This isn't just an enby thing but...

It may be more pronounced to us nonbinary folks, although I'm sure anyone could relate to this. I've been thinking about my childhood fictional influences lately, because I've been writing a story where a character has to think about a lot of similar stuff. I've found mainly two things:

1. Only when I realized I was nonbinary did it finally make sense to me why some characters immediately feel like "my kin" even if I don't relate to their personality.

2. It irritates me a lot how throughout my childhood I was always automatically assumed to relate to only female characters.

It's not surprising, I know, and this isn't to say that anyone should have known better than to assume. I'm not writing this to make anyone feel bad or to claim anyone should understand anything they're not exposed to, or automatically know how to correct every assumption they've been taught to make since their own childhood. It's not anyone's responsibility to know what goes on in other people's heads.

But. That doesn't mean I don't get to be irritated about it. You get to be irritated about your broken leg, even if it wasn't someone's fault. So, in the same way, I get to be irritated that the world is what it is and was what it was.

Sometimes what you need to do is to put into words what you couldn't when you were a kid.

So, I'm gonna share some highlights of incidents that made me feel misunderstood through characters that made me feel understood.

The earliest example I can think of is Peter Pan. One of my earliest special interests. I watched the Disney movie so, so many times.

 

I will never forget this particularly embarrassing summer day when I was walking through some marketplace with my mom. I may have been five or six. We ran into one of my mom's friends, and I think I may have seen something Peter Pan related in the marketplace, I don't remember exactly how things led to it, but I remember what was said so well, because it stayed with me. Basically, my mom started telling this friend how "in love" with Peter Pan I was. And somehow, that felt completely humiliating and wrong to me. I couldn't put my finger on why, back then, but I do now.

*Sigh*

No, gross, I wasn't in love with Peter Pan. I wanted to be Peter Pan. I mean, come on? He's the only one who can fly without fairy dust? I was obsessed with flying. All I ever did in my lucid dreams at that age was fly until I felt tired even in a dream. I wanted to be the one to take other kids to adventures, not just a passenger. I also related to the feeling of not wanting to grow up for a long time, which should be kind of understandable from a nonbinary perspective.

But of course I was always dubbed as Wendy, any time I played Peter Pan with anyone. Because I looked the part, and I was the big sister in most contexts. I probably wouldn't still be so annoyed about it, if Wendy wasn't literally my least favourite female lead of any cartoon I can remember.

(I shipped Peter and Tinker Bell even as a little kid. :D I even had a whole elaborate headcanon when I was in middle school, where they were both reborn as humans and were childhood friends who had to rediscover their memories and redefine their relationship. Peter and Wendy just scream everything that can go wrong in straight relationships, and I disliked them since their very first interaction. No wonder my wife is more like Tink, but let's not go there...)

When I was nine, I saw Spirited Away and fell in love. (No, still not with a character.) It was the most magical and touching story I had ever seen.

 

Nothing new here, I was expected to want to be Chihiro. I like her story of course, her character development is great, and I like that she finds a way to sort of cheat the system and befriends the monsters.

But, it was Haku who caused this pang of familiarity in my chest that was such a rare treat. Not that I wanted to be him, but more like I just related. It may have been a little bit about personality, too. (Like being stubborn enough to sometimes go to self-destructive lengths to achieve something.) But a lot of it was because I perceived this character as androgynous, which I didn't realize then, but looking back it's obvious.

In my teens, I think I also connected with Haku because the way he's a helper to Chihiro for most of the movie, resembled what my role usually was in friendships at that age. Sometimes still is.

Then there's Mulan, my favourite Disney princess since always.

I was told by someone that I relate to her because she's a girl who wants to be a guy. And that... was such a gross misinterpretation of both Mulan's character and me.

I think Mulan is such an enby story. Of course, you don't have to interpret it that way, and I'm not saying that's what any of the creators meant, but from the eyes of someone who is nonbinary, that's totally how it reads.

She literally tries to be a woman and fails.

 

Then she literally tries to be a man and fails.

 

And then she ends up with something that seems neither but kind of both, and fucking blooms.

