Celebration!

I haven't been blogging or blog-hopping in a long while. Been busy focusing on other stuff and my blogging muscles have atrophied (in some ways). Plus I don't think I have that much to say anymore about my infertility journey, so I may be writing about other stuff in this blog from now on. 

I've mentioned here last year that I entered a writing competition. I knew I wouldn't be able to win because my Finnish ability was still basic (compared to Finnish writers), but I had a story to tell and there was nothing to lose. A few months ago I got a letter that stated that my piece was in the top 30, so my story made it to the anthology. YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYY!!!! It felt too good to be true, so even though I was happy, I tried to hold my horses. Then afterwards I had a call from the organization that held the competition, saying that my piece was in the top 20 and I was invited to the gift-giving ceremony. Unfortunately it was held in Helsinki, so I couldn't come due to my work (plus it's not that cheap to go there). 

Two days ago they had the ceremony and the published the list of winners. Six winners received money, whereas the other fourteen finalists will receive copies of the anthology. I'm one of the latter. I can't wait to get the anthology! Now I can truly celebrate and know that this isn't a dream! :-D 

Must admit, though, when I read the list of winners online, it was bittersweet. I felt like saying to my deceased dad, "Dad, even though there's no child carrying your blood through me, I've etched your (sur)name on a book."

You see, even though in my birth certificate in Indo and all my previous legal documents there I don't have my dad's surname, all of my legal documents here carry my dad's surname.*

Anyway, will you celebrate with me and dance along to this song? :-D :-D :-D


* This is because the crazy Indo officials wouldn't let my dad add his surname to my birth certificate. This doesn't only happen to me, but it happened to my brother as well as all the kids born during those period of time. However, when I first applied my passport, the crazy Indo official decided to add my dad's surname to my passport. FYI, nobody in Indonesia (none that I know of) changes their names when they get married, so they retain their birth names. I was planning on adding my husband's surname before infertility...but after infertility, I decided to keep my dad's surname. Nowadays I keep my dad's surname just because it's such a hassle to change all my cards/passport etc., but who knows maybe someday I'll change my mind.

The Beginning of a New Era?

My period has started getting weird. I remember skipping a month before we got married (not sure which year), but other than that my periods haven't been so weird until this year. My periods range between 31 - 43 days. I remember a few years ago it arrived on CD (calendar day) 45 and at that time I was scared of getting pregnant, so I was relieved when it finally arrived. At the beginning of this year, I had another period on CD 27. It had never happened before. Then this summer I didn't have any period for 65 days. Is it the start of peri-menopause, I wonder? 

In the beginning my period lasted 7 days and there was so much blood and for many years I almost always dirtied my uniform with some blood (ugh!), then for a long time now the length of my periods went down to 5 days and the amount of blood was thankfully getting less and less. The last period before this one only lasted 4 days and on the fifth day, I was squeaky clean. Not a drop of blood. I don't mind getting short and sweet periods, though. :-) If this is really the start of peri-menopause, no wonder I couldn't get pregnant when I started trying at (almost) 30. I thought I still had years of fertility left! After all, my mother had me at 32 and my brother at 34! 

How do I feel about the possibility of peri-menopause? Neutral so far. 

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On an altogether different note, I'm almost ready with the preparation for my mom's visit. Can't believe the day is coming soon. Felt like ages ago when we first started talking about it. I remember holding my breath every now and then, hoping that she stayed healthy (and alive!) to make it for her trip and now it's finally right in front of us! :-D

The Japanese learning has been put on hold for a long time. I've been focusing more on healing my bilateral tennis elbow and spending time with relatives this summer. This year has been full of physical healing trials and errors. I've also been forced to learn to set my boundaries and stick to them (even if it means disappointing people). Two people have told me that it took them two years to heal their tennis elbow, so I'm trying to be patient with myself. I hope my bosses and coworkers will also be that patient. So far they've been awesome with me, but nobody knows how long it'll take for me to heal fully. I've learnt a lot of things about stretching, self-massage, and strength training as well as bought and tried different types of exercise/massage tools. My new fave self-massage tool is a spiky ball. I combine using that with my Pain Hook and Gymstick foam roller.

Yesterday I finally sent a story to the Finnish (non-fiction) writing competition. I started writing it months ago and then got stuck. After a long break I continued writing it, but almost gave up as I thought it wasn't satisfactory. However, I decided to push through. A coworker had promised to read it, so I had to keep my promise. I finished the story, sent it to my coworker and she gave me some positive feedback and correction (bless her!). :-) I'm not hoping to win (though it'd be a nice surprise - there are more than one prizes), but I hope that my story is one of those that will be published. However, my deepest wish is to see the faces of the judges as they read my story. That would be the best thing ever! :-D 

"Write Me!"

