Meet my personal devil, eczema.

This post is massive for me, since for me the struggle with my skin has been a tough topic, and I have always been very insecure about my skin, especially on the bad days. Well, its out now, I have suffered from atopic dermatitis, a type of eczema, for my entire life. The reason why to bring this out to public now is the first ever Skin Week, that is taking place in Finland right now, and this picture I took today, when I was trying to decide whether to get rid off my ear piercing or not.

So let's make one thing straight right away; atopic dermatitis or eczema is not a synonym for dry skin! Yes, it means that my skin dries faster and easier than a normal skin would, but that's not all, and therefore my skin cannot be cured or maintained (however you want to put it) in the same way a dry skin can. We are actually talking about chronic skin disease, in which infections come and go. We are talking about a structural problem of skin, in which the top layer of the skin is 'build wrong' and therefore gets damaged more severe and heals slower that a healthy skin would. This is also one of the  main reasons for the reoccurring skin infections. This next thing I am saying only because it has happened and still happens; I am begging you whether you are a stranger or someone I know, do not, and I mean it, bring me advice of skin moisturizers and commercial or biological lotions that help for dry skin, and do not tell me how to change my diet to cure my skin, if you do not know what eczema means and how it is taken care of. Trust me, if you read it from somewhere I have tried it, or consulted my skin specialist about it, and this is a very sensitive topic for me, so I really do not feel comfortable about people bringing it up. I also know that most of the people suffering from eczema of any kind will agree on this advise.

Right now my skin is actually rather good for it being bad, and the spots on my neck are pretty much the only indicators of the existence of my eczema. I have had long periods in my life, when the eczema has been in remission, namely the times I have not experienced stress, since for me that is the biggest trigger for the eczema to show up. Eczema has complicated trigger mechanisms that vary among the people affected, but some common triggers are stress, winter (dry air), some fabrics, and unhealthy diet (and by this I mean a lot of fats, sugar and salt). I have always eaten more or less healthy and diet has very little effect to the condition of my skin, however I admit that when I'm stressed out my eczema is horrendous and this is because I find comfort from eating and drinking huge quantities of sugar compared to my usual diet. However, to me (and many others, although some find release from a change of diet) eating milk free, gluten free, 'pure', and so on, is just torture for nothing, since it has no impact to my skin. Good hydration is important for me, so I drink lots and lots of water, but the infections still come and go.

I cannot really say whether I have suffered more about the visible rash or the itch that it causes, since the looks of the rash are not appealing to me (and therefore I think everyone else finds it disgusting as well), but in the other hand the itch makes me want to turn to a vegetable peeler for help. I have never really been bullied of my skin, maybe because I was pretty chubby as a child, but I have always been very conscious of the looks of it, and very insecure to walk around in clothes exposing my arms or legs when the rash shows up. I still hide under long sleeves and pants in public, when my skin is unwell. As a result from years and years of scratching my skin I've been left with hundreds of scars, which have luckily began to fade away due to me growing up and having some self-discipline, and having found ways to avoid scratching without noticing it. Yes, I still scratch, as everyone around me knows, but way less than when I was little. So, let's talk about the itch.. it the moment I don't even remember how it feels when nothing itches, since the final years at the university, followed by the job hunt have kept me stressed to a tee. It is overwhelming, annoying, irritating, ITCH, that you cannot escape! Anyone who has not experienced an itch like eczema causes understands how itchy it is. Someone very close to me always liked to remind me not to scratch and still does it, but you have no idea how satisfying and amazing it feels to press your nails into the skin and SCRATCH the **it out of it, when the eczema is on. Burning the itching part under hot water also feels heavenly and gives a moment of relief, although it comes with a cost, since it actually makes the skin worse = more itchy.