 

Because it's not like she completely failed at either.

Anyway, I just feel like Mulan is so authentic by the end and I love it. Again, you can relate to this no matter what gender you are and gender expression doesn't equal gender, etc. etc.

But this is still a very satisfying interpretation to me.

Not to say I have strong opinions of any of these characters actually being nonbinary, that isn't the point of this post at all. It's just to self-reflect and write about some assumptions that annoy me.

Good night.

Chronic

 

And I obviously failed my attempt to blog weekly. Last month I had an awesome weekend at Helsinki Book Fair, where my first novel was released, and on top of that I also had to help my mom pack, and send her to Saudi-Arabia, during the same weekend. After that, I pretty much crashed down, and any routine I had managed to build before that weekend fell apart as well.

So, I figured I'd write about why this happens to me.

I've always struggled with different degrees of burn out, fatigue and being overwhelmed because I'm autistic. It wasn't confirmed until this year, but obviously I've always been this way. That alone would be enough to make me tired after spending a weekend surrounded by masses of people, especially after social distancing for so long.

Unfortunately, there are co-morbidities.

These are also chronic and often linked conditions, but the symptoms can vary greatly throughout life. A lot of my fatigue has to do with how my heartbeat rises and my blood pressure drops abnormally when I stand up. It's called POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), and I was once tested for it by a nurse who didn't think I needed an official diagnosis. It's still not a very well known condition. Ever since I was about ten years old, this caused me to faint a lot, or my vision to black, sometimes for a long time. My worst symptoms with this have been in my early twenties (so far at least). Heat can also be a big problem with POTS, and at this point in my life it got so bad that I could rarely take a shower without blacking out: sometimes on the bathroom floor, sometimes I had time to throw on a bathrobe and stumble to my bed. Luckily, these symptoms have been a lot easier on me for the past few years! I think the last time I completely fainted was in 2018. Sometimes POTS gets less severe with age, so I hope I'm one of the lucky ones.

What has been getting worse during the past couple of years, however, are issues caused by my hypermobility. Currently, I'm diagnosed with a Hypermobility Syndrome, but it's likely that it's actually EDS, I just haven't been able to get to a doctor who would know enough about it to diagnose that one. I'm lucky that I've never had a full dislocation in any joint, but I have daily wrist subluxations that get in the way of drawing, writing and pretty much anything I'd like to do with my hands, and I have frequent rib subluxations, (Lol, I have one right now as I'm writing this) which are not very severe, they just hurt when I breathe deeply or cough, and sometimes I can't wear a bra. They go back in their own time. Other than that, I've only had very small and infrequent subluxations in other joints, such as my knees, ankles and shoulder area. Nothing I couldn't fix myself.

An example of hypermobility in the wrist. By the way, if you can do this, please don't do it, it's bad for you.

 

But, dislocations are often not the biggest problem in Hypermobile EDS, which is what I likely have. It's the pain, and the other stuff caused by the overexertion that hypermobility causes to your body. EDS causes differences in connective tissue, and my worst problems right now are foot and back issues. During the last couple of years, my feet have flattened so much that they've "grown" a full shoe size. Standing still is the absolute worst, and I used to cope with it by standing on the sides of my feet instead, which is obviously not good for my ankles. Usually I cook in a saddle chair now, because I can't stay on my feet for that long. Luckily, I can still walk and dance for a longer time than I can stand still. My back pain is also mainly caused by standing, sometimes sitting. I have mild protrusion and degeneration in my lower back, and Tarlov's cysts, which have not yet been proven to have a link with EDS, but it's suspected to. Obviously, I'm not a doctor, but it would make a lot of sense for there to be a connection in some cases, since I, for example have quite hypermobile knees, and that puts a huge amount of pressure on your lower back, so if the connective tissue in your back is also weak, it would make sense for you to have all of these back issues earlier than someone with no connective tissue disorder.

