January 1st gets a lot of credit for being a good day to start over.
But honestly, any day will do.
A Tuesday in November. A Thursday after work. A perfectly ordinary morning when you decide you’d like to give something another try.
I haven’t written here in a few weeks. The longer I leave it, the more I feel like I should come back with something especially worthwhile. Which is a very effective way to continue writing nothing.
So today, I’m writing a few paragraphs.
There’s something comforting about remembering that we can begin whenever we like. We can try something new, return to something we miss, or pick up a good intention that got buried somewhere under everyday life.
Getting off track doesn’t erase everything we did before. We still have that experience, even if we’ve lost a little momentum.
And we don’t have to catch up on everything we missed. That sounds exhausting, and I already have laundry.
Whatever date is on the calendar, we’re allowed to get up and give it another go.
I think many of us would still answer “yes” to that question. I have to admit I am a very bad social media customer, and that includes LinkedIn, which is supposed to be the grown-up one. If you contact me there, it may take me a week to notice. Possibly two, if it’s summer.
I have turned off notifications on my phone because they are distractions.I want to choose how I spend my time without being pulled into a picture of someone’s lunch, an endless scroll of ads, or an unsolvable math problem that I’m fairly sure exists only to piss us math nerds off. Social media seems to be mostly ads now, and I admit I am sometimes tempted to buy whatever they are selling. The algorithm has studied me closely and knows exactly which jacket I didn’t know I needed.
Many times, I have thought about deleting my Facebook account. What stops me is Sweden. That’s where my cousins’ kids are, along with my brother and his wife and their kids, and the people from my old ninth-grade class, who have aged suspiciously well.
It is hard enough to keep in touch when everyone has busy lives, so the connection matters. If someone likes to share, you get to see what’s going on in their life, and they are only one message away. Even if you never write, you know you can.
Facebook has also educated me. For instance, I learned that kids in Sweden now go trick-or-treating. This was not something we did when I was growing up. We had påskkärringar instead. At Easter, children dress up as Easter witches, with a headscarf, a painted-on freckle or two, and a copper kettle, and go door to door asking for candy or money. According to tradition, the real witches fly off to Blåkulla to dance with the devil, and the children, I assume, are there to keep up appearances. It’s a very Swedish solution: take something alarming and turn it into a seasonal activity.
So when I saw my brother’s kids in Halloween costumes, I wasn’t scandalized. I was just a little jealous. Nobody handed me a pumpkin bucket in the 1980s. Apparently, I am making up for it now.
My yard is full of skeletons and assorted skeleton parts, a werewolf about nine feet tall, and a ten-foot skeleton. Walk up the steps and you are greeted by an IT clown taller than me, holding a hammer, with glowing eyes. There’s an inflatable tree by the front door and two smoke machines. Two. Somewhere between Sweden and here, I appear to have become the Halloween department.
But yes, please tell me more about the children dressing up.
And that, I realize, is exactly why I can’t quit. I can resist most of the ads and ignore the math problems. But I can’t give up a window into a country that keeps changing without me.
So I’ll keep the account. Notifications stay off, I’ll answer messages whenever I get around to it, and everyone will go on waiting a week for my reply. But the door stays open, and in my family, that seems to be what matters. You don’t have to knock every day. You just have to know you can.
Don’t you hate being woken up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep? It always happens at the worst possible moment. Then again, is there ever a good time to lose sleep? Probably not. I’d like to speak to the manager of sleep, because the scheduling department is clearly broken.
I’ve had periods of insomnia before. A whole week of waking up at 3-ish a.m. and staring at the ceiling like it owed me money. But that’s not today’s topic. Today we’re talking about the kind where something wakes you up. A person. A pet. Or, in my case, a surge protector that is supposed to be saving me power and has instead started clicking in the middle of the night like a tiny, passive-aggressive woodpecker with a grudge.
It’s 1:20 a.m. I went to bed at 10:30. That’s roughly three hours of sleep. Definitely not enough for me to be done for the night.
