back to writing / back to myworld

Predictably, my middle school relationship didn’t last. We made the long distance thing work for a few months, but my heart wasn’t really in it anymore and we broke up.

I was excited about my new school. Although it was a public school and had no tuition fees, it was also one of what we call the “elite” schools in Estonia — the schools that consistently rank at the top of nationwide charts for exam results. Being an elite school, it did have more resources than regular public schools, and since there was a lot of competition and it was more difficult to get in, inevitably, most of the students came from wealthier families who were able to invest in their childrens’ education (and, in many cases, had the right contacts).

I quickly bonded with the two other noticably less-wealthy girls in my grade. Thinking back on it, they kind of represented two different sides of me: one (we’ll call her Heather) was a punk and metalhead, spent weekends out partying and going to gigs with friends, taught me how to shoplift and, though she was smart, she wasn’t super academically motivated. The other (we’ll call her Charlie) was very responsible, organised and disciplined, and enjoyed much quieter activities in her free time. I think deep down I was always more of the Charlie-type, except more mentally ill and less organised, and I really wanted to be more like Heather: loud and confident and a bit wild.

The year 2015 (the middle of 10th grade to the middle of 11th grade) was my year of Heather. After she took me on my first heist right before Christmas 2014, she decided I was cool enough to introduce to her friends, and after that, we were inseparable. Literally. If anyone saw one of us without the other, they would ask, “where’s [insert missing person’s name here]?”.

Her friends were all cool and wild and punk and metal as well. I didn’t even drink and the first night I stayed out with them, the second-hand smoke made me so ill I puked in her friend’s toilet, but I still loyally went out with them each weekend. We’d go to gigs, hang out at bars, drink in parks, have house parties. Although I was always quiet and shy and more than a little intimidated by most of her friends, I enjoyed my time with them, and was accepted into the group as the Sober One as well as the resident shoplifter — a lot of them were secretly anxious about getting caught. I never was, until I got caught (I got off with a warning and never stole again).

I genuinely did enjoy punk music and doing occasionally stupid things, and I was already extremely leftist in my views (thank you, social justice warriors of Tumblr) — not that everyone in the group was that political, but the ones I liked the most were.

I also had a massive crush on one of the people in this friend group. I had a few really strong, long-lasting crushes during my high school years, and my fantasies about them were things I latched onto whenever I was struggling. I would never have been brave enough to actually confess my feelings to any of them and risk ruining my fantasies forever, and so nothing ever came of them. Just having them in my life as friends and knowing that I could see them again was a sort of comfort to me.

Like most of my significant relationships, my friendship with Heather had its darker sides, too. She was the loud, talkative one of us, and I was her most loyal audience. She had her own self-esteem issues, and I would be available for her to put down whenever she needed to lift herself up. I never really felt “good enough” for her, and so it was no surprise to me when, in the first week of 2016, she silently removed me from a group chat and we never spoke again (until years later, when we met and pretended nothing had ever happened). It just confirmed the fears I had had all along: that she found me boring, that I wasn’t fun or interesting enough, and that she would eventually get tired of having me around.

I plunged into another depression for a while after that. Fortunately, I still had other friends, and school kept me busy. I had started the IB Diploma Program, a rigorous internationally recognised high school programme, along with Charlie. My high school helped me love learning and academia again. I got really into languages and linguistics, watched tons of studytube (YouTube for people who like to study) and started spending more time with people who cared about things like academia and working towards their lofty goals in life. Not that I ever really had a clear idea of what my goals were, other than finishing high school and getting out of Estonia.

High school is when I became obsessed with the idea of travelling, living abroad, digital nomadism, other forms of nomadism… I didn’t really feel any strong connection to the country I lived in, and the longer I stayed in Tallinn, the more I felt that the city was becoming too small for me. I started going on small trips on my own and with friends, and then, the summer after I turned eighteen, I spent seven weeks backpacking through Europe. I slept on benches and in strangers’ homes, I was semi-kidnapped on a bike in Amsterdam, I dealt with creeps and was helped along the way by lots of really kind people. I met some old internet friends, went to a FIDLAR concert in Hamburg and met the band, learnt how to train-hop in Germany. I spent a week volunteering at a small farm in Norway. I missed buses and flights and panicked and learnt how to deal with things going wrong. I found some reprieve from the stress and anxiety that used to haunt me constantly, and realised how freeing it is to only have to worry about where you’re going to sleep that night and how you’re going to find your next meal.

I came back home for my last year of high school and had a really bad bout of post-travel depression. I felt like I knew what I wanted to do with my life now, but I still needed to spend a whole other year doing something else. It was a frustration that I sometimes found really difficult to deal with, and I know there were moments I seriously considered dropping out.

In my last semester of high school, Charlie and her boyfriend kind of set me up with her boyfriend’s best friend. We had a lot in common, and it worked out — we ended up staying together for about three and a half years, three of which we lived together. I gradually moved into his family home after the summer and they all took me in as one of their own.