So yeah, this is not an exhaustive list of my issues or anything, but basically I have a lot of chronic pain and fatigue, and after a day at the book fair, I had to sleep through the next one. After that, I spent another day at the book fair, and helped my mom pack for the next one (it literally took an entire day). So, given that this weekend was also full of emotional stimuli and stress, it basically took me two weeks to really recover from it. This is a normal life for someone with a disability. You crash down, recover slowly, and just when you start to think you're doing okay, sometimes even fool yourself that maybe you're not that disabled after all, something comes your way and makes you crash down again, and then you repeat the process.

Not to sound doom and gloom. :D I just decided to write about these issues now, because I have a habit of only talking about the good things in life. I'm realizing it's partially due to the fact that invisible disabilities are often not recognized or taken seriously, which has led me to develop a coping mechanism of always pretending to be "normal", always pretending to be fine, no matter how much pain I'm actually in. Sort of like a wounded animal trying to hide its injury, because showing weakness makes everything worse: predators might pick you as the target, and your own kind might decide it's best to leave you behind, so you don't hinder anyone else.

Being able to pretend is a kind of privilege, but it's also not, because when you develop a coping mechanism early in life, you don't really know what you're doing, and you don't yet know the problems that this coping mechanism will cause you later in life. You don't yet know, that it will make your condition worse in the long run. I'm 28 and this is something I've learned only recently.

Aesthetics

 

I used to be self-conscious about the fact that I have a very visual imagination and that I need an aesthetic that appeals to me, to be able to really get immersed into a piece of media. If I don't like the drawing style of a comic, I can't read it, no matter how amazing the story is supposed to be. If the setting of a book makes me feel and see nothing but grey, I find myself skimming through it. Only movies that allow me to notice tiny aesthetically appealing details, such as the way a strand of someone's hair curls or the way a flicker of light is reflecting on the surface of the river, are completely immersive for me.

For the longest time, I felt like this wasn't something I was allowed to focus on or need. Even though some media is largely visual, the pressure to not care about what things look like is huge sometimes, as if liking a certain aesthetic means you're vain or that you would automatically judge people by looks in real life. This type of thing is really easy to say if you're not very visual, or you happen to like a more grotesque aesthetic, because no one will think you're vain for liking something "ugly". Actually people seem more likely to think that the deepest stories lie behind an aesthetic that would be considered traditionally unappealing.

And it's easy to say if you're neurotypical.

After discovering that I'm autistic, many issues in my life have made more sense, and so does this one. My brain type explains why my aesthetic includes so many things that a lot of neurotypical people would consider "kitsch" and thus boring or vain. For me they communicate different things, because my brain responds to them enthusiastically.

Glitter and softly flickering lights stimulate my brain in exactly the right way. Looking at them is essentially stimming for me. So are characters with big emotive eyes where you can count the eyelashes and the pen strokes, and clothes with a lot of tiny details in them such as pearls or lace with a consistent pattern, and the contrast between dark woods and a starlit sky and how each branch of the trees contributes to the whole picture. These types of things make me feel absolutely delighted.

Basically, it's very hard to get into a story, or anything, when you're understimulated. And for me the visual aspect is very important, and it's not because I want real people to look like fairies or something. (Obviously no complaints if they do.) The things that my brain needs from visual media say absolutely nothing about how I treat real people. The fact that I have a hard time reading a book with an unappealing font or a cover that ruins the visual experience of the world or the characters for me, doesn't make me a bad reader.

This is not about "not vibing" with something. This is about some media actually being inaccessible to me, and other people with different neurotypes, in a way that is just as real as someone being forced to read in a foreign language. Yeah, you might understand a word here and there, but overall you wouldn't be able to comprehend what you're reading.

My brain is just a little bit particular and a little bit more detail-oriented than average.

I don't ever again want to think that movies like Red Riding Hood or Crimson Peak are a "guilty pleasure" for me. There's nothing cheap about their aesthetic. There's nothing to feel guilty about in liking a movie that has an aesthetic and the level of detail that makes me so immersed that I forget the rest of the world exists.

I got married

It's been a while, and I don't really want my blog to turn into something I only remember exists after a big life event. And only after two months have passed. But oh well. The summer is too hot, and I'm tired, and I should be editing my book, so it only makes sense that I'm here, posting my wedding pictures.

