Love and roots

Oh, hello, my old blog! 

All of your followers have probably disappeared, sorry about that. But I have things to tell you, so I'm back!

Kävelin kivisiä katuja,

ajelin kehäteitä.

Hiihtelin elämäni latuja,

ajattelin meitä,

kuinka nuorina tahdoimme

päästä maailman syliin.

Minkä sille me mahdoimme:

jäätiin maalikyliin.

--

Näissä elämän vesikeleissä

hahmottuvat haasteemme suuret.

Tärkeintä loppupeleissä

on rakkaus ja juuret.

I may have done the most radical thing I've ever done. I moved to Finland in August.

Making the decision to move took a lot longer than my decision to move to Scotland. That was something I didn't even have to think about. But moving to Finland was a tough decision to make.

I had fears that I would just "move back" and get stuck. I was worried that Finland would be cold and dark and I that would just get depressed and scared of life. — But actually: Scotland is cold and dark and I had been living there for 7 years. That's almost a decade. Practically (if you use a little bit of imagination and don't think about it too hard or precisely), a 3rd of my life. So I was about to get stuck there and wanted to try something else. I could have moved to somewhere completely different: Germany, Sweden, Japan...?

But no, Finland was worth a try. I had never lived here as an adult before. I have a 5-year old sister and a 3-year old goddaughter. It was about a time to get to know them. Being a bit closer to be able to meet them a bit more often wouldn't be so bad, right?

So I tried it.

I moved to Finland with my new kitten. And so far it's been awesome. I've probably never been this happy. And maybe it's time to share some of this happiness with you! Goodbye depression blog, hello happiness blog! That's kind of what the blog was about in the first place though, but maybe it's good to inform you about the fact that I've just had the best autumn of my life.

Finland has been so sunny. I've met dozens of fantastic people. I feel really extroverted in Finland compared to typical Finns you find in the streets. Well duh, who speaks to strangers in the street? (Apparently me.)  I thought I might be lonely if I lived alone, but it's been quite the opposite. Now, I actually have to leave the house to socialise and apparently I do that. Sometimes I also have guests over. And I have a cat, so there is no boring times at home ever. Not that I even know how to get bored.

I've started a new hobby and somehow got a temporary job where I'm allowed to drink water and go to the toilet. And all of my best friends live really close to me so I actually get to see them more than a couple of times a year. Instead of random messages I now get phone calls of whether I can meet them for coffee straight away. It's so crazy after so many years of communicating primarily online.

I love my friends, I love my life, I love my cat, and my roots are here. This city I moved to has been completely new to me, but maybe I'll grow some of my roots here. Some of them I left behind in Scotland. Roots all over the place. 

About hate and anger

I really didn't want to post this, because I want to be a person who doesn't hate. But I am struggling with that and am confused why. So I decided to write about it. Maybe it will help me to get over it. I gave myself a love therapy session here earlier and it helped. So maybe this will too. But I warn you, it will be a rant. If you came here looking for something sophisticated, you won't find it here.

I'm far from perfect and apparently have  many insecurities that I'm trying to work on. In general I really like people. Many people inspire me and I want to learn from their good qualities and develop myself to become better. I want to see the good in people.

© Yle Areena: Au Pairit Los Angelesissa.

But sometimes I have a bad day and feel disappointed and it's just not that easy. And I catch myself thinking bad and unhelpful thoughts. For example, the other day, I was watching a Finnish reality TV show Au Pairit Los Angelesissa  ("Au pairs in Los Angeles"), and noticed that I thought that one of the girls had a terrible style. She wore a lot of really cakey make-up and spider-like fake lashes, and I just didn't like that type of make-up. But then I thought about it and realised how judgemental I was. She was a teenager which is the best time to try out absolutely any style! She clearly liked her style and it was the way she expressed herself — actually she was great and really smart! After that realisation she became my favourite person in the series. I absolutely hate the fact how quickly I judged her in the first place based on her appearance. Just because I personally wouldn't use some sort of make-up doesn't mean that there's something wrong with that style.

Maybe I was so quick to judge after I was bullied at school, which has made me nervous around certain kind of people. And suspicious about certain appearances. It's crazy and I should try to learn to be less judgemental. And I most definitely don't hate any of my bullies. I wouldn't even be able to name them if I had to.

But there are two people I still do hate. And I don't know what to do about that. So here I am to confess you everything about my unhelpful thoughts.

© Fab After Forty.