I must say I have been lucky in a sense, that I have inherited my eczema from my dad, and therefore I have always gotten fast diagnosis and great treatment. At the moment I have a very well working "cream cocktail" to get over the worst days and maintain my skin in a rather symptomless state for most of the time (or during the past year for some of the times when I haven't been experiencing stress), but once one 'cocktail' stops working, the trial through other creams and medicine is agony that can last months, and therefore I am very resistant to try out any new products, no matter how great they could be. Messing up a working system can send my skin to a downward spiral for months, and that is not a gamble I take easily.

I hope this post will help someone else, bring awareness of the thoughts of an individual suffering of eczema, or explain some of my habits or reactions to those around me. This is my story with eczema and there are as many stories as there are story tellers, and I believe it is time to talk about this.

Did the Climate Change Eat the Christmas Spirit?

Lets make it clear, I'm a Christmas person, and since very young the 'preparation' for Xmas for me has begun in the beginning of October, when the choir began to practice for Xmas concerts. Well, I haven't sung in a choir for ages, but the excitement for the becoming Xmas has still began to build up around the same time in the following years. However, this year something is different.. I don't even think of Xmas and its already mid-October. This has kind of worried me, so I have tried to reason why I'm missing the holly jolly bubbling joy of building excitement that the months leading to Xmas usually bring to me. The answer I have arrived to is the weather. It is extremely difficult to imagine Xmas, that I associate with winter, cold weather, possibly and hopefully at least a bit of snow, dark nights with skies filled with stars, and nights spent curled up in a blanket while zipping hot chocolate and watching movies, when it is literally summer outside. I can still go out wearing my summer clothes during the day and at night I just throw a light jacket on when entering outdoors, and this is crazy!

Now, I have lived in mid-Europe for a while, about six and half years, and this weather is insane! It should be raining, grey and chill outside, but instead the temperature is in twenties and its sunshine day in day out. I usually absolutely hate the time between late September and March because of the weather in here stays cold and wet pretty much the entire period of time that is considered fall and winter. At least in Finland the winter is cold and dry so you can hide the cold by wearing layers! Although, as a person who really dislikes the weather typical for fall this is of course good news, it is also extremely worrying, since its abnormal, just like the cold that lasted pretty much until late June and then turned immediately to +30°c this year.

I cannot say that I'm a person who is specifically worried of the climate change.. or maybe that's I lie.. I do worry about the climate change, and I have for a long time but I do not act upon it since I feel very powerless to do anything significant with my own actions. This is still my standpoint, unless the biggest countries, and industries contributing to the climate change do something to slow down the climate change, I believe all the individual persons in the world could do very little to stop the process, even if they all acted collectively. I also cannot blame anyone for not taking action, since I do very little myself; I fly at least twice a year, I eat 'too much' meat, don't buy bio- or local produce, don't recycle much... the list goes on.. However; some of these things I want to do, but it has been made ridiculously expensive for 'poor' people like me; for example I would recycle most of my waste, if the waste was collected in a price suitable for low-income households (actually in here there is no service that picks up the recyclable waste from your house), or the recycling center would be easy to reach, and again the price for the use of the recycling center would be affordable (and also the gas costs when you need to drive there). Because of this I only recycle cardboard and glass, since the cardboard is the only thing collected from residences and the nearest class recycling point is only a couple of steps away from our apartment. I would also buy bio and local products if they weren't so expensive. As a conclusion; to me it feels like living in 'an environmentally friendly way' has been made into a privilege of the wealthy in the Western societies.

I guess I will have to get used to the idea that I will be celebrating Xmas in summer from now on, so I will get back to looking for my lost Xmas spirit, since I got this dilemma off my chest.

Three weeks after graduation

I never imagined what kind of an emotional roller coaster the life of a newly graduated unemployed person would be.. well, actually I never thought I would end up being unemployed  to start with. Anyhow, life is truly exciting and scrolling through hundreds of job offers is amazing, since "all the door as open" and I can make decisions on where I want to go next. However, the job hunt for a foreigner turns disappointing very fast in a country with three official languages (which is confusing and ridiculous in Belgium, and I could talk about it for hours with the 'stupid' language divide and separation of the nation, but I'll leave it for another time), none of which you're fluent at. I knew that finding a job with my language selection and work experience would be challenging, if I didn't find something from my field, but I never thought that out of 800 job offers I could only find 1 that could be possible for me. And I don't have high standards, I just want something that is not too far away and that is either open for inexperienced people or for people on the field I've studied at, and that is paid (since the urgency for finding a job is financial).

Many could think that for a seemingly lazy person like me, being at home would not be a problem, but I am very bad a staying still and not doing anything. Therefore, I am already extremely bored and I hate that I have no 'function'. Although, I try to keep myself busy with different projects that involve mainly cooking, baking and knitting, I cannot wait to have something meaningful and challenging to do in my life. I guess that's the thing that really makes me bored; I don't need to use my brain or find out solutions to anything. Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love cooking and knitting, but they 'come naturally' to me which means that they're mainly things that I do to kill time right now, and I can do them in half-automatized way while watching TV.

In the other hand life is amazingly chill and nice at the moments, when I am able to distract myself from the boredom and stress to find a job. I can do anything that I wish to, sleep long and go to bed without a worry, since I don't need to wake up at a certain time, and I don't need to be anywhere.

The most controversial campaign of our time.

I really wanted to begin this blog with a post about my graduation, which seemed like a natural first post in a blog, which starting point it is, but then this news paper article of the first Me too related court case of Finland showed up this morning. Shortly, a well-known singer is accusing three women of defamation, after losing two TV-show appearances due to the women's social media accusations that he has sexually harassed them.

I didn't want to refer to 'Me too' in the title of this post, because I don't recognize myself of being sexually harassed or assaulted in any situation, although, I have ended up to situations that could count for being sexually harassed. The reasons, why I want to comment the Me too campaign are simply that I  have had countless discussions of the campaign with my friends and other close ones, both men and women, and I think the campaign was and is definitely needed, however, it has generated unwanted and nasty by-products with, sometimes, severe consequences. This is an argument that I have also heard a lot from others.

If we look back to the news paper article, this singer has taken responsibility of his actions, admitted that he has perhaps been to aggressive when trying to find company in situations where the interest has been one-sided, and apologized, since the first comment he published after the accusations. He has also admitted that alcohol has often played a role in these situations. After this he has been in the middle of a social media storm in which he has been called horrendous things, such as a rapist and as a result lost job opportunities. My question however is, should he be blamed of sexual harassment or is there something else underneath the surface? And if he should be blamed of these accusations, then what?

In the discussions of the Me too campaign that I have had on theme has always surfaced; the bar or drinking culture. In the society we live in, it seems to be normalized that when we go to a bar we a) get hammered, and b) seek for someone to have sex with. This is of course not always the case, and many people going to a bar go there for other reasons, but in the society the bars have become 'sexual hunting grounds' for singles, where it is acceptable to get so hammered that one has no understanding or memory of their actions. In bar-like settings, the social rules have been twisted and behavior, and gestures that are considered unacceptable elsewhere are part of the 'normal' (god I hate the word normal!) social interaction. I'm not saying this to downgrade the experiences and feelings of those women and men, that have been sexually harassed, but I do think that if someone was to be blamed of the sexual harassment taking place in the nightlife it is the society, not specific individuals behaving in accordance with the 'social norms' that nowadays are thankfully turning more and more into an 'urban legend'. Although people still expect them to be reality, since society does not change over night, and it'll take a while that everyone will forget the idea of bars being outside of the normal social norms.

This is only one of the examples, where the Me too campaign has generated an unfortunate by-product as a playing field for hunting down individuals. I'm not saying that the individuals behaving in unacceptable ways should not be punished in any way. However, I do think that in cases like these, in which the individual acknowledges their actions and apologizes for behaving in an unacceptable way, in a setting and situation in which the unacceptable behavior is more or less expected by the wider society, we should end the witch hunt and focus on the real problem; the societal misconceptions and the changing of them. This kind of witch hunt of sexually active individuals with imperfect skills of social interaction is not beneficial to anyone, and will most likely make people scared of approaching strangers that they find attractive.

