I had no idea that moving to Spain would make me realise that all I needed in my life was rest and time to focus on the things that are important to me.

I also realised that I had no idea who I was, because I only valued myself and my life through work. Living abroad puts you in a situation where you have to tell many times and to many different people who you are, where you’re from and what you do here.

Now, after living several years in Spain, I realised that I’m so much more than the paper I got from my school or workplace. This wasn’t the case before the Internet. Information was limited and we had to take a book in our hands to get access to reliable information. Now there’s an endless amount of information in our hands and sometimes we don’t even know what to do with it. How do we really know what is relevant or real and what is not?

Introducing yourself seems like a very normal and relatively simple thing to do. You share your age, where you’re from, profession or maybe what you’ve studied and finally your hobbies. We completely ignore the fact that nowadays you can basically learn almost everything just by having access to the Internet. This causes enormous stress because it seems like there’s not enough time to do all the things you want to do, and on the other hand there are people with a problem, that they have no idea what they want, or should do.

I realised that I can’t change in an environment that reminds me of the “old me” that I used to be. The version 1.0 needed a lot of validation from everyone and was very insecure. I’m very sure that it’s most likely also age related, you eventually stop caring that much of what other people think about you. Despite the age factor, I believe that the level of confidence that you gain comes by dealing with many unpleasant, and sudden obstacles abroad. Spicing it up a little bit: everything happens in another language and in a completely new environment. I’m not saying that you wouldn’t grow or deal with terrible things in your own country as well, but when you leave, you have to start everything all over again. Or that’s what they say.

What does it mean to start something again?

I think we have to change the way we think about starting to do something again after a possible failure. I might start a new project because the other plan didn’t work out the way I wanted to, but I’m not starting again from zero. Imagine a scenario where you have been building an instrument or a program for 3 years and when you started to design it, you made a mistake that you can’t fix. The end product doesn’t work and you have to start again. It might feel like you failed and lost your valuable time, but actually you’re not starting from zero because you went through the process already. Now you have an idea how to make it work and most likely the end product will be even better than it would have been when building it for the first time. The biggest mistakes are done and now you don’t have to repeat them again.

I’m very happy that I chose to leave my home country. I would never change a day of the adventure I’ve been on, because it has made me who I am now. I have only very recently started to identify and introduce myself to other people based on what I do daily, and what I’m passionate about, but not necessarily my profession or what I’ve studied in the University. When you start to search for new opportunities and also listen to what you really want to do, you have to open yourself up to many uncomfortable feelings. Nothing good comes for free or without stepping out of your comfort zone. You might look up to people who have achieved a lot of things but you can’t see the amount of sacrifices or hard decisions they had to make to be where they are now.

I’m going back to the beginning and repeat: I was very lost, just like most of us. I also have to mention that Finnish people are very work-oriented and it took me a long time to start to see life and things differently. I understood that this type of hard work and career-oriented approach, which is very common in Northern Europe, was a creativity-killer for me. I want to do things well and I have a very high work ethic, but the revolution was to understand that not everyone is like that, and they still go on with their lives. I entered an identity crisis and the question was, who am I when I’m not working? I was sad and angry to realise that I didn’t really value my free-time the way I should have and that if you only look at yourself through a narrow lens, you might never be able to see what you’re capable of.

We usually say that we don’t have time to do the things that we want to. Most likely if you’re constantly near burnout, and trying to just survive, there’s no space for creativity or even your own thoughts. When I decided to prioritize the things I truly enjoy, I don’t know how, but I could feel some nerve patterns slowly starting to change. I realised that I’m a much happier person when I have time to write, take pictures, work out and work on different projects. That also makes me happier at work, when every day I have something that I’m looking forward to doing and I’m not just waiting for the next holiday to arrive. It doesn’t matter if anyone would ever read my texts or see the pictures that I take, I would still continue doing those things because they make me feel that I’m alive, and that is more valuable than any recognition created.

I don’t know where my passions will take me in the future, but I’m curious to see. If I had to choose between the person that I was, compared to the one I’m now, I would never go back to the old me. Even though growing has been painful and will most likely continue to be painful, I can tell that just by taking risks and continuing pushing forward even though you most likely suck at what you do in the beginning, has only been rewarding in the end.

In Finland there’s a phrase, that if you get happiness, you should hide it. For me it sounds like that there is some-kind of outside force that will take your happiness away from you, if you show it around. Maybe your neighbor, who knows, anyway I think that it’s a bit of a self-centred idea. Do you think that happiness is not universal or that you are so unique, that someone would make all the effort to hunt you, and try to take it away from you? It might happen that people try to put you down, but the bad and the good things will come to you, no matter whether you try to hide the happiness from others or not.

I’m not like this because I wanted to, I had to become like this.

People love to talk about their ideas and dreams. I think that sometimes dreaming is like sugar, it tastes sweet and it fulfills you for a moment but if you over consume it, it kills you. I wrote on the 30th of April in 2020, “My dream is to live in peace and do what I like”. It is a big dream that many of us would like to have. Even though dreaming might be like sugar, there are people out there who have no dreams and this is damaging as well. I told this to my fiance and he responded that it might be the reason why so many people are miserable, people should have dreams but also should attempt to make them reality.

For most of my life, I would say that I’ve been active, creative and optimistic. I have been working a lot during my whole life because I don’t want to find myself after some years just sitting around and doing nothing, especially now when we’re living in a world where we have more opportunities and options in our lives than ever (if you are born in Europe for example). To be optimistic and positive about the future doesn’t mean that you’re stupid, even though many people might see it that way. I know that this world is full of chaos, violence and other terrible things and our Planet is just getting hotter. We have only 1 life to live (we still don’t know what happens afterwards) so I refuse to waste it by laying down in bed and waiting for the end of the world to come.

I think that for our survival we have to try to think positive, even though sometimes you want to just scream, can you please have a look at this pile of shit that I’m dealing with! The big important question is: what can you do to that pile of shit? Life is hard for everyone, things usually are very difficult and sometimes you feel like you just want to give up. We all will die eventually and the truth is that nothing lasts forever, but now when we’re here, what if we would focus on doing more stuff that we like, than the stuff that we don’t like?

Majority of us have a very limited amount of power in our hands to be able to change the way our world works today. I’m fully aware of that, and I still will continue recycling and doing my naive stuff that probably has no meaning in the big picture. But depending on how you want to operate during your lifetime, I’m not focusing on the big picture, because that is not what I’m aiming for. Fuck the big picture, it makes even simple things seem difficult.