So what do you do? Glad you asked. I’ve been lying here for a while, so I’ve had time to think.
Step 1: Stop looking at the clock
I know. You already looked. You looked three times, and you’re about to look again. But every glance kicks off the sleep math: “If I fall asleep right now, I can still get five hours. Okay, four and a half. Okay, if I’m out in the next ten minutes, I’ll be fine.”
Congratulations, you’re now a night-shift accountant, and your brain has clocked in for overtime.
Turn the clock away. You don’t need another update.
Step 2: Deal with the thing that woke you up
If it’s a clicking surge protector, deal with it if you can safely do so. Lying there hoping it stops seems reasonable until you realize you’re now listening for the next click.
Click.
Maybe that was the last one.
Click.
Apparently not.
If it’s a person, hopefully they settle back down. If it’s a dog, investigate what they need. Although if Hugo just wants more of the bed, I’m not sure there’s enough bed in the world.
Step 3: Keep the lights low
If you need to get up, use just enough light to move around safely. Leave the phone alone if you can, and resist the temptation to scroll.
Checking one thing is rarely checking one thing. Suddenly you’re looking at someone’s vacation photos, and your brain has a whole new set of things to think about.
Nobody needs to see Karen’s brunch at 1:30 a.m. Karen is thriving. Karen is probably asleep.
Step 4: Know when to take a break from trying
If you’ve been awake for roughly 20 minutes and you’re getting frustrated, get out of bed for a little while. No need to check the clock. An estimate is fine.
Read a few pages of a book or listen to something quiet in dim light. Return to bed when you feel sleepy.
The idea is to keep your bed associated with sleep, instead of the place where you lie awake getting increasingly annoyed about not sleeping.
Step 5: Give your brain something quieter to do
Your brain at 1:20 a.m. can have so much to say. Tomorrow’s to-do list. Something awkward you said years ago. A problem you cannot possibly solve from underneath a duvet.
Try slow, comfortable breathing. Or do a gentle body scan, noticing and relaxing your toes, legs, shoulders and face. There’s no need to do it perfectly. That would just be another thing to think about.
If you keep rehearsing tomorrow’s tasks, jot them down on paper. They can wait there until morning.
Step 6: Be nice to yourself
Being annoyed that you’re awake is understandable. Being annoyed at yourself for being awake probably isn’t helping.
These are things to try, not another checklist you have to succeed at. If one doesn’t help, you haven’t failed at sleeping.
Tomorrow, try to keep your usual routine, get some daylight, and resist the urge to move bedtime all the way up to 6 p.m. One rough night doesn’t mean the next one will be the same.
So, is there ever a good time to lose sleep? No. Absolutely not. But at 1:20 a.m., you can at least make yourself comfortable, deal with the disturbance, and give sleep a chance to return.
And if all else fails, you now have a blog post, a silent room, and the smug satisfaction of having won a war against a power strip.
Click.
…okay, there must be a second one. I’ll be right back.
It started Tuesday, just as I was about to drive home from work. Apple CarPlay wouldn’t connect. My car is a 2018, and I use an adapter to make CarPlay wireless. It can be a little wonky, so I unplugged it, plugged it back in, tried restarting my phone. Nothing. I finally played my audiobook through Bluetooth and drove home.
A reasonable person might have left it there for the night. I went straight to Google and spent two hours troubleshooting in my garage.
By bedtime, I was still thinking about it. I grabbed the bedroom TV remote yes, there’s a TV in the bedroom, I know, sleep experts everywhere are shaking their heads and pressed the button. The TV wouldn’t come on. I tried the other remote and got a screen asking me to log back into everything with a QR code or a password.
Absolutely not. I had reached my troubleshooting limit. I put in my earplugs and went to bed. (The earplugs are because my Frenchie sleeps beside me. If you’ve heard a Frenchie sleep, you understand.)
I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. Naturally.
I go into the office three days a week, and Thursday wasn’t technically one of them, but skipping it meant a mandatory Friday instead, and Thursdays are usually quiet. So in I went anyway.