Sometime near the end of last year, I spotted a writing competition on a Finnish magazine. I took a photo of the competition with my mobile and I was so psyched in submitting my entry. The competition ends at the end of summer this year, so I wasn't in a hurry as I had a story in mind already. The competition isn't non-fiction. However, soon after I got really busy at work and then I got tennis elbow. During the time I was on my sick leave, I was in such a dark place that the competition was the last thing I had in mind.

Must admit that on my darker days back then, I felt some shame over my tennis elbow. It was the first time I had invisible health symptoms. I even avoided going to my workplace as much as I could. I was afraid of not only losing my job altogether, but not being able to work well with my arms anymore. Both arms! What kind of job would I be able to do in this small village if that happened? And the thing is, I still enjoy my job, so I'd still love to continue doing it.

Thankfully my long and winding road to recovery finally started in the middle of January and now I've been back to work for a full month already. I still have some tennis elbow symptoms and the degree of the symptoms depends on what I've been doing, but at the very least I can go back to work as long as I don't do too much work. Anyway, I felt like my life was put on hold before I found out my final diagnosis and before I met my two physiotherapists. I tried many things I found online, but since they usually made me feel more pain afterwards, I refrained from doing them. It was difficult to know what to do, what not to do, how much I should do the things I should do, when would be safe to start doing it, etc. Now I've gotten more help and pointers on what to work on, so I've also spent time working out more than before.

Anyway, back to the writing competition. Now that I feel that my new year has finally started, the writing competition popped back into my mind. It's mid March already, so I don't have as much time to write my story. The other day I started thinking about how to start it off and for the first time in a long time, I literally felt joy bursting forth. It was so much fun to think of different ways to start a story! It's as if the words are begging me, "Write me! Write meeee!", so I can only obey them he he he...I feel excited simply by imagining some people (the judges) who are going to read my story. I hope the story will make them smile. :-D

I'll start blog-hopping bit by bit from now on. It's been a long time since I last wrote a blog post here.  

 

Splendid Sodankylä

I've been silent due to many reasons. One of the major reasons is my wrist/thumb/arm problem. I've been staying away from using the computer to rest my active hand fully. The second major reason is linked to my previous post. 

Let me try to summarize it. Basically speaking, written text is by far my most fave form of communication. Always has been, always will be.

The barrage of written text after the Paris attacks was like the last straw that broke my back. It's like this: if written text is like my fave chair in the house (bad analogy, I know), then I feel like people are throwing their fave chairs at one another instead of inviting other people to sit there and have a good, private discussion. And it scared the shit out of me. It was disturbing enough to be surrounded by the mirrors of what-I-could-have-done (I could easily have been one of those people), but it was all the more disturbing to see so many chairs being hurled at one another. It also disturbed me that people used social media as a means to somehow say this: "This is what I stand for. If you're not with me, then you're against me." "If you stand for XX, then I'll delete you from my friend's list." Ugh. Ugh. And more ugh.

My most fave form of communication never felt like the destructive two-edged blade the way it did after the Paris attacks. And it hurt. It hurt. It hurt that I became scared of using that tool to express myself, even though it had always been a tool that makes me feel the most alive. And another disturbing thing is the TMI factor. It feels like in the past, we only get to know other people's inner beliefs/personal opinions when you talk to them/write to them/spend time with them in real life. These days, it almost feels like Mel Gibson in the movie where he suddenly got the ability to read people's minds. On a smaller scale, it doesn't feel disturbing, but when it feels like the global world is giving you TMI, it's overwhelming.

So I took time to recharge and stay away from all the "white noise" and figure out how I wanted to use social media. Here are some things that I've found during my cave time:

- We all make mistakes. We all fuck up. I'm also prone to reacting when I'm in fear, prone to lashing out when I'm angry, prone to defending myself, prone to be narrow-minded and obstinate in my beliefs and ignorant. I've also hurt other people with or without intending to do so. My words have been misunderstood or taken out of context. My words may have fueled other people's feelings to a certain direction and may have created more chaos than peace. But you know what? That's all a package of life. The only people who don't make mistakes are the ones who don't do anything. Yes, silence is sometimes better and wiser than words and yes, I've made the mistakes in speaking when I'm supposed to be silent and not speaking when I'm supposed to speak up, but what matters most is that as long as I have another day to live, then it's a brand new day to do better.

- Life is a journey of learning. So go and write, speak and make mistakes and learn from them. Learn to be brave to speak when you need to speak up and learn to shut your mouth when necessary.

- No matter how hopeless an act of peace can be among those who want to create chaos for their own personal reasons/gain, keep striving to spread peace wherever you go, because the world doesn't need more hatred.

