your unhealthy relationship with your home country

Sweden gave her everything she ever dreamt of but she didn't want it

My friends are on their fourth kitchen renovation and often discuss mortgages and interest rates. I dream of hanging a painting on my wall, but landlords don't let you drill holes in the walls without paying insane amounts, so I let my paintings stand on the floor next to the Amazon furniture my landlord picked out six years ago. When our toilet seat breaks, it takes them six weeks to fix it, and we must email them daily. I chose this. Whenever I see my paintings standing on the floor collecting dust, I am reminded of my choices. It would be so easy to move back, yet I don't.

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My Swedish friends expect everyone to care about every important issue on earth, especially the ones they care about. I travel a lot, and people ask me what about the environment! I will care about the environment to the extent I can, for instance, I buy 70% of my clothes second-hand, but I'm not going to carry the world's problems on my shoulders. I do not care enough about the impact I can make by choosing a paper bag over a plastic bag in the supermarket on a Tuesday evening after work versus the impact we can have by changing large-scale systems. Swedish people don't realize how good they are at caring about the environment. It's embedded in our DNA to coexist with nature, we are not separate but one. It’s a cultural thing. We grew up with the right to roam, after all. I never find the words to describe it, but it becomes obvious when you move elsewhere. When you move to a big city, you quickly learn recycling is impossible, and most people don't understand where their food comes from or what goat cheese is made of. 

I tell my American boyfriend and his friends that I pick oysters from the sea every summer and we learned how to make a fire in school and I took cold plunges in the middle of the winter to pass my PE class. The Americans tell me wow that's so cool, so nature

?

People don't always do what others consider right or noble.

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Sometimes you forget but then your friend sends you a photo of their brother in Copenhagen and all you can see is the Scandinavian apartment in the background, the tile stove, the wooden floors, the clean air, big windows, you know exactly what it smells like. You know exactly what it feels like to walk barefoot in that apartment. Mmmm. You know precisely how the light hits the window every morning and how it smells. There is something weird about leaving a place for a long time because the longer you're away, and the more time passes, the stronger this feeling becomes. The feeling of knowing

exactly

how it feels to be there.

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People spend 9 hours on their screens every day to afford to have a nanny so that they can continue working and go on a vacation every year. But in Sweden, without working that hard, you can have everything many of us work so hard for - children, education, one or two houses, work-life balance, food on the table, access to nature, and traveling. You don't need to make the most money in the country to have three kids who all go to a good school. The air is clean, food is normal and healthy and made of real ingredients and real animals, and you find empty swimming spots and forests, and you can camp anywhere and pick blueberries and apples; it's all yours. 

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The realization that I could love something as ugly and horrible as a moldy room in east London opened my mind to what lives I could enjoy. How I would choose this life over a seemingly perfect one in Sweden didn't make sense to me for a long time. For me, it was a question of physical freedom and high quality of living versus mental freedom and living outside the system I was raised in which naturally pushes you to change. When you've allowed yourself to change, there is no going back because you slowly let go of your desire to do so.

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People adhere to social norms and enjoy following them. People are raised to not be too different and comply with the rules and expectations of you as a person, and for that reason, they will continue to live like this because living according to these norms and living in a way that people expect you to feels good.

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My salary is high by Swedish standards, so when I tell my friends what I'm making, they say wowow but the thing is, I still live with two roommates and I have mold in the corner of my room. In true Swedish spirit, they also say stuff like 'you're so lucky' as if I hadn't given up on many of my dreams to pursue a higher salary just to live in a moldy room. Meanwhile, my American colleagues jaws drop when I tell them my salary because they make twice as much as me for the same job. There is no such thing as comparing salaries in numbers across markets, yet comparing is always the first thing people do when they hear someone else has something they don't.

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Nothing like home.

<3