Another thing I want to criticize the Me too campaign of is that, when someone decides to raise accusations of another individual us spectators, and especially media seem to be fast to judge the accused party as a sexual predator without a question raised. However, the campaign, like any other campaign, can be misused, and the so-called victim can have several motivations to throw an egg on one's face. These motivations can vary from revenge to greed and cleansing one's own reputation after a regretful one-night stand. I'm sure we have all read cases in which someone has been accused or even sentenced of rape and it's been later discovered that the rape never happened and the accusations were raised to fulfill some other purpose. Well, Me too -campaign can also be used in this way, only the threshold to accuse someone is lower and the attention the accusation gets is greater, and can therefore ruin someone's life.

Like I mentioned in the beginning of this post. I believe that Me too campaign has an important message and purpose, since sexual harassment is a large problem, and its victims often hide away and stay quiet. However, I believe that we should be critical of the accusations made towards individuals. The campaign is twofold, and can turn against itself if it becomes a witch hunt, instead of serving the purpose of raising awareness and perhaps changing the society. The power of social media is well-established, and we can say that it tells something about the importance of the Me too campaign as a phenomena that the Eurovision Song Contest winner of 2018 was inspired by the message of the campaign, after all this contests has "hundred million followers" that get to vote their favorite. However, 'I'm not your toy, stupid boy'-like phrases are also dangerous. Not all the victims are women, and women are not brainless beings incapable of making their own decisions. However when we use language like this and turn the campaign into a hunt of sexual predators that often targets men, there's a danger that we create a monster that assumes every man to be somehow in blame of incidents that are actually often a result of the societal code of interaction.

Prologue

At first, I think I will have to say a couple of things about myself and why I put this blog up.

I have written a blog in the past but after entering the student life about four years ago the passion to write got buried underneath the piles of books and essays that took over a big part of my life. However, now when I'm finally finished with my master's degree I feel that there's time (..and inspiration) to write again.

I was born in a little town in Southern Finland in a hot summer day in 1991, well actually I'm not sure if the day was hot or even sunny, but anyway, it was in mid-July. For the first 19 years of my life I lived in that same small town, and for a long time I believed I would never leave. No-one of my family had ever left, and therefore staying would have been the evident option for me as well. Well, that's not what happened and after graduating from the high school I left my home town.. I left and traveled all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the Big Apple, where I worked as an au pair for a year. That year was amazing and gave me a lot but it also changed me a lot, and I came to a realization that I could no-longer imagine my future in Finland. However, New York was not an option either, so I came back to Europe. I found being an au pair an easy way to live abroad and more importantly I loved the job itself, so I continued as an au pair but moved (or actually ended up) to Luxembourg, where I stayed for two years. More about this part of my life can be read from my former blog (mainly in Finnish).

In Luxembourg I found home. I fell in love with the country, its people, its vibrancy, its diversity, and its uniqueness. More importantly I fell in love with a person, my person, who has ever since stood by my side in my (our) hectic life. However, studies took me away from Lux to the Netherlands, where I completed my bachelor's. After three years in the Netherlands, I decided that it was time to skip town again, and moved to Belgium to study my master's degree, and here I am now. Freshly finished with my studies and at the beginning of my 'adult life'.

This is where the story of this blog begins; Seven years after moving away from Finland, after living in four countries and after having waded through the busy student life. At the verge of adulthood full of hopes and dreams.

So, what I'm asking from you is to buckle up, and enjoy the ride through my lifetime of adventure. This blog will include my life as it is and without a sugar coating, the excitement and struggle to find the first job, ups and down of casual days, and opinions (knowing me, plenty of them!), love and laughter.