Category: Non-fiction

Good news: Life is a huge life-shaped hole in which we all fit, at the same time, without problem.

Bad news: People make it a problem. Including me.

At work we are about to make an introduction course for new employees. This is my suggested synopsis.

I want to start with a picture of Death and a text that says Memento Mori. When that is done, we go back to life’s trauma and construct cheap but guiding walls of Styrofoam around the people to create an illusion of security in a world where security does not exist.

Disintegration is a continuous theme in the introduction and we disintegrate the organization into smaller parts until even the employees themselves are dissolved and resolved. Then death returns as a jack-in-the-box from the darkness of the false emptiness and draws relieved laughter from the nervous spectators.

But their laughter get stuck in their throats when everybody realizes that what they think is the face of Death is in fact their own skinless skull. The plot thickens when doubts and self-hate are built up by the employees, and when the breaking point is approaching, a spontaneous vacuum breakdown is triggered.

It dissolves the entire universe in total eradication as all borrowed energy is released and repaid to nothing. In what we interpret as darkness, but really is absence of existence, a final text appears: “Now is your only chance.”

I’ve not been writing for a couple of weeks. I don’t know why; it just happened. I wish I could say I’d been busy, but I’ve mostly been lazy.

There is a time to write, there is a time to sleep. And a time to dress up as a Nuclear Accident for Halloween. Hence the white/glow-in-the-dark-wig on my profile picture [picture omitted].

As the evening progressed – fueled by something stronger than heavy water – I became a secret government project code-named Miss Plutonium with a bra full of eerily glowing rods I kept losing everywhere.

I won the horror-quiz with twice as many points as the one in second place. Then I started to hand out black rubber gloves to a new, cute friend and said: “You’ll need these, they’ll protect from radioactivity if you want to touch me!”

I’m still single, by the way.

My thoughts this morning: “What if I were a snake. With neither arms nor legs. Slithering all the way to work every morning. How would it feel? How would I dress in the winter?”

I think I’ve been to my last hat-sizing today. It feels like I know more about hats than the hatter. Also, what nature gave this weekend was far better. Art, magic, love – it’s all connected. Not relationship love, neither amor nor eros, but that greater love, the love of being, what’s the word, maybe agape, without connotations of god but instead focusing on the feeling of creative sparkling inside all of us hideously beautiful beings and the flame which flows between intimate friends on a journey together.

Oh, and by the way: I am genderfluid. I’ve written it in my profile bios since day one, but never really posted about what it means to me. It’s difficult to explain even to myself. Well, here goes: Sometimes I identify as mostly female and sometimes mostly male, but I’m never strictly either or. Maybe I could use the term genderqueer or non-binary, since there’s an overlapping, but the fluidity is also an important component in who I am.

I hope this is no big deal to you, dear readers, as you have been very understanding and supportive about anything not conforming, both to me and each other, ever since I came here. I hope you continue to treat me the same. No one has ever questioned my ambiguous personality or the more or less manipulated pictures of myself and some of you have also been discussing gender in a very open-minded way. That makes me dare write about this. Everything I’ve written about myself is true, well, except for the fiction parts of course. And even in the fiction there are truths about who I am. To write fiction is to write truths.

On this site you get the more female side of me, who is a creative and mostly positive girl, who may be the only one in Sweden who wears a black dress when celebrating light and joy on Midsummers Eve, who marches in Pride, who is kinky with her partners, who paints her nails, flicks the finger in the face of the world and who sometimes likes to roll herself into a blanket, disconnect from the world and read the entire weekend. Despite her black clothes she likes the lightness of summer. She is the one with visions, who writes privately, she is the author.

She co-exists with another one. A more male entity that is more logic and organized, more caring for others, used to taking care of business, getting things done. He has no sense in clothing and just cheers when he can remove her damned bra. He is more pragmatic, but also lately more neurotic and depressed, as he shoulders all responsibilities, and he can’t stop doing things once he’s at it. He’s not as relaxed anymore and is often in a strange, brooding mood. He moves in the shadows and emerges once in a while. Cranky when he has to face people and pretend. For some reason he prefers the heavy isolation of winter. He is the one writing at work, writing to communicate, he is the copywriter.

This division might sound like a “we” but there’s really just “I”. And I’ve always been this way. As a pre-school child I was looking and behaving androgynous. When my mom was shopping clothes for me, and the shop staff came to help, they always had to ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I always hesitated. I don’t know what I would have said if my mother had not been there. Not that I wanted to change gender, not to either. I just felt like identifying as a girl was as valid to me as identifying as a boy. No matter how my body looked. I’ve always felt in between. I wanted clothes from both sides of the store.