Of course, this messed up the one part of my life plan I thought I had figured out — leaving Estonia. He was already committed to staying and doing his Bachelor’s at a local university. I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to study at another local university without needing to apply or take any exams, because I had participated in the International Linguistics Olympiad (an event I LOVED) in my last year of high school, so I decided to sign up for the Middle-Eastern Studies programme on a whim and stay with my boyfriend, in Estonia, for the next three years.

Why Middle-Eastern Studies? I knew I wanted to study a language, and all their other offerings bored me — a bunch of European languages, Chinese and Japanese. The ME Studies programme included three years of Arabic and optional Turkish, which sealed the deal for me. My mum had met her Turkish now-husband while I was in high school, and I had been to visit them in Turkey and absolutely loved it.

I had a great time at university. My programme was really interesting, and I had a lot of freedom to study other things on the side too. I did a minor in Digital Humanities, and took random classes on British literature, Latin, and linguistic anthropology. My boyfriend was very disciplined and well-organised, and a lot of it rubbed off on me, too — today, I’m someone who constantly uses calendars, to-do lists and journals and is generally always on top of their shit, and I have him to thank for a lot of it.

Academia is one of the things I think I am best at. I love research, I love writing, and I’m good at it. I even became comfortable giving presentations, despite my social anxiety and stage fright. I became someone who raises their hand in class and has things to say and is actually brave enough to say them. I was always looking for more things to do, opportunities to challenge myself. I went to a Turkish history summer school in Czechia. I applied for conferences aimed at undergrads, and got in. My professors were supportive and encouraging. I felt like maybe I was destined for some sort of success. The only problem was that doing literally anything in academia fucking costs money.

The other thing I became really invested in during this period of my life was activism. I had started going to more events throughout high school — community events at the local LGBT centre, protests, pride events. I discovered the local anarchist centre. I joined the local LGBT choir, and became a board member. I started organising more while I was in university. My proudest accomplishments have to be organising the first pro-Palestine demonstration in Estonia and being part of the first LGBT choir to ever perform at the Estonian Song Festival. I also participated in a daily protest for gay marriage legalisation throughout June 2021 — two years later, Estonia was officially the first post-Soviet country to legalise same-sex marriage. Activism was something that gave my life purpose, and made me feel like I was leaving a positive mark on the world.

During my last semester at university, COVID hit. Classes went online, and I hated Zoom. I managed to make it to my first ever conference right before the lockdown, but the second one was cancelled. The one Master’s programme I had so far applied to rejected me, and I couldn’t handle any more Zoom classes anyway. I knew I would be taking a break from academia, at least until the pandemic calmed down.

My boyfriend kept going, and his Master’s studies took him to another city. We knew our time was over, and ended things amicably. I said farewell to his family, who had really become my family as well, and moved into my first own home. I started working full-time at the university library (where I had taken a part-time position during my last year of studies), and was doing translation work on the side.

Suddenly, I was a real adult with bills to pay. And I kind of enjoyed it? Although I missed studying and I missed not constantly worrying about money, I enjoyed the freedom of having my own home and my own finances. I liked my job. I still had time and energy to do other things, too. I think after the exhaustion of my last year of university, when I was working and studying at the same time, the break felt nice. I could come home after a shift at the library and not have any homework to do.

I was still feeling frustrated about living in Estonia, but COVID put a damper on any plans I had of going abroad. I also felt suddenly overwhelmed by the money of it all. What kind of lifestyle would I want abroad? How would I finance it? So, for a year, I enjoyed an easy life: work, gym, choir, friends.

There were periods where I was depressed, and I struggled with being alone during lockdowns. After living in a household of 6 people and being in a relationship for so long, suddenly being single, in an apartment that I shared with a friend who was often away, during a time where going out and meeting people IRL wasn’t always an option, felt isolating. I returned to the internet, and this time TikTok became my main platform.

I used a lot of this time to think about who I was, and who I wanted to be. This led me to a topic I had questioned years earlier, as a teenager: gender.

There’s no better time for experimenting with your gender than a global lockdown. I cut off my hair, bought new clothes, and started asking my closest friends to call me by a new name and pronouns. I dyed my hair fun colours again (I think one of my most iconic looks has to be my half-green, half-pink shaggy mullet from spring 2021). I got a septum piercing. I bought mascara and applied it above my top lip as a kind of shadow of a moustache. It was a good time, and though I don’t really identify as trans in that way anymore, I think experimenting is great and has really helped me understand myself. Parts of that period have still stayed with me, such as my name.

My late teen and early adult years were a time for discovery, experimenting with different lives and identities, and for slowly crawling back out of the shell I had built around myself during my middle school years. The person I became then laid the foundation for who I am now, and I think they’d be really proud of how far we’ve come in just a few years.