We were going to wait after covid was done, but who knows when that will be, right? So we got married in April. We never wanted a big party anyway, because we're just not party people. It was great not having to worry about anyone else but ourselves.

We had a friend take pictures, which turned out pretty good! A relief, because we really didn't have money to pay for a professional photographer.

We took pictures outside the magistrate, and the simple grey wall turned out to be a surprisingly nice background.

We had planned to go eat in our favourite restaurant where we had booked a private room, but all restaurants were closed again literally a day before. So we just ordered sushi instead.

Rita had her hair and make up done and I did mine at home.

It was a fun day. I can't even imagine how people who actually have a wedding party manage to also enjoy the day because we were SO tired even though we did practically nothing. :'D

 

We stayed the night in Linnunlahti camping area. They have these little houses we've always admired, and one night was surprisingly affordable.

Next morning, we picked up our favourite cake from café Houkutus. It's a vegan chocolate cake, and I've never had cake this good anywhere.

It's weird how happy and relieved you can feel about having got "getting married out of the way". xD Maybe it's because pandemic is so stressful. Throwing a party literally would've felt like a chore.

Who knew what a ballet skirt could do

After training at home one day I started playing with my wrap skirt, and quickly got a little obssessed with how many things I could do with it that I had never thought of before. Ballet classes usually have a uniform or at least some guidelines for how to dress, and even though my school doesn't have a uniform, most people still wear pretty much the same colours and styles every day. But at home, you can do whatever you like, right? So, I figured this might certainly spice up training alone at home!

Most of these styles I came up with, I could actually dance in and they would not fall off or get in the way. (All except the last off-shoulder.)

The pictures are crappy because I was just taking them for my own amusement, and so that I would remember these styles. I didn't think I would share them, so I didn't put any effort into it... But then I thought this would actually be pretty fun to share. I gave them cheesy names.

That's it! I hope you had a portion of how much fun I had while doing this. xD

A Corona Post

Maybe this will be interesting for me to read in later years.

The negatives:

• My ballet school closed a couple of weeks ago, which happened pretty fast in the end. Well, I guess everything has been happening fast, but I mean, we were talking with our teacher probably two days earlier that we wouldn't be closing in the foreseeable future. There were no confirmed cases of corona in our area yet at the time and I guess no one really understood how fast it spreads. But things changed in a couple of days and all schools closed their doors. Competitions and our spring show are also cancelled, obviously.
• I'm out of work for the time being. I only started working in a sushi restaurant a couple of months ago and now it's closed as well. It's a new restaurant, so I don't know if it will survive and whether I will have work at all anymore, so I suppose I have to start looking for a new one, which is a shame because I really liked that job but I can't just rely on it being there after this crisis is over. The problem, of course, is that if the job market around here was bad before...
• I had to move in the middle of this crisis, last weekend. Moving is stressful to begin with, so this move was definitely the hardest one for me yet. Me or my girlfriend don't drive and neither do most of our local friends, so we had a friend come over from quite a distance away to drive a van for us, and I was just waiting for the government to ban travelling altogether, but luckily it only started happening today, four days after our move. For now it's only in certain areas though. It was also the first time that I was physically the strongest person so I carried all the heavy stuff myself or with our friend. (Until now I've always had my dad for help!) The day after I was so tired I couldn't do anything but watch Gilmore Girls for almost the entire day.

These were probably the most significant things so far, but I'm sure the situation will get worse. Obviously, just like everyone, I've had to cancel all plans that involve getting outside of my house but right now things could still be a lot worse. In my area we can still go to the store and visit friends even if most places are closed, and there's a lot of space in my city to move in nature and it isn't heavily populated so avoiding people isn't very difficult.

The positives: (Yes, there are positives)

• Some people are awesome. A local law firm decided to buy tickets for cancelled events in the spring season from three local culture and sports organizations since they lost practically all ticket income because of corona. The three they chose were the city orchestra, Kataja Basket Club and our ballet school Relevé. My teacher, the owner, was besides herself. She thought it was a prank at first. The law firm challenged other organizations that aren't so affected by corona to support those who are.
• I have all the time I want in my hands right now and don't have to feel guilty about wanting to spend it home. A feeling shared by all introverts. Even if the loss of work means I'm poor again it is far easier to be poor when you've got nowhere expensive to go anyway. I'm going to enjoy getting my new home in order and I'll be working on my comics and writing.
• Since my new home is finally big enough for a ballet barre I figured I needed to get one right away since I would be training at home. The move was a perfect timing actually, because it would've been nearly impossible for me to do ballet in my old home but here it works out! I asked if my ballet teacher's husband could make a barre for me since he's quite handy and now he's making them for everyone, which is very cool of him!

I'm sure I'm yet to discover a lot of negative and positive things I'll face in the near future, but this is what I've been thinking about these days. I don't want to waste a good crisis, so we'll see what the future holds.

Aand this has nothing to do with corona but I'm besides myself because I finally have ground under my feet instead of a balcony when I step out of the living room door. It's tiny but I'm so happy!

30 Day Challenge: Best trip of your life (How I met my girlfriend)

In my second year of high school I got a chance to go to Japan for a short (three weeks) student exchange. The possibility to go to Japan was one of the two reasons for my high school choice. (The other reason was the music program.) Every year, two people were chosen for this short exchange in an all-girl high school in Osaka. I still kind of find it hard to believe I was picked. Luck was on my side, and the choice was mostly based on written applications. I tend to be much more convincing on paper than in person.

And that's how I met my girlfriend, Rita. It's been, what, almost ten years now.

It's kind of baffling to think that we probably never would've talked if we hadn't been the two people chosen for this trip. I knew of her, but I'm pretty bad at making friends spontaneously, and I wouldn't have had a reason to talk to her without this. According to me the first time we met was at the info for the Japan exchange, before we applied. We happened to sit close by and I started talking to her and we talked almost the entire half an hour about anime and Japanese culture. But it kind of doesn't count because afterwards she had no memory of talking to me. So, if we hadn't been chosen together we most likely never would've talked again.

She counts that the first time we met was after being chosen. I still remember that well too. I saw her friends circling her and congratulating her at school, in the lobby, just when I was getting a hot chocolate from the coffee machine. I knew those reactions couldn't be about anything else than the Japan exchange, since the e-mail about the choices was supposed to come that day. I hadn't had a chance to check my e-mail yet (Oh, the time before smartphones...), so I went to ask her who else was chosen. She tilted her head and looked at me with a ”Do I know you?” -look. Since then that expression has become all too familiar to me. Whenever she's caught off guard and doesn't get what's going on she has this same expression: Her whole face is a big frown and her mouth hangs open. But it seemed obvious even then that her brain was processing, so I waited. Then she concluded that the other name mentioned in the e-mail couldn't be anyone else's, and she pointed her finger at me.

I managed to find a picture from Japan where she has almost that exact expression except the frown is not as strong in this one.

She tells me I was funny, because I kind of tried to do a very slow pirouette to celebrate, without spilling my hot chocolate. And later she got kind of embarrassed about pointing at me, thinking it must have looked rude, but, excuse me, who cares, I'd just heard that we were going to Japan! One of my high school dreams was coming true!

I don't even know where to start with Japan, really. It may have been the best, but it was also the weirdest trip of my life. I had never been that far from home, so I guess the culture shock was to be expected. Everything about Japan made me feel like I had stepped into another world completely, even though the Japanese and the Finnish as a people are significantly similar in a lot of ways if you look past the initial culture shock.

Anyway, feeling out of place started the moment I got out of the plane.

The air. So. Humid. For a moment I thought it would bother me for the whole three weeks, it just felt so heavy to breathe. I had never felt like the air itself was difficult to breathe. But in the end I got used to it surprisingly fast.

But I suppose the most significant thing that made me feel so out of place there was that I'm used to blending in with the crowd. In Finland I've always been exactly medium height, medium blonde with medium length hair, not fashionable but not exactly quirky (maybe a little now that I'm older). I've never drawn much attention in Finland. But oh dear, Japan was a whole new ball game. I'm sure a lot of foreigners have had a similar experience in Japan, but, honestly it felt completely ridiculous. The same attributes that made me completely inconspicuous in Finland, made me the center of attention in Japan. And you would think that Japanese people are as reserved as Finns and understand personal space? As if... For some reason people there seemed to think it was completely fine to touch my blonde hair without asking, to stare into my blue eyes at almost a kissing distance and stare really obviously and without shame at my E-cups, just because they find these things exotic.

I think we could almost play another round of every anime fan's favourite game... "Spot the Main Character" with this picture. (I'm not even the only foreigner in it but I'm still the one to stick out first.)

And because it was an all-girl school, I essentially got to experience what it's like to be "the prince of the school". I'm not even kidding. Groups of girls would start screaming, actually truly screaming, when me and Rita walked past in the corridor. Sometimes someone wanted to give their e-mail to us or ask us to add them on Facebook or something and they would always blush so deeply and have a bunch of girls behind them cheering them on.

It was baffling to me. If this wasn't my fifteen minutes of fame, I don't know what is. And it was kind of a shock to me that Japanese girls actually did behave like the girls do in all the manga that I had read for a few years by then. I always assumed it was exaggerated, but really, it isn't, not significantly, anyway.

And some random guys on the streets were equally baffling. Once when I was just walking out of a train, minding my own business, a guy came behind me and almost jumped in front of me, like close, and yelled: "Konnichiwa!" at my face. And then he slowly walked away, looking at me the whole time with a manic smile on his face. He didn't even look where he was walking!

For some reason it was me who got the most attention out of the two of us, even though we're both blond and Rita is the loud one.

I didn't always appreciate how random strangers thought it was okay to be so rude (because I was an interesting foreigner?) but I really loved my host family and I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual. They made sure I got to do everything I wanted to do there, they even took me out to eat sushi multiple times because they knew it was my favourite food, even though it's considered to be pretty festive food.

Don't I look happy. You won't find a sushi place in Finland where the sushi comes to your table on a conveyor. What.

I certainly had a lot of new experiences there and I have to admit a lot of the most memorable ones had to do with food, because I had been reading so much manga and seen so much Japanese food in them that I never had a chance to taste before. One of the coolest things was the school bakery. Me and Rita both fell in love with panda shaped buns that had chocolate inside them and some other chocolate bun too that was kind of like a cinnamon roll but bigger and just with a lot of chocolate instead of cinnamon. I'm still sad I can't get those anywhere. I loved everything I tasted in Japan from takoyaki to yakiniku.

We had a lot of time to bond with Rita because exchange students had their own hangout room in the school and for some of the time we were the only ones. We also didn't go to every class with our host sisters, just some, and then we had some cool ones separately, like tea ceremony and Ikebana. But we also had a lot of time to spend in the exchange student room alone, and I got to witness a lot of Rita's randomness during the first week that I knew her. She would do things like lie on a table on her stomach because she had eaten something that made her feel bloated. She would climb on a chair just to look at the room from a different perspective. From the start, she was a very entertaining person to observe. Once she completely shocked some poor truck driver who was looking at us curiously, and she just smiled widely and waved at him as if they were best friends.

I was initially a little sad that we weren't expected to participate in everything. Like when we had an overnight camp with our host sisters' class we were not expected to make food with everyone or attend all of the activities. But, I must admit it was nice that we were also scheduled to bathe separately, because we had so much room, though it seems a little unfair. We got the whole bathroom for just the two of us, and we got to bathe first too. Even though we weren't exactly treated like everyone else, which would've been nice in a way, it was also nice to have a lot of time to bond with my new friend. She was interesting to me from the start, because she was so free and easy in a way. I was used to people opening up to me, but she took it a step further, like asking me to massage her and braid her hair and lie beside her in her bed before we went to sleep, even though we had really known each other for just days. She was also kind of brutal. Like, when we took that bath she took a long good look at me and said: "Well, you're exactly like a hentai girl with your boobs and your mellow personality." Haha... But for some odd reason I didn't mind any of it at all. I just found her personality very curious.

