kareina

I reached out to a friend far away a week or so ago, and got a reply today. Since my reply to him includes a good summary of my last decade, I thought I would share it here, too:

How wonderful to hear from you.  I bet that you are truly beautiful with white whiskers to compliment your eyes!  How have the years been treating you otherwise? What are you up to? How has your life changed, and how is the the same, since last we spoke?

Have you spoken with any physical therapists about the knees? Perhaps there is something you could be doing to make them complain less?  I had a problem with my hips some years back--when I flew to Australia to apply for my permanent resident visa for living in Sweden all those hours of sitting without the option to get up and move meant that my hips (specifically where the leg tendons attach at the front of the hips) started aching, and continued to bother me for weeks afterwards, hurting especially after sleeping a couple of hours (probably due to my life-long habit of curling to sleep, so same deep bend there as when sitting).  So I spoke to a physical therapist and he explained that the problem wasn't with the front of my hips (where the pain was), but with a small muscle in my rump that was under-developed with respect to all of is neighbours. He gave me some exercises to strengthen that muscle (which, at first were pure torture, even though I needed to only hold the pose for 10 seconds), and, sure enough, the pain in the front of my hips went away.  Since then I occasionally go through periods where I am not doing those exercises for a while, and then I start waking up with sore hips again, but when I do them even semi-regularly (they haven't been torture in ages) there is no discomfort at all.  I have no idea if knee complaints can also be helped so simply, but if you haven't looked into it, it might be worth the time to do so. :-)

As it turned out, that session with the physical therapist was the trigger for a pretty serious change in my lifestyle. I have been doing daily yoga since 2003, and got in plenty of walking and dancing, so my physical fitness was really quite reasonable. But when I understood that all of my movement had done nothing all all to exercise that small muscle, I started wondering what other muscles I had which were likewise neglected, and I decided to hire a personal trainer for a year to improve my overall strength and fitness, especially my upper body.  These days I have no problems at all standing on my hands against a wall, and doing partial hand-stand push-ups (while my feet are against the wall), and can even hold the handstand for a second or two in the middle of the room (and practice doing so daily, so that time is likely to keep improving).  Around the same time that I started working out I also became active in one of the on campus student clubs, Phire, a "jester group" (gycklargrupp), which does all sorts of "circus arts" including juggling, staff spinning, fire shows, and, my personal favourite, acroyoga.  You might recall that I never outgrew the "pick me up, carry me" stage of childhood, and now I have friends (half my age, or younger), who not only pick me up, but spin me around on their upraised feet!  Life is wonderful. (If you want to see a few videos of my acroyoga sessions with friends, they are available on line here.

In addition to the acroyoga I keep busy through the SCA (where I try, and sometimes succeed, to convince friends to join me in acroyoga), both at the local level (this is the Shire of Frostheim), and, when the travel budget permits, at the Principality and Kingdom level, and Swedish Folk dance. I really love living in Luleå, and encourage you and your sweetie to come visit me sometime.  Luleå lacks mountains, but it has pretty much everything else I would want for a happy life, and it doesn't take that long to get to Norway from here, which has plenty of mountain.  We are far enough north to have as good of winter as is possible these days (while it does, sadly, warm up above zero multiple times each winter, causing the footpaths and roads to get slippery and the snow pack to shrink and get crusty, the snow doesn't go completely away, and we stil have more than half a meter's worth in our yard as I type) and good northern light viewing opportunities. The city is reasonably small, with lots of forest and lakes within the borders, and the university is located in a suburb at the edge of town, and my house is four km further out from there, just on the other side of a Nature Reserve, giving me a nice walk or bike ride (depending on the season and if it is likely to snow before time to go home--they plow the bike path pretty promptly, but my recumbent trike sits pretty low to the ground, so if there have been more than 10-15 cm I don't want to pedal till I am certain they have gotten to that path).

Our property is 2.5 hectares, and came with lots of wild strawberries and many, many black currant bushes (a former owner put them in during the 1970's as a cash crop, but by the time we bought the house the patch had been neglected for at least a decade. We have tried, but even with the help of friends we have never managed to harvest all of the black currants, but we keep lots of berries in the freezer, dry lots to add to my muesli, and make jam, jelly, and some years "saft" (I don't know a good English translation--it is what you get when you run steam through the berries (+/- sugar) and collect the concentrated juice thus formed, to later mix with water or sparkling water to drink), and more nettles than I can eat (I dry lots of them, so I can keep adding them to things I cook all winter long).  I have also learned to do a bit of gardening in addition to harvesting what grows here on its own, and am enjoying it.

