2025 was a year of heavy burdens, My mother was disintegrating, my chosen profession and financial security were disintegrating. I struggled, exhausted, to hold them together,
There was mother trouble with hospitals, cancer and the relief of moving her into a care home. I missed out on two company parties and a road trip due to illness and funerals. I spent a lot of time processing disappointment, loneliness and the fear of an eye disease. I played volleyball and went to the gym - when I could find the time. I became highly sensitive to emotional pain and cried a lot. I considered deactivating my company and started looking for other jobs.
I also found inspiration in my studies and took on my first coaching clients. I found a bit more faith and trust in God.
I read 146 books. I had a museum card, a Christmas gift that kept on giving throughout the year: history, art and new perspectives.
Regular social events: quarterly reports (i.e. parties) with industrial friends, Nasty Club almost-original edition, food and TV with sister, choir rehearsals and concerts (sometimes in three languages), meetings with my "life women" in church, in cafés, in the woods, at the bowling alley.
Highlights:
* New Year's Day: tears and poetry.
* A very large needle and the discovery that I'm not scared of very large needles.
* Translating for the Israeli ambassador, under heavy security.
* Best friend's 50th birthday with venison and quirky women.
* Concerts that all taught me something: big band jazz (that I still don't like big band jazz), a lute concert (what a lute sounds like), the Gloria Mass (what heavenly music sounds like).
* Local talents in the Eurovision Song Contest, a watching party with friends and dogs and guinea pigs and screaming out loud.
* Learning how to chop a pencil in two, using only one finger.
* Road trip to J-stad, to study dried flowers from Napoleon's grave and ancient manchurian cherry trees.
* Birthday: sunny lunch with a friend, vegan burger dinner with another friend, and a mimosa.
* Hiking among spring flowers and howling wolves.
* Turku weekend with sister and brother-in-law: the castle, Cloister Hill, Indian food, a riverside picnic, giggling breakfast table quizes.
* Coach get-together in a café, with veterans and students.
* Midsummer as usual, plus a long talk with a best friend in the chilly summer night, under a crystal chandelier.
* Kuddnäs and the history and culture of my ancestors.
* Waffle-selling at a church conference, a social success. Hugged a puppy, gave away my ear-rings to tweens, discussed cardigans and demons and other important things.
* Sunny, lazy days on the beach, with exhaustion and sorrow and great joy. Alone and with important people.
* Improvised road trip along dusty country roads, with family members. A country fair, a hardware store, icecream, a river, a weird elf village.
* Three boat trips. Two for sun and swimming and euphoria, one to fetch a dead eagle and send it in the post as a very weird package.
* Funeral of yet another beloved aunt, which meant quality time with aunts and cousins, in a village far, far away in the mysterious eastern forests.
* Weekend in quaint old town of Kristinestad. Summer heat and thunder, garden cafés, friends, a church conference, sleeping in a hundred-year-old cottage.
* Wheelchair excursions with increasingly weak but cheerful mother, to look at flowers and buy icecream. One last trip to the summer paradise to kick off our shoes and have coffee on the beach.
* Night of the Arts: from exhaustion and back-ache to the comfort of friends and a glass of red wine.
* Renovation of the summer cottage: emptying cupboards, painting walls and kitchen cabinets, finding treasures, throwing away trash and generally getting to know the Sixties and Seventies.
* Last night of summer: with family and the younger generation and the usual nostalgia, on the beach.
* Clearing out parts of my mother's flat, finding more childhood trash and treasures and insights into my parent's past.
* Autumn with too much work, besides mother troubles and studies. PPE, army gear translations with AI help, Finnish for Swedes and doubting my ability to speak my own language.
* Meeting a therapy dog: the instant cure for every possible ailment was one look into those deep brown eyes.
* American-style Thanksgiving dinner and improvisation theatre - two new experiences on the same weekend.
* Concert with three student choirs straight out of my past.
* Stomach flu, just in time to miss the most expensive dinner of the year.
* Extremely local Christmas party: folk dancing, accordions and bilingualism.
* Traditional Independence Day with gingerbread cookie baking, this time with mental health issues, tears and traumatic experiences.
* My first coaching client sessions, during dark December evenings - feeling lost and inspired.
* Trip to Umeå with friend: shopping, cafés, rain, old books, great food and an awesome view from our hotel window.
* Delivering Christmas packages with a teenager, getting lost in the maze of poverty.
* Christmas eve, twice: love, wobbly singing and a trip in a wheel-chair-accessible taxi.
* New Year's Eve just like half a lifetime (literally) ago: freezing cold, church youngsters in a school building. Then back to my chosen life with fireworks, champagne and Tennyson.