying to decide what I should or could do after high school. Trying to decide if I was going to try to do something my heart pulled me towards, even though there was no encouragement in my immediate environment.
Many thanks I owe to the Finnish school system that made it possible to keep studying despite coming from a low-income family.
I’ve always loved school. But there have been times where being at school has been difficult. I feel like middle school and high school were more or less difficult for everyone; it is a time of figuring out who you are and what you like to do, but the distractions or obstacles can be, well, profound. However, waking up in the morning before the sunrise (in Finland during winter time), gathering my things, and going to meet friends has always been something celebratory, and great problems have appeared when I have learned to suppress that excitement. Which brings me to what school, for me, is all about.
Depression and other issues around mental health are prevalent, and the reasons are deep and complex. One of them seems to be the errors in a culture that should strive to understand people instead of controlling them. Somewhere down the road, we stop playing, communicating, and understanding who we are. We may stop believing in ourselves and listening to our emotions, the “good” and the “bad”. With many people, smaller or greater trauma has occurred, which can make it feel impossible to stop and have compassion for oneself. The truth is that human life is messy, the feelings go up and they come down in buckets, and when we feel like we don’t see that going on in everyone else’s life, we may feel lower than the ground, like a lone failure.
I entered university at 19, and I’m 23 now. Even after deciding on a field and finally getting in, the path was nowhere near clear or set. During these years, there have been crises, doubt, sorrow, fear, excitement, confusion, grief, horror, joy, relief and awakening. Everything that a human could feel, and it is almost every time in those moments I feel like I’m alone with it, and that it is going to compromise everything I love and have learned. However, the support from friends and family and all the support and inspiration found on the internet, in film, literature, or just by going out in the world, has been what makes the processing and acceptance easier. Furthermore, the ability to go to school and talk about everything that warms my heart and forces my curiosity out of its culturally determined place (a box that is stagnant, goal-focused, calculative), can, again and again, mend those alienating feelings. When I see people with a purpose, I remember my own.
Now I know that even if I don’t know where I’m heading exactly, I see where my beliefs lie and what in this world is worth fighting for. I hope to work with other people, for all creatures on the planet, for a sustainable and peaceful future. Every day I wish we could work towards a deeper understanding of each other and of the world we live in, so life could be as safe and joyful as possible. School should be a place that has the ability to inspire and give the students positive influence, and most importantly, offer information about everything they are curious about as well as about everything they know nothing about yet. Thus, it became clear to me early on, in those classrooms where I discovered the joy of reading, listening to others, and gaping at pictures from other countries, that it was possible to understand and always thrive to understand lives outside of my own. I hope that every person in the world could go to school or take part in another community that wpuld be a place that’s good-hearted, especially in times where the rest of the world feels like it isn’t.
However, there are moments when the world comes together in celebration of justice, freedom, and equality, like the news from the US last weekend demonstrated. It brings hope and the much-needed strength to keep going and standing up for all that is good in this world.