I booted up my computer. No internet. Which meant I couldn’t connect to GlobalProtect. I asked a couple of other people if they were having trouble. Nope. Just me. So “I restarted the computer I had just started”
That was number three. At this point I was beginning to wonder if I was the problem. Not in an emotional growth kind of way. In an am I interfering with electrical signals? kind of way.
Apparently three glitches in two days wasn’t enough to make me leave the car alone. That night, I spent another hour in the garage trying to get CarPlay working. Still no luck. I went to bed hoping that, at the very least, everything would stay quiet until morning.
Then, at 2:20 a.m. the fire alarm went off and scared the living hell out of me. It announced a problem in the “Family Room.” Except I didn’t have anything called Family Room in the app. Now I was awake, startled, and trying to solve a mystery in a room that apparently only the smoke detector knew existed.
It turns out the detector can have one name in the app and a different name that it says out loud. “Family Room” was its default callout name. I still don’t know what set it off possibly dust but at least I know which room it was talking about. At 2:20 a.m., that information would have been helpful.
And the car? After all the adapter troubleshooting, the problem appears to have been the cable. It could charge, but it wasn’t transmitting data. I got a new cable, and CarPlay came back.
Which means the actual culprits were: one bad cable, one confused smoke detector, one TV demanding my life story, and absolutely nothing to do with my personal electromagnetic field. Disappointing, honestly. For a few days there, I almost thought the universe was trying to tell me something.
Yogi Tea says: Not every signal is a sign. But every sign is also, technically, a signal.
I don’t know that I do. I’ve never been someone who checks my horoscope in the morning to find out whether I should make an important financial decision or avoid Geminis until after 3 p.m.
But since this is my birthday month, for some reason I ran across something about Virgos. And I have to admit, astrology is quite entertaining when the description starts sounding a little too familiar.
Virgos, according to the internet, are analytical, practical, organized, observant, helpful, perfectionistic, critical, prone to overthinking, and apparently incapable of simply letting something go when there is still a perfectly good opportunity to analyze it from seventeen additional angles.
Well, this feels unnecessarily personal.
The organization part is especially offensive because I don’t necessarily consider myself organized. I just think things should be where they’re supposed to be.
That’s different.
And I’m not a perfectionist. I simply don’t understand why we would knowingly do something incorrectly when we could do it correctly.
Also different.
And I don’t overthink. I think the appropriate amount, sometimes for several days about something that happened in 2017 because there may still be information we haven’t considered.
Completely normal.
Then there’s the Virgo reputation for being critical.
Again, rude. I’m not criticizing, I’m observing.
If the dishwasher has been loaded in a way that prevents the dishes from actually becoming clean, I am not being critical by pointing this out. I am providing valuable operational feedback.
You’re welcome.
Apparently Virgos also like being useful, which sounds lovely until you realize it means we’re the people who hear someone casually mention a problem and immediately begin designing a solution they did not ask for.
Okay, this is getting uncomfortable.
Of course, I’m temporarily forgetting that approximately four billion people could read the same description and find something in their lives that fits.
That’s the trick, though. It’s like a fortune cookie that’s been to therapy. It knows exactly which insecurities to poke and then has the audacity to charge nothing for it.
So no, I don’t believe in astrology.
But I will say this: if a system invented thousands of years ago by people without indoor plumbing can accurately predict that I will re-fold a fitted sheet four times “for the greater good,” maybe the stars know something.
Naturally, once I found mine a little too accurate, I did what any reasonable person would do and looked up everyone I love, just to see.
My mother is a Scorpio loyal, intense and apparently equipped with a memory that keeps receipts. My sister is an Aquarius independent, stubborn and deeply committed to doing things her own way. And one of my closest friends is a Sagittarius adventurous, spontaneous and blessed with the ability to say the thing everyone else was still deciding whether they should say out loud.
Which either means astrology is real, or I just surrounded myself with people whose personalities are extremely on brand.