I had some troubles in Japan too. Like the fact that it took 1,5 hours to get to school from my host family's house and it took three trains and two buses and some walking on top of all that. And it's not really the time or the long way but the fact that there are so many people everywhere. I am not used to such crowds and it drained me of energy completely. Sometimes I was so tired I fell asleep right after coming home from school.

Language was another issue, since I don't really speak Japanese. I took one course in high school but it's nothing really. I probably picked more up from anime than that course. And the level of English of Japanese high school kids it pretty much the level of my Swedish. (Bad, even though I studied it from seventh grade.) Our host sisters went to a special English class so they were better than average and communicating with them was fine, but I always needed my host sister to translate to her parents and some teachers too.

Certainly there were some cultural differences that were not easy to pick up on or understand. The thing we were the most bewildered by was that pretty much no one in our host sisters' class actually liked manga or anime, but instead they loved things like High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Justin Bieber completely unironically. In Finland no one older than maybe 13 would. (Or if they did most people wouldn't admit it.) And as the weeks went by it became clear that this might be a part of a bigger phenomenon. It seemed to us that the Japanese kids our age were treated in a way that seemed younger than they were, from our perspective. Maybe it's a part of the communal culture in Japan. Students were made to do things like walk in pairs during a field trip (something that would never happen in Finland after elementary school). Everything about their life in and outside of school seemed so scheduled to us. I think kids tend to have a much longer leash, so to speak, in Finland when they are much younger. It seemed to us like Japanese kids were mostly taught to obey and not ask questions. While in Finland I think that kids generally would assume they have a right to know why some things need to be done a certain way, and if they're given a good reason they're happy to do it, but they would feel a need to know why. I'm speaking very generally of course, but that's the feeling I got in Japan: Asking "why" didn't seem like a cool thing to do.

I think what I liked about the people there the most was that I was not expected to be outspoken or talkative. I realize that it probably comes from a place that has many problematic aspects as well, but, people tend to assume that Finland is a country of introverts, and while that may be true in large scale, any day in Finland is still always a draining experience for me socially. I feel like I have to use every last bit of my tiny storage of extroverted energy just to get by. I didn't feel like this in Japan very much. I had other issues, like crowds and attention that drained my energy too, but I didn't feel like I needed to pretend to be more extroverted than I was, very much. All I needed to do was half smile and nod and people loved me for it. Writing it out makes me feel a little icky about it now, because it makes me think of all the ways in which that is problematic, but back then I was just happy because it made my life easier.

Here's another thing that Japanese people can do unironically which is actually really cool. They had beauty contests at school where boys dressed as girls, and they were very convincing. Almost none of them were over the top, they just all looked really good in skirts and wigs and put serious effort into it. In my middle school some boys dressed as Spice Girls one time but they didn't even try to do it well, it was all a big joke. I appreciated that this kind of thing in a high school festival could be not-a-joke. The picture is from our host sisters' friend's school were we went to see the cultural festival.

My main take away from the whole trip was my new friend, though. Of course, we got to know a little of each other before the trip began but essentially we got to know each other in Japan. I guess someone could say our friendship began in a "misattribution of attraction" sort of way since people say it's common to find another person interesting if you go through an adventure with them. But I think the ten years of ever deepening bond that all happened after those three weeks speaks louder. And still, without Japan, we probably never would've gotten to know each other, because neither of us was the kind of person that the other would've instinctively wanted to make friends with at first glance. So this is one of those situations where one distinct detail actually has the power to change your life. There was no way we would've found each other if we weren't chosen together for this escape from our normal reality. Sometimes it's only in extreme circumstances that you can really see someone, and that's definitely what happened to us.

We look like such awkward nerds.

We thought it was because of the time we spent away from our usual circles together that made our relationship difficult for other people to grasp from the start. But it was probably more than that. People didn't seem to be sure how to categorize our relationship and neither did we, for a long time. Maybe it's because we grew into what we are now, so slowly but so steadily that most people started assuming were we a couple before we did.