The first person really angers me. A few years ago, I was suffering from depression and was really lonely. I asked her if she would like to meet up for a cup of coffee with me sometime. We had previously spoken about that, so it wasn't out of the blue. Although, of course in UK you sometimes suggest meeting up when you don't really mean it. But still, I thought I'd ask because I really needed more pleasant activities in my day and a human to talk to. We were messaging about how we were doing and I was honest with her, about my anxiety and depression. She said that other people's company helps with that. So I asked her if she would like to meet me for coffee because at the time I didn't feel like I had other people I could just meet like that. And then she told me that I should just go to therapy and get professional help and take a gap year. And honestly, I had tried to get to therapy but the queue was 2 years long. It can be difficult for a healthy person to understand how difficult it is to find and get professional help for mental health issues. Often you have to be self-destructive to even get on the waiting list. But I didn't want her to be my therapist. I just wanted to have coffee with a real human being. I am still hurt and angry about that and I hate her. I hate her! And I don't know why. But I never told her how much her words hurt me. She's still my Facebook friend and she keeps posting really inconsiderate and self-boasting comments on Facebook. But maybe I am just so annoyed with everything she posts because I have such strong feelings about that incident and her. I have considered deleting her, but I'm not sure if that's the best solution. 

She reminds me of another person I used to hate. There was a similar incident around the same time, when I was really sad about having no one in my life. I was so depressed and slightly suicidal and I was crying at someone else's home, because I just didn't want to go home alone. And I was told to leave. And I wasn't even angry because I was told to leave. I completely understand how annoying it must have been to have me around that day. I was angry because she told someone who was crying and suicidal to go away. You should never do that. You take the time to make them a cup of tea. If you don't have time to listen to them, you tell them that they are welcome to stay as long as they need to, even if you are busy. Or you make other arrangements. You make sure they are okay to walk home. WHATEVER. Never, walk pass a crying lonely person, offer a tissue. Never leave a suicidal person alone. Would you walk pass a person ready to jump of a bridge? Would you kick out a suicidal person? If so, it's very likely that I will hate you.

©Quotes Lover.

At least for a moment. I don't actually hate her anymore, I don't have such feelings towards her, but I still haven't forgiven her for kicking out a suicidal person, even though I have forgiven her kicking out me.

The other person I notice myself hating hasn't actually done anything like that. She didn't invite me to her Hallowe'en party once, which is hardly a reason to even dislike someone. But I get these same angry and hateful feelings about her when I see things she posts on Facebook. (Because Facebook obviously is the place where the social things happen with people you don't actually see in real life anymore.) And I really used to like her. I've written a blog post in my less public blog about how much I missed her when I was on a summer holiday. And I used to be so happy to see her. But after that Hallowe'en party incident something changed and now everything about her annoys me. Do I need some therapy again? Or should I perhaps just delete her on Facebook and forget about her like she's forgotten about me?

©Rick Quotes.

Wow, I sound really shallow and bitter. I am not proud of this. I just want to let go so bad.

But yes, unfortunately, there are two people I still hate, but I am working on it. People suck and I need to accept it and get over it. This post really sucked. Maybe next time I'll tell you about people I love.

What are all these clothes?

I have too much stuff. My inner nomadic soul is suffering from owning this much stuff. But I just love all of my stuff. I haven't figured out how to get rid of it all, but I just dream of owning little enough so that it wouldn't tie my down so much to where I'm living at the moment.

I'm doing my second load of washing today, but I don't understand where I am going to put it after it's clean. My laundry basket is so full I can't fit any more clothes in it. My wardrobe is full. My chest of drawers won't even close. I have a clothes horse up, covered in pyjamas I washed yesterday. And guess what? The cliché: "I have nothing to wear", quite often describes the thoughts that are going through my mind when I'm trying to get dressed.

This is where I lived and how I dried my laundry in first year.

Why is that? Do I really have nothing to wear or is everything I'd like to wear in that overflowing laundry basket? What is all that stuff that is making my wardrobe full? Do I ever wear them? How do I find out? Should I literally just wash everything and start taking notes of what I am actually wearing? How many clothes does a person like me actually need anyway? Do I want to become a person who wears the same clothes everyday? Am I already that person without realising and am just trying to hide that truth from myself by owning all of those other clothes? When was the last time I bought new clothes anyway? When was the last time I donated some clothes to charity?

Home sweet home and all of my lovely clothes. In 2008.

Okay, the last time I bought new clothes was last week. I bought two new vests from Primark because the ones I wear all the time are so worn I'm worried they will fall apart soon. And the other week I took a couple of jackets I never wear to a swap shop at uni. So I am trying. 

But maybe I should do more. Should I really start taking notes of what I like to wear? And create statistics? And renew my wardrobe so that it looks like a wardrobe that belongs to a 25 year-old (me). I'm worried there's a big "backlog" of my teenage years; clothes I am now keeping there just in case I decide not to do laundry for 6 months. Completely good clothes that I could definitely wear so that I wouldn't have to walk around naked.