I refuse to investigate further.
Or maybe I’m just extremely, tragically legible.
Either way, I’ve already ordered a mug that says, “Virgo: I’m not overthinking, I’m thorough.”
Years ago, my Polish friend and I had a brilliant idea.
We were going to start a podcast.
Because apparently having full-time jobs and normal adult responsibilities wasn’t enough.
The name?
A Swede, a Pole and a French Bulldog.
The concept was simple. We would pick a subject and discuss it from three different perspectives: Swedish, Polish, and French Bulldog.
The French Bulldog had no qualifications whatsoever, but he was extremely confident.
We never actually made the podcast.
We did, however, make notes.
I recently found them.
One of our proposed episodes simply said:
Swedish meatballs vs. Polish sausage — the origins, why famous, and dog food.
I have no memory of how dog food entered this conversation. Although considering Hugo was one-third of the podcast, I suppose we were trying to be inclusive.
Sweden enters the competition
Let’s start with the obvious.
Swedish meatballs are better.
I realize this isn’t technically how you begin an unbiased cultural comparison, but I am Swedish and this is my blog.
Then IKEA came along and introduced Swedish meatballs to the world. This has been both good and bad. Good because millions of people now know about Swedish meatballs. Bad because millions of people now associate one of our national foods with buying a BILLY bookcase and discovering three hours later that you have one screw left over, a panel installed backwards, and a marriage that will never fully recover.
Poland would like a word 🇵🇱
This is where my friend would immediately point out that Poland has sausage.
Not a sausage.
Sausage as an entire category of national identity.
And Americans call it kielbasa. Which seems reasonable until you learn that kiełbasa is basically the Polish word for sausage. So saying “Polish kielbasa” is a little like saying “Swedish meatball meatball.”
There are many kinds. Smoked. Fresh. Garlic. Pork. Different regions. Different recipes.
I know this because once you have a Polish friend, you will eventually receive information about Polish sausage whether you requested it or not, usually mid-conversation, usually unprompted, usually correct.
I’m sure she feels exactly the same way about Swedish meatballs, except her version of this paragraph is shorter, because there is only one Swedish meatball and I have now spent four paragraphs describing it.
She is also as of many years a vegetarian.
I want to be clear that this has never once slowed her down. She will describe the snap of a good kiełbasa casing with the reverence of a woman who has personally eaten thousands of them. She has not eaten a single one. This is not a contradiction to her. This is heritage.
We need an independent judge
Obviously, Sweden and Poland cannot settle this ourselves. We’re biased.
Fortunately, our original podcast had a third member.
Hugo. French Bulldog. Thirty pounds. No culinary training. Extensive opinions.
Hugo has reviewed the evidence carefully.
Sweden argues for the meatball. Poland argues for the sausage. Hugo would like it noted that both arguments contain meat, and that this is, as far as he’s concerned, the entire debate resolved.
His ruling: both.
He would like one Swedish meatball and one Polish sausage for comparison purposes. Then another meatball, because the first sample was statistically insignificant. Then another piece of sausage, because scientific integrity matters. He is willing to continue testing until somebody stops him, and it should be noted that nobody has ever successfully stopped him.
And apparently, dog food
Which brings me back to our original podcast note: the origins, why famous, and dog food.
I still don’t know what we intended to say about dog food. Maybe Hugo had negotiated his own segment. All possibilities are, at this point, equally likely, equally undocumented, and equally his fault.
Sadly, A Swede, a Pole and a French Bulldog never made it to air. Which is probably a loss to international diplomacy.
But after reviewing the evidence a couple of years later, I think we can finally declare a winner in the great Swedish meatball vs. Polish sausage debate.
A friend of mine has a daughter heading into her final year of college. This daughter has had exactly one boyfriend the whole time. They got together a few months into freshman year and never really stopped.
We got to talking about what comes next. The daughter wants a gap year before med school, and she and her boyfriend have floated the idea of getting a place together. He’s staying in school. No gap year for him.
My friend wasn’t thrilled about the living-together part. Her worry: if her daughter moves in, he’ll have less reason to ever propose.
I’ve been in the U.S. for years now. Long enough that I don’t expect much to catch me off guard anymore.
And yet.
There’s a specific flavor of surprise that only American dating logic can produce in me, and this was one of those moments.
Come again?
Because to me, the reasoning runs completely in reverse.
It reminded me of that phrase people trot out here:
“Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
I have thoughts.
Starting with this one: since when is he the customer and she the livestock?
And why does the saying assume she’s just standing at the fence, waiting to be deemed purchase-worthy?
Where I’m from, nobody’s buying anybody.
Both people are choosing.
If we’re going to keep the barnyard metaphor alive, maybe it should go like this instead:
Why would a woman commit to a bull before finding out if he even fits in her barn? 😂
Moving in together was never supposed to be a bargaining chip, something she trades for the promise of a ring down the line.
It’s just how two people figure out if a life together actually works.
And honestly, this goes well beyond the roommate question.
The longer I sat with it, the clearer it got. Sweden and the U.S. aren’t just doing dating differently. They’re starting from different premises entirely.
To be fair, Sweden isn’t game-free. Some version of “don’t seem too eager” is probably universal. It’s been a while since I was in the dating pool back home, but I’d guess the instinct to play it cool hasn’t gone anywhere.
Women in particular seem tasked with the same balancing act everywhere: be interested, just not too obviously.
Sweden included. We’re not exempt.
But the actual mechanics of dating feel less scripted there.
Two people meet. They start spending time together. They sleep together.
Or, honestly, they might sleep together first and the “spending time together” part follows. 😂
Sequence aside, here’s the real difference: nobody typically has to schedule a sit-down conversation titled “So, are we exclusive?”
Once you’re seeing someone regularly, exclusivity is the default setting. If that’s not the case if someone else is in the picture too that’s the part you actually have to bring up.
I’ve got a much younger sister, which means I’ve watched Swedish dating unfold long after I aged out of it myself. What I’ve noticed is that when someone isn’t looking for anything serious, or wants things kept casual, that gets said out loud early, precisely so nobody ends up confused or hurt.
The American version often runs the opposite direction.
You can be dating, sleeping together, spending every weekend together, and somehow still need a formal check-in about whether either of you is doing that with anyone else, too.
My Swedish nervous system finds this baffling.
Then there’s the friends-and-family piece. In Sweden, meeting someone’s friend group isn’t loaded with meaning. Meeting the parents isn’t a milestone with a flashing sign over it either.
Sometimes you’re just around, long before anyone would call you the girlfriend or the boyfriend.
And that same casualness carries all the way through, right up to the question that kicked off this whole train of thought: marriage.
The old cow saying isn’t really about timing. It’s about the fear of never getting picked at all about being the one left standing at the fence while somebody else decides if you’re worth the commitment.
I’m sure that fear exists in Sweden too. People are people, and relationships can make all of us insecure. But the idea that a woman shouldn’t move in with a man because it might make him less likely to marry her feels very foreign to Swedish culture.
Living together before marriage is simply the norm. The idea of proposing to someone you haven’t lived with first would feel almost backwards.
Marrying someone means formalizing two lives you already know fit together, not making a leap of faith and hoping the daily reality works out.
Sambo, the word for living together, isn’t a stepping stone toward the “real” thing. For a lot of couples, it basically is the real thing, just without the paperwork. People buy houses, have children, build entire lives together and may never get married at all. Nobody is necessarily waiting for the next step.
And even engagement looks a little different.
In Sweden, when you get engaged, both people wear a ring.
Traditionally, the rings are engraved with your partner’s name and the date you got engaged, signaling the commitment you’ve both made to the relationship.
When you get married, the woman gets a second ring. The man often keeps the same ring it’s taken off for the wedding ceremony and put back on, with the wedding date added to the engraving.
Sweden has definitely become more Americanized when it comes to engagements. There are more diamond rings and elaborate proposals now than I remember growing up.
But the man still gets a ring.
And usually, even if the proposal itself is a surprise, the idea of getting married isn’t.
They’ve talked about it along the way. Both people already know this is where the relationship is heading.
The proposal might be a surprise.
The answer probably isn’t.
And maybe that’s why another American question has always sounded a little strange to me:
“Why hasn’t he married her?”
Not why haven’t they gotten married?
Why hasn’t he married her?
It’s such a tiny difference in language, but there’s an entire relationship script hiding inside it.
He’s the one deciding.
She’s the one waiting.
He’s choosing.
She’s hoping to be chosen.
And suddenly we’re back at the cow.
Of course Swedish women want love and commitment. Of course people wonder where relationships are going. And yes, we can make ourselves completely insane over another human being too.
We’re Swedish. We’re not some emotionally evolved Nordic species. 😂
But underneath all of it is an assumption I grew up with that I never really thought about until I lived somewhere else:
Both people are choosing.
Maybe that’s the part that gets lost in the cow-and-milk logic.
A woman isn’t giving a man the benefits of a relationship and hoping he’ll eventually reward her with marriage.
They’re both trying the relationship on for size.
They’re both deciding.
They’re both committing.
And if they get engaged, they’re both wearing the ring.
Forget about buying the cow and getting the milk for free.
Yesterday I cleared a few spiderwebs off the patio up in the north GA mountains.
For the record, I have nothing against spiders. They’re good to have around, they eat bugs, they build genuinely impressive webs, they mind their business. I only asked one thing:
Please don’t build across the spots where I walk.
Cool, well, that request got denied.
This morning several webs were already back up. Overnight. No permits, no contractors, nothing. Just fully rebuilt structures like it was nothing. Mildly impressive honestly. One even had a tiny spider chilling in it, so I guess they’re doing affordable housing now too.
Tried to get a picture but the green background, my phone refusing to focus on an actual spider, and my frenchie barking at me the entire time made it basically impossible to document.
So here’s where the Spider HOA and I landed:
You can stay. Eat the bugs. Build your webs, I respect the craftsmanship.
But if it crosses into my walking path, I’m knocking it down, no notice.
Apparently, there are certain things you’re not supposed to complain about.
Traffic is one of them.
Sleep is another.
Unfortunately, I currently have complaints about both.
This week, it took me almost two hours to get to work. The first hour was just my normal commute, which already feels like I’ve completed a small task before I’ve actually arrived at the place where I’m supposed to do tasks.
Then I got to my exit.
There had been an accident, and traffic was backed up for what looked like at least a mile. I sat there for almost another hour.
At first, I was remarkably reasonable about it. There’s been an accident. Someone is probably having a much worse morning than I am. Getting irritated isn’t going to make the cars move any faster. I’ll listen to something. It’s fine.
I was fine.
And then I noticed the left-turn lane.
Cars were sailing past all of us who had been sitting there, patiently waiting in the lanes that actually went where we were trying to go. One after another. They’d drive all the way to the front and then force themselves back in.
At first I just noticed them.
Then I started judging them.
Then I started keeping track of them.
Then I could feel the heat rising.
I wanted to honk. Not because honking would accomplish anything. Obviously it wouldn’t. I just wanted them to know.
I SEE YOU.
This was when I noticed something slightly alarming .
I might be turning into my mother.
My mother’s road rage is legendary in our family. This is not classified information. She knows it. Her children know it. I’m reasonably certain a few motorists in Sweden know it.
She’s also usually not wrong. Someone is following too closely? That’s dangerous, you need room to brake. Someone is doing something stupid in traffic? They probably shouldn’t be doing it.
It’s the delivery where Mom and I differ.
I might think, that person is following way too close.
Mom has been known to arrive rather quickly at MOTHERFUCKER.
All of her children tease her about this.
And yet there I was, sitting in Atlanta traffic, watching what felt like the hundredth car cruise past me in the left-turn lane, feeling my internal temperature steadily rising.