- Even though there is a potential of darkness within each of us (like Yin/Yang), I shouldn't be afraid of the darkness (during my low moments I felt like dark shadows were creeping out from the corners to get me), but instead I should focus on how the darkness can help me see some things better, for example how bright the stars and moon can be when it's pitch dark all around me. Focus on those stars and moon (or the Aurora or other people's lit inner candles) instead of the shadows that you're afraid may swallow you up whole.

On a totally different note, I went for a walk along the river bank yesterday and took a video. I combined the video with last year's Christmas video, added a song and some quotes. Here's my End of Year greeting to you all...

The Introvert In Me

Infertility, PMS, and friendship. Not a good combo, eh? Surely not. Especially when one of the friends is pregnant. Especially if the introvert in the group hasn't realized the important difference between herself and the rest of the group. It took several emails back and forth as well as a few days of pondering what went wrong before I finally felt a huge weight lifted off of me.

To cut the story short, my main problem (blown up by PMS) has been the fact that I'm the only one in my group of closest friends who relies on writing as the best/most fave kind of communication. Not writing SMS or short texts like in Twitter, mind you...but writing emails and blog posts. I just LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE writing in details about what I've been through and what I've been thinking about and I love finding out why I feel a certain way and in return I LOVE LOVE LOVE reading in details about other people's lives. 

In the past, I noticed that I had a high expectation on this type of communication and when I found out that my friends couldn't cope with it, I tried to lower my expectations and I tried my best to shorten my emails (and leave the details to my blog posts). However, despite my best efforts, I still had too high an expectation it seems. My PMS brought it forth this time because one of us is pregnant and I FELT that she had received more responses (yep, jealousy attack being blown up by PMS!). 


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After pondering on what the problem was, though, I realized that it was foolish of me to expect that people whose main form of communication wasn't writing to respond to me the way that I had tried to respond to them. It's like asking them to keep on watching horror movies with me and comment on those horror movies. As much as they love me and as much as they want to meet me halfway, the best thing I can expect from them is to watch a few of those movies and comment on a few of them, but I can't expect them to do more than that. Why? Because if the situation were reversed, I wouldn't be able to do the same. 

Most of them prefer live chats or face-to-face interaction or phone calls. And I have been blindly thinking that because we all live in different cities and countries, emailing is the most preferable method of communication. How wrong I was! Lately they have preferred talking in WhatsApp or live chats because their lives are much busier than I am and I'm the one who can't cope with WhatsApp chats because they exhaust me so much (because I'm more of a detailed person and when- due to time difference - I'm left with hundreds of live chat messages, I'm overwhelmed and I don't know what to do because I tend to want to reply to every single one of them - or at least the important ones and it takes a LONG time to read through all the messages and figure out which ones need replying). This is why I prefer emailing, but for them, emailing takes more time and effort to reply, whereas during live chat when some of them are online at the same time, they can get responses ASAP. 

Anyway, the second problem was infertility thrown in the mixture of all that. In my PMS-loaded brain which was already full of confusion because of my own expectation, I thought of the not-so-distant future when my pregnant friend's baby would be born and how there would be so many more bonding moments between the mothers in our group and this freaked me out because I could just imagine how many times in the future would I be reminded of my own losses (the birth story, the baby room, the first smile, the first word, etc.) when many of them would naturally be ooh-aahing all the lovely moments and sharing their own kids' moments. I know, I know, my overworked PMS-loaded brain couldn't stop thinking way too far ahead!

So all those feelings made me reach out to them, asking if it was too much to ask if I asked for a little bit more response (honestly, I felt like a cranky little child begging for attention when I wrote the email), but in the end the emails between us back and forth made me realize that the only possible way to sort this mess is for me to step back and let go of my expectation (all of it, not just a part of it). I need to remember that for them, emailing is tough to follow and that they've given all they can. I know that they'll be there for me when the going gets tough (they've always been there), but it's unhealthy for me to expect them to respond the way I have responded to them. You see, for years I've always tried to respond to as many little details of their emails as possible and I've just realized that they don't even expect me to do so!!! Talk about a shocking moment for me! In my mind, I was respecting their time in their busy lives by responding to as many points in their emails as possible, but it wasn't even necessary! Yep, major doh moment!

For all it's worth, though, I'm just glad that I've sorted through all the mess. Phew! Now I just hope that I haven't damaged this friendship too much by making them worried about what to write (esp. when it's about their kids), because I DO want to know about their kids, though I have told them that I can't deny that on bad days (PMS days), the stories remind me of my own losses, but on good days, I'm very happy to read about their kids. But anyway, after the stormy mess, here's what I feel now: