Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.

Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻

Welcome back or welcome if this is your first time reading! This is the story of me and my late adoptive son, if you’re late to the party. And in my memories are all sorts of really bizarre and strange stories about him, because he was a funny guy. In today’s edition, we’re going to explore more of his healthy masculinity and his relationship to sex, and how it changed drastically after one pointed question.

If you’ve missed any of the previous parts of the story, here are the links: part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V …

So, I’ve said in earlier parts of the story (I think part III), that he was very good looking and very desirable because of the way he looked out for women. I know a lot of readers will be like, “wtf you were his mom, why did you know so much about his sex life?” Well, on one hand, I think it’s actually really harmful for people to continuously put a lot of shame on the concept of sex, a thing that none of us would exist without. Open communication is always the route to healthier relationships. Plus, like, he was a 20-something male. Of course he’d be gettin’ it on, if he could, and especially with all the drug use, that can tend to (and in his case definitely did) exacerbate any and all sense of horniness. So for me to deny or shame that would benefit absolutely no one. If he wanted to and felt safe telling me those stories, so be it.

Also, though, I think he just found me to be such a safe space that he’d tell me anything that came to mind, and he happened to have a lot of weird sex stories. We even had an inside joke that went something like, “GAWD mom, I know how to have sex with myself!” though admittedly, I don’t remember the context for it. I just remember that it was supposed to be the name of a psytrance song, hah.

But, perhaps one of the funniest stories he told was about New Year’s Eve 2021. At least I think it was then, but maybe it was a couple weeks before.

Either way, he had agreed to a tinder date with a trans woman. She, from what he told me, had a very cheeky personality, and a big ol’… use your imagination. He had no idea if he was into dicks at all, and I swear that nothing made me more proud than his willingness to try and find out. I mean really, he was willing to try most things, so why not cock?

Ultimately, they had a good time, but he wasn’t really into the whole penis thing, so he decided that it wasn’t for him. But again, I was proud that he gave it the good ol’ college try.

Now here’s where the story gets funny. I mentioned in brief before that I had replaced his nightmare bed, but the replacement came with one simple rule: he was not allowed to fuck in that bed until he slept in it (literally sleeping) with someone he trusted1. I wanted this new bed to be a place of peace and safety, as given by the protection of his mamabear. I didn’t want it to just be another fuck den bed.

So, in an inebriated accident, he sent a message to his roommate, saying something along the lines of, “I slept with a trans woman in your bed,” but in Finnish and with more vulgar and offensive wording, because he was being a little shit. And because apparently that was the sort of thing he did, heh. Only, because of the inebriation, he accidentally sent the message to the group chat I put together for WST Thunderfuck 2021 (that’s my annual Christmas dinner party for my chosen family, if you’re wondering). So all of my nearest and dearest friends got a little insight into his love life that night and we all had a good ol’ riproarin’ laugh about it afterwards.

However, this rampaging libido of his — which he once described as not having really died off since puberty — didn’t outlast his first weekend staying at our house, which was, I believe, in the first month or two of 2022.

We were still finding our way around one another back then, so I remember… okay, first of all, he fell asleep immediately after coming over. As per usual.

I’m not sure why I’ve always particularly liked this picture. I gave him the hat, the headphones, and the grey sweater (which he loved), and perhaps it’s the most “normal” he looked sleeping. You can still see the bags under his eyes, but somehow he feels super cute to me in this one.

After he eventually woke up and we had dinner, he went on his phone and started scrolling Tinder. This really bothered me, but I was having a hard time figuring out why, so I went into my office to get some space and figure out what was going on in my brain and why this irritated me so much. Was I jealous? Because logically, it seemed like a weird thing to be jealous about, because I wasn’t trying to be his girlfriend. So why did it annoy me so much?

But also, I removed myself because I didn’t want to project whatever was going on in my head onto him and make him uncomfortable or anything, at least before I knew what was up. I was always very cautious to figure out my shit before we had conversations, so I knew where I was coming from and wouldn’t push my problems on him.

Eventually, I started to clue into what was bothering me, which had to do with presence. Here I was, giving so much, and he was coming to my house and low-key ignoring me to scroll for dates. That was what was irritating me. But also… I didn’t know why exactly he was looking for a relationship. I’ll get into that in a moment though.

Now, he wasn’t always super self-aware, as I’ve said, but if I left his side for any significant length of time when we were hanging out, he did tend to notice. So, he came into the office to check on me, and I admitted I was feeling kind of off. We talked about this a bit and he agreed that he should probably put his phone away when he was spending time with me.

But then I asked the million dollar question. “I’m curious why you’re looking for girlfriends right now. I don’t mean anything by this, but… what do you have to offer someone in a relationship, in the state you’re in at the moment?”

His response?

Thousand. Yard. Dead. Stare.

It was like I encountered a 404 Error in his brain.

Lots of young people are in pursuit of relationships without ever really thinking about why they want them. He fell into this category. He liked attention, liked being loved, liked sex, all that sort of thing. But when he thought about himself and what he had to offer another person, only one word came out his mouth.

“…Nothing.”

The realization of this actually broke him. I can’t even remember if we ended up watching a movie that night (this may have taken place after… give me a break, I have a lot of memories, I can’t keep them all straight, haha). He was so devastated by this information that he went into a severe depression and just went into the