Oh no. Is this how it starts?
Fortunately, I remembered First Date Follow Up. It’s a radio segment where someone goes on a first date, is certain it went wonderfully, and then can’t understand why the other person has vanished off the face of the earth. They call the missing date to find out what went wrong.
It is ridiculous.
It is also extremely entertaining.
And, ironically, my mother is the one who told me about it.
So apparently my mother provided both the genetic predisposition toward road rage and the treatment for it.
I turned it on.
Within a few minutes, instead of monitoring the left-turn lane like an unpaid traffic enforcement officer, I was deeply invested in why some stranger wasn’t getting a second date.
The cars were still cutting in. Traffic was still barely moving. Nothing about my actual situation had changed.
But I had stopped caring quite so much.
By the time I got to the office, I was exhausted. Which seems ridiculous, considering I’d spent the previous two hours sitting down. But apparently trying not to lose your shit in traffic takes energy.
So yes, I’m complaining about traffic.
And while I’m breaking the rules, I’ve also been woken up around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning three nights in a row.
Traffic and sleep.
Two things nobody wants to hear you complain about.
I’ll try to come up with something more interesting next time.
In the meantime, if you see me sitting in traffic, talking angrily to people who cannot hear me that’s just the family gene showing up.
Not in the she likes music and occasionally DJs at a friend’s party kind of way.
She’s Acid Sussi.
She’s been playing clubs and events around Stockholm for years. She’s played Boiler Room. She and her longtime partner have a DJ duo called Solid Sliders, and they just put out a track called “Get Ill.” And more than a decade after she started doing it, she’s still out playing on weekends.
I find this ridiculously cool.
But here’s the thing.
I knew her when she just had the records.
So. Many. Records.
We met in school, although I don’t remember exactly when we went from knowing each other to really becoming friends. What I do remember is that music was always a huge part of who she was. She loved vinyl and, for as long as I can remember, wanted to DJ.
And then she actually did it.
There’s something really wonderful about watching someone you love actually do the thing they talked about doing when they were young.
Sussi and I have a lot of history long walks that turned into long talks, all-nighters spent talking and dancing in equal measure, raves we found our way to together. There are entire pieces of my younger life that have Sussi in them.
And after all these years, she’s still one of the people I can talk to about absolutely anything.
And when I say talk, I mean talk.
We can take one subject and disappear into it for hours. We don’t just exchange opinions and move on we dig, we question, we turn a thing over until we’ve looked at it from every angle. One thought leads to another and suddenly we’ve spent hours on something most people would have wrapped up in twenty minutes.
She also knows me well enough not to simply tell me what I want to hear. If I come to her with something difficult, I’ll get the love. I’ll get the understanding. And then, somewhere in there, she’ll ask a question that makes me stop and reconsider the whole thing.
And now the friend who has always been willing to dig a little deeper has officially become a therapist.
This year, Sussi graduated from Karolinska Institutet and is beginning an entirely new chapter in her life.
She’s had quite a few chapters already. She’s been a hairstylist. She studied psychology. She became a UX designer. She became Acid Sussi.
And now she’s a therapist.
Who’s still a DJ.
Of course she is.
What I love about her story is that she never seems to have discarded an old version of herself to make room for the next one. The psychology student didn’t replace the girl with the records. The UX designer didn’t replace the DJ. And becoming a therapist isn’t going to make Acid Sussi disappear.
She just kept adding chapters.
And the more I think about it, the more I suspect neither the DJ nor the therapist is really a new version of her. They were both there all along the girl surrounded by records who wanted to make people dance, and the friend who could spend hours talking about life, people, and why we do the things we do.
I remember the records.
I remember the long conversations.
I remember the dancing.
And now I get to watch one of my closest friends begin yet another chapter of her life.
I’m incredibly proud of the therapist she’s becoming.
I love the friend she’s always been. ❤️
And I still think it’s pretty damn cool that she became the DJ.