Like I wrote in the previous post about my pansexuality, I didn’t understand myself for a long time. Why would I do this, I wondered. What’s the point of dressing in what society decided is “wrong” clothes? Well, it’s like going the whole life with gloves two sizes to big and then suddenly getting a pair that fits perfectly. It’s not sexual or fetish, it just feels right. Beautiful clothes makes me feel at least a little bit beautiful myself. But I can’t fully explain it even today. There’s still some stigma surrounding this, mostly because of peoples prejudices, confusing identity and fetish, and I don’t want to be misunderstood; I’m neither butch nor sissy. I am not one gender dressing like another, I am dressing as who I am.

And of course it’s not all about the clothes. That’s just a tangible, external manifestation of what happens inside. It’s how I think, feel and interpret the world around me that is fluid. The me inside switches between modes that identifies with different gender. Sometimes I have to change clothes in the middle of the day cause I feel differently than I did that morning. I’m told there’s changes in body language too, but I do not see that myself. Somehow I write and interact differently too.

At the moment I am more content – and confident – with me being female. The male me is the burned out, fatigued, side. He stepped forward and had to shoulder a lot of responsibility over the last couple of years and all my energy went into keeping him alive. Which meant there was no room for my female side, she was pushed back and got desperate, struggling for freedom, wanted to live. Now I’m trying to let him rest and to let her loose on the world. Wish me luck!

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It took forever to write this post. I’ve been coming back to it in my notebook on and off for a while. At first I felt obliged to explain myself to you so you wouldn’t feel deceived about who I am. Then I wrote a new version to sort it out to myself. Cause I am still struggling to understand and that makes it hard to explain. It’s the eternal question: Who am I? Oh well, I am a writer, no matter the gender, and hope you’ll continue to read my ramblings, thoughts, reports from life and of course my fiction.

I have been living in a naked reality – stripped of the glamour, the interpretations and extrapolations of my mind. Exhaustion and fatigue prevented me from connecting the dots and coloring the fields of the world. No wonder life was lacking meaning. I see that now. I remember now, what I was, who I’ll be. The frozen becoming fluid. I’m beginning to let myself protrude out of the shell. Entering the world again, slowly, growing tendrils, tilting reality, expanding chaos, edging ideaspace till I’m all wet with possibility.

My taste when it comes to literature is kind of diverse. I love contrast, I want diversity. I like deep psychological probings as well as pulp horror with tentacles. Here I’d like to introduce three of my absolute favorite books too you. They are of the more serious kind and all happen to be written by some of the Swedish literary giants 50-60 years ago. All three have in common that they were written very fast in a creative frenzy claimed to come from outside the authors. All still valid, today more than ever.

Aniara | Harry Martinson, 1956
Might be my all time favorite and a life changing read for me. A science fiction poem/novel about the spaceship Aniara that has an accident at launch and hurls lost towards the big nothingness. Big questions and small, about humanity and humans. You should all really really read this!

Kallocain | Karin Boye, 1940
A dystopic sci-fi novel about a totalitarian state, written ten years before Orwell’s 1984. Boye is mostly known as a poet (and writer of early queer identity prose) but wrote this out of nowhere after seeing the brooding darkness growing with the Nazis in Germany.

Island of the Doomed | Stig Dagerman, 1946
Dagerman only wrote four novels and all of them would be on my list of recommended books. In each of them he explores the dark and painful aspects of being human. A Burnt Child is the most straight forward of them and might be a good starting point, but my favorite is probably the anxiety nightmare of Island of the Doomed.

I’m not right handed, nor left handed. And I am not ambidextrous. I use my right hand for some things and the left for others. With my right I write with a pen, with my left I write on my phone. Right for brushing teeth, left for putting lipstick on. Right for flicking the finger and shaking an angry fist, left for caressing someone I care about – or myself.

They are not interchangeable, wrong hand feels uncomfortable, but they can cooperate sometimes. Both for my guitar, which I love to play. Both for driving, which I hate to do. Neither can paint or draw but sometimes does it anyway. I got silver rings I made myself on the right; it’s strict in its shiny adornment. The left is naked and free; untamed and impulsive. Two sides of myself, living in symbiosis.

Why choose one above the other?

I can get so lost in my thoughts that when I wash my face in the shower I sometimes end up water-boarding myself.

Relationships – Either they end or you die.

I’ll become a nun in a writing convent/cloister. Is there such a thing? If not, who’d join me in starting one? Bring your writing tools, toothbrush and dildos – but no relationships whatsoever.

“Get up early, sister Ellinor, you’ve got coffee duty! Grind the beans vigorously so that the writers may be divinely inspired!”

Then we’ll dress in black garments and write a few hours, or at least until breakfast. Or lunch. And there’ll be long walks at the lake or nearby forest to think and when tired in the afternoon take a nap or hang out with the other sisters. Maybe some wine in the evening. Not to friendly though, no intrigues or hanky-panky!