Relationship wise I still own a house with David (Kjartan is his SCA name), who was the reason I moved here in the first place, back in January of 2011.  However, these days his primary romantic relationship is with Caroline, a delightful lady who lives in an apartment very near the university, where David works, for the IT department. He lives primarily at her apartment, in part because it is easier to walk to work from there, but mostly because that is where she is sleeping and he prefers to sleep by her side, but he spends time at the house to work on projects here, sometimes with me, and sometimes on his own.  They first met many years ago, when she rented our guest room for a month. She had posted to the Frostheim FB group that she had a short term job in Luleå, but wasn't having any luck finding an apartment for rent, and did anyone have a room she could rent for one month.  We had only that week finished fixing up the basement guest room (it had some serious issues when we moved in, including a raised floor with mould under it, which we took away), so we said she could stay with us, and that worked out very well. By the end of that month she and he had gotten together. Then she returned to Göteborg to finish up her degree (biology), and they did the long-distance thing for a few years. 

Eventually she graduated and moved in with us, but after a year or so she realised that she would rather have her own space. She prefers to go out for her social activity, and have home be a quiet refuge, or, perhaps, occasionally, invite a couple close friends over now and then, with the menu planned out for the occasion well in advance. I, on the other hand, prefer to have people drop by randomly and uninvited, any time of the day or night. This contrast might have been easier to balance, but this is a small house built in 1966, and there is no where in the house where she can be where she can't clearly hear what is happening in all other parts of the house.  So now they mostly live at the apartment, and when she feels for entertaining, sometimes she invites people to the house, and I am happy because the house is full, and she is happy because afterwards she can go back to her nice, quiet apartment.  

I have had an occasional few other lovers myself in the years I have been in Sweden, but none that have blossomed into a more serious long term connection.  In fact, the friends I have fallen for most seriously have been ones who care for me deeply as friends, but are not at all romantically interested in me, causing me to refer to them as "my unrequited loves", a connection that is delightful, but I do confess that it would be nice if one of them (or someone else I could fall for) were interested in an even closer connection. 

The other physical change in my life that I am both most happy with, and which is so natural/normal that I often forget it was ever different than it is now, is that a year ago I finally got my breasts removed. I have only wanted them gone since they first started growing, when I was around 13 or so, but in the US I couldn't afford it.  I did ask google when I first moved to Sweden about breast removal, but the only web page I found at that time was for a private medical practice here in Luleå that offered "breast reduction" surgery for 50,000 SEK (just over $5,000 at today's exchange rate), and didn't have the cash at that time, so continued to think of it as a "would be nice, but still isn't possible" thing for a number of years. Then one year one of my SCA friends in Germany was posting about her struggles to get puberty blockers for her daughter so that when the daughter grew up the surgery needed to finish her transition to have her body's gender match her actual gender would be easier, and I couldn't help but wish that I had known about puberty blockers when I was little--how much better life would have been if I had never grown the breasts (or had to deal with menstruation) in the first place.  But in my case, I wouldn't have wanted them to make it easier to become a man, but only because I didn't wish to be a woman--I am totally ok with being a little girl.  
Around the same time one of my SCA friends in California posted photos to FB about his mastectomy, and how happy he was to have them gone so that he looks more like the man he is.  So I emailed him and asked how he was able to afford that surgery, given that he is a student?  He replied that his dad's insurance covered it, as part of changing his gender.  This conversation inspired me to call the Swedish National Health line phone number and ask "I understand that Sweden's medical care will help one change gender. What about those of us who never wanted a gender in the first place?"  They replied that I would need to call my local health clinic and do an initial screening interview, and if they thought it was appropriate they would refer me to a psychologist, who could then refer me to a surgeon.  So I hung up the phone, and promptly called the local health clinic. I started by telling them only that the national number told me to call them, they opened my file on the computer, read what had already been entered in there from the national number, and replied "We have an appointment available next Tuesday, is that ok".  

I met with the nurse there, explained how I have always felt about it, and pointed out that since I didn't want to be a man either, and that time was already solving the problems associated with having a uterus, that it would be pretty easy--only the breasts would need to go.  At the end of that appointment she sent her recommendation off to the psychologist's office.  A week or three later I got a letter from them saying "you aren't depressed, you don't need our help, we will refer you directly to the surgeon".  Another few months later and I met with the surgeon, who asked important questions about exactly what I wanted, and confirming that I understood that this was a permanent change, and there is no going back.  Then my name was entered into the queue, behind everyone who needed a mastectomy for health reasons (e.g. cancer), and another year or so later it was my turn.  The surgery was done as an outpatient thing--check in at 06:30, and home and sleeping in my own bed by 10:00. I, of course, went to an indoor SCA event that weekend (surgery was on a Thursday). Some people there asked "shouldn't you be at home?", to which I replied "I am home, but here I have lots of friends to fetch and carry for me and make certain I don't over do it".  They did, too.  

So, there you have it, a (not so short) summary of my life in Sweden.  There are changes on the horizon, as my current job as a laboratory manage winds to a close as we outsource the lab (for budget reasons), but it is much too soon to say what will happen next. There have been job applications locally and abroad, but I have till December before this job ends, so I am not too stressed about it, something fun will come up, of that I am certain.

Do please write back and let me know how you are doing. I may be crap at keeping in touch, but I do think of you often, and fondly.