Definitely not naked.

According to Jenna Marbles it's just embarrassing to keep wearing the same clothes all the time. I don't entirely follow that ideology but as a girl living in this society I am still probably affected by that. And also alarmingly I can recognise some similarities in my behaviour and this video:

My wardrobe is a lot smaller than hers though, you can see it in her "How Guys Get Dressed" -video. And I am planning to move house at some point in the not so distant future and I really need to get rid of a lot of it before that. I need to go through my sock drawer so that I could at least occasionally find matching socks. But I am sad to throw out all of those odd socks. But I honestly don't know what I could ever do with them. I am not a crafty person. And I don't like wearing matching socks anymore. I've done it. It was great, but sadly I have now moved on. I also need to get rid of my old clothes that I am saving as a backup. Perhaps, I should organise my clothes into categories when I take them down. Primary clothes and secondary clothes? And then I can donate all of those secondary clothes when it's time to move on with my life. That could potentially work.

Do you ever experience these problems? And how do you manage to throw out your old clothes?

Hyperopic vision problems

Hello,

I just wanted to give you a health update and ask for some advice. I had the most horrible week last week. I had a migraine all week that resulted me needing to go to a hospital in the middle of the night.

They found nothing wrong and thought it might be my prescription and sent me to an emergency appointment with an optometrist, but they found nothing wrong with my prescription.

I am fairly frustrated with my eyes at the moment and if you have any experiences or tips to share with me — they are the most welcome! Especially if you have similar eye-sight to mine. 

I've spent ages trying to search experiences that are similar to mine, but found nothing. I was almost hopeful when I found a promising YouTube-video made by a lady who was far-sighted, but then she started talking about Jesus and how he gave people different prescriptions and then started reading out bits from the Bible, and it wasn't really what I was looking for. But if you are looking for a "short discussion on receiving the prescribed vision adjustment and having the eyes of your heart enlightened through the true Counselor, the Holy Spirit" then feel free to watch her video. It was interesting, but I really was just looking for people's experiences with contact lenses when dealing with far-sightedness and astigmatism. But I just found experiences from people who were near-sighted.

Let me just tell you a little bit about my eyesight.

According to my mum, I had bad strabismus when I was little and wore glasses since I was 2 years old. This might be the reason why I still can't see 3D.

My strabismus, however, got pretty much fixed and I was able to see well without glasses — I stopped wearing them when I was 13. Then five years ago, I got reading glasses that I wore when I was working on something. Then, I started getting migraines that may have been caused, or at least made worse, by the contraceptive pill. I didn't want to make them even worse by needing to strain my eyes too much and started wearing glasses everyday.

According to my prescription I am far-sighted and have astigmatism. So when I sit on a sofa at home and look in front of me, the world looks like this:

How I see the world.

It's difficult to see things near me, but I can see well far away. This is fixed when I put my glasses on. After last weeks migraines though I started wondering whether they actually could be caused by the fact that my glasses keep constantly sliding down my nose.

I figured that if I wore contact lenses I most definitely wouldn't have that problem because they would stay on my eye. It just apparently cannot be that easy. I did write about my initial contact lens -struggle but the saga continues. I wore contact lenses at work for almost a year and was able to see things that were close to me but I had no hope seeing far away. I realised how bad my eye sight is with my contact lenses when I tried wearing them again last weekend to stop the headaches.

My vision with contact lenses.

Sure I can read medication leaflets with my contacts in but activities like watching TV are completely out of question. Unless I move it on the coffee table, approximately half a meter from my face. That's what I had to do last weekend. But it just isn't very practical.

I guess the way I see the world with contact lenses is quite similar to how most young people with bad eye-sight see the world. At least I've met far more near-sighted people than far-sighted people.

I'm going to go and see the optician again and ask about this, because I don't understand why it's happening since as far as I understand, my prescription is pretty much the same for both; my glasses and contact lenses. But I would also like to know about your experiences! Have you got similar experiences with contact lenses?!

In the mean time, I've solved my vision problem by properly attaching my glasses to my head.

I tied some hair ties around the frames. I then attached the hair ties to this beautiful headband with a hair pin. This keeps my glasses still, but makes it more annoying to take them off. But at least the headaches have stopped for now!

Any words of wisdom or personal experiences?

Also, if you came to look at pretty pictures and have not yet learned that this is not the best place for that, I would like to apologise your disappointment and the fact that I haven't really had the motivation to try and look presentable or tidy the house or use a proper camera to take these pictures. They are here mostly for expressional purposes.

Golden Hair!

Hi!

Surprises, I got bored with my hair again! I dyed it earlier with some non-permanent hair dye, which gave my hair a nicer shade, but after about a week I decided I wanted to try something different and decided to try a permanent hair dye.

I wanted to try and get my hair a bit lighter. I could have of course bleached my hair. I've heard that Jerome Russell Bblonde -line is good, but I decided to be a rebel and experiment something that I thought would be a bit gentler. I did a little bit of online research and watched some convincing YouTube-videos and decided to try out a brand called Naturtint. They have a very good colour chart and it had clear instructions how to mix the colours to get a shade you might want. I'm not sure if most self-use hair dyes do that because I'm very new to this hair-dying business. But for me it made it a lot easier and I was more confident about trying out this hair dye.

When I started my hair was maybe a bit an ashy light brown colour, with some lighter highlights? This was mostly due to my previous hair-dying experiment. Naturtint recommended to choose a colour which is 2 shades lighter than my starting colour, so I actually should have probably chosen the colour 9N. But of course I was a rebel and didn't follow the recommendations. I chose the lightest colour: 10N. But I wanted to believe that 10N would be more effective. I have no way of testing this theory, but I'm just going to show you what happened to my hair and make some sort of a review of this product.

I ordered this dye online, but you can also find it at Holland & Barrett and maybe at some other health shops. I'm not sure if this product is any healthier than most box hair dyes, but it doesn't contain ammonia, parabens, silicones, paraffin, mineral oils, heavy metals, artificial fragrances, SLS or formaldehyde derivates. I guess it's good that some of these are not included. I don't really need my hair dye to be fragranced. But I'm sure ammonia for instance has been replaced by some other chemical that does the same job. You can dye your hair darker with henna and coffee* but if you want to go lighter like me, you need some peroxide and other stuff.

The boxed contained the usual things: colourant, developer and gloves. So I put the gloves on and mixed the colourant and the developer. Unfortunately, I was a bit useless and run out of dye. But I combed my hair to get a more even spread and it was all OK after that.  One box is actually enough for shoulder length hair if you know how to spread it. So if you are new to hair dying and use this hair dye I recommend that you mix the dye in a bowl so that you can see how much dye you have left.

Apparently I'm just asking for rude anonymous comments by adding these unflattering photos here.... I don't know if all hair dyes are like this, but I found it really easy to comb my hair like this. Then I just hang out for 40 minutes before I went back to bathroom to wash my hair.

First, I tried to rinse all the dye out of my hair, but it was a bit difficult because my hair was so dry it just felt like one big knot. But I did that until the water seemed clear and then I decided to shampoo it.

The box provided samples of shampoo and Naturtint Nutrideep Multiplier Protective Cream which is a conditioner/hair mask. I guess the shampoo is a toning shampoo. It foamed a lot and left my hair feeling even more like knot. But at least it no longer felt like there was hair dye left. Then I tried the Nutrideep Multiplier and it smoothed all the knots straight away. I left it on for 2 minutes as instructed and then rinsed it out. It was fantastic! I actually ordered two tubes of it so that I could keep using it. Best conditioner I have ever tried! My hair has never really needed a conditioner though, so I've just used whatever, so I am not the most experienced person in this field. But for me it was amazing.

Under my living room light the colour looked very golden. Naturtint actually has dyes that have a more golden shade. I had chosen a more natural shade, but the result still looked more golden. I feel that if I look at their colour chart, I went from 7N to 8G with their hair dye 10N. But it's okay, I really liked the result. And it didn't look as brassy as some other blonding attempts I've seen.

It's entirely possible that my hair doesn't even look that golden outside. But I rarely realise to take selfies outside, and unfortunately, I don't have anyone who would just spontaneously take photos of me. It would be useful in this sort of situations. 

But I'm curious and wanted to try and see what silver shampoo would do to my hair, even if I wasn't trying to go platinum. So I went and bought Pro:voke's silver shampoo.

I found that it worked well, although the result might be more noticeable if my hair was lighter. I apologise for random drunken bathroom photos, but the Hilton just had better lighting than my flat does. Apparently the lighting makes a big difference here which I maybe should have realised before. Maybe in the future I'll try to be awake and alert while the sun is up. After that I can provide you with some proper before and after photos.

But I found this dye very good and I can recommend it! As long as you're prepared for it to go a bit more golden than what the picture suggests. The company actually does mention that on their website as well, and suggests that you mix the neutral dye with their ashy dye (10N + 10A in my case), but I didn't want to do that this time because I was curious to see how the dye would work on its own. I'm really happy with the result. And this range has good colour choices and their dyes don't stink as awful as some other ones I've encountered before.

Have you tried any particularly good hair dyes? What do you think of this result?