Then back to writing for us night-owls. Catch that nocturnal flow of inspiration and then off to bed. What a dream.

Oh, what do nun’s pyjamas look like? Are they black and comfy? I imagine they must be – cause sleeping alone can get very cold.

(I’m keeping emotions at bay here.)

She very cranky snappy several days though says all good. Teeth dog snap snap. Her unemployed days filled with overflowing laundry. From work I gym rage. Shower have to wear last resort panties. Also groceries carry trembling tired. Feel bad fucked all time. Want be sushi roll in blanket. Travel away away. Wish alone. Walk home like black cloud. Old lady approach on bike downhill puts her legs out in air and smiles. I tears my eyes.

I had been looking forward to this day for years, been preparing for a month, re-watching the old seasons, really getting in the mood for the last days before the premiere. And the day came, I was happy and giddy all day. Couldn’t wait to get home.

But then she was there. Upset, crying, being unfair about things, once again thinking her way is the only way. She occupied the TV and I started crying. Not because of what happened between us, I can take that. I cried because it had made me lose my happiness.

All the built up excitement gone. Always when I am happy something bad happens. I cried and cried and couldn’t stop. Finally she said she was sorry, and that my joy would come back. But it feels like she always does this, she never gets where I am.

She says she is empathic but at the same time she can be kinda egoistic. Maybe I’m unfair too. Things are never that easy. She sat down by the computer in another room while I wiped my tears and watched the two premiere episodes I had been longing for for so many years.

And then, to watch the show in the state of mind I was… I was left speechless. Joy isn’t back just yet, but wonder is. Wow. Just wow. Season three is pure magic.

I wrote a post earlier this week. A kind of metaphoric text about myself. Only a few sentences and I felt it turned out like a good read worth sharing.

But before I could post it my muse came down with her idea hose and sprayed me with words. I continued to write, 667 words to be exact. What I thought would be a simple, single post, turned out to be the synopsis of a short-story set in Azza-Jono.

So I can’t post the original text because it would spoil the story. I wanted to continue writing but it was too late at night already and I had to go to work the next day.

And of course, while at work my muse came down with the hose again. Now it’s going to be a whole novel. Damn. Why didn’t she get here when I was unemployed instead? There is not enough time in my life as it is now!

Well, she is a bitch, but she is my bitch and I love her. Bring it on, darling, I’ll buy a new laptop and try to keep up.

Yesterday I wished I was a ball of yarn, rolled up into myself, like a warm, cozy little self sufficient world.

I’m an introvert gone supernova. I need time alone, and that includes time away even from my partner. We have had rough times for a while and I’ve tried to make it work by acting extroverted, talking for the sake of talking and always trying to do things together. That, of course, only made things worse by draining me without giving anything to us. But I didn’t understand, so eventually I got stuck in that mode.

I had moved to a new city and left my few but close friends behind. And in this new setting I entirely forgot that I am an introvert and that when I am social – which I really do enjoy – I must get time to charge my energy in between. But I was trying to fit in and got desperate somehow to make everyone around me happy. Except myself.

I didn’t understand why my energy got so low and never recharged. I became, like a star burning it’s last fuel in a bright flash before dying, a supernova. This is my most recent insight into myself. It was just the other week I finally put the pieces together. Introvert and never alone. Of course I’ll get fatigued. Now I try to make sure I get time by myself and though it’s a long way back, I’ve started to recover, I think.

Being someone you’re not is exhausting.

I have so many messages I need to get out. But my communications array is overloaded. It’s the middle of the night here and I can’t sleep. There is a chaos waiting to be formulated, put into words. Like I want to harness my feelings, making them real by shaping them into words. While they are still undefined those feelings have power over me, freezing my conscious self while the unconscious runs amok. I have to make them tangible. Need to write them down. I’ll try.

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Addendum: Every fragment I write captures some thoughts, piece by piece. I’m just afraid I’ll discover that every piece comes from a different puzzle. Or maybe that would make me relieved — then there’s an explanation to this mess that is me. Thinking of it, now I’m kind of curious.

There is a rare kind of woodpecker living in the wall of the old house where my father lives. Every morning while I was visiting, at 6.15 sharp, it woke me up with a noise like a small machine gun. But since this particular species is an endangered species my father doesn’t want to chase it away. In fact bird watchers go there to watch it.

First morning, vacation and all, I just wanted to shoot the damned thing. But then after a few days I got used to it. Last morning it didn’t even wake me up. Now I am on a train going home and I have accepted that even noisy birds must be allowed to live and do what they do best. I suppose I’m a noisy bird myself.