As with every place I’ve ever lived in, Finland is at the tail end of my intense and unabridged hatred on bad days and severe displeasement on better ones. A combination of xenophobia and medical incompetence – which resulted in a 90% impairment on my quality of life for the past 18 months and hopefully won’t result in an impairment for life – was the icing on the proverbial cake. After that everything even remotely negative became a free-for-all as these things go: when you’re happy you just brush off the little annoying instances (if you take notice of them at all), when you’re unhappy you become a scientist looking for the fault in the presentation, so you can eliminate it and make it better. Except, unlike a scientist, when you’re unhappy or mad you don’t look for solutions but instead just look for the faults as justification to spiral yourself deeper and deeper into the abyss you already see yourself falling into. 

So why post about this or even admit to it? Shouldn’t someone working with cross-cultural themes shy away from their own negative perception of a country they are living in and working from? And a cultural consulting specialist at that! After all, my job is to ease people into another culture so that they feel at home, or at the very least not overwhelmed. 

And that’s precisely why I want to talk about it. Life changes are hard, they don’t always work smoothly and to mask that process with a false sense of positivity would be dishonest and toxic. Personally, I want to do everything in my power to keep  people questioning themselves as to why they can’t make it when XYZ is (seemingly) living that (all too) perfect life. We know that when something is too good to be true it usually is, and despite everyone also knowing that most of us mask what’s truly going on deep down inside, we still feel a certain way when we perceive ourselves coming up short against the achievements of XYZ, however big or small they may be. 

I want people to see the struggles others go through – myself included – when either the veil lifts and false promises are exposed or the honeymoon period is over. Because this is a part of life. Dealing with another culture is not all honey and roses and sugar and spice. Much like in family life or your job there will be ups and there will be downs, and for the less extreme moments there is everything in between. Smiling and pretending that you have it made is just false, and in the long run causes more damage and harm than it brings about good. We all struggle at times and that makes us human. 

But I also want to see if there is something that can be done to bring back those good days of yore, when hardships were just par for the course and could therefore be dealt with because the good days and times were always ready to reemerge if they ever disappeared. And in forcing myself to give an honest, unbiased account in which I need to look for the good in the bad and highlight the less savory when talking about the good, there is also a sense of redemption of a particular situation, an element of being able to right the wrongs by looking at the whole picture instead of just focusing on one aspect.

Writing from neutral ground forces me to look at things from a different angle, possibly even in a different language (which is said to help shift your perspective, thus providing a different viewpoint) and see things from another perspective. Or ultimately decide that indeed in this case nothing can be done and the time has come to move on. Besides, someone very near and dear to me is enamored with the country, and I don’t want to be constantly s******* on their dream, even if every fiber in me yearns to yell, I wish I could protect you from getting hurt as I know you inevitably will be, because that’s what this country does to you and I will be there to catch you when it does happen, though I really wish you were the exception while I also wish that you could see my heartache and pain that I live with every day, more so when you extoll the virtues of this country that continues to hurt me and sing its praises. 

I remember hearing this song when I was around eleven or twelve. Children have a much deeper understanding of what they see, hear and read than we give them credit for, even if they can’t accentuate it. I also remember reading somewhere that one of the band members made a statement about incorporating all they had grown up with into their music. I didn’t know what a working boy was, what implications came with that particular status in British society of the late ’70s – early ’80s, but there was something about the music that pulled me in. Domestic abuse was just beginning to ping on my radar, and I wasn’t aware of all its implications just yet, but it certainly helped lay the groundwork, and open up my world to people talking about it, which meant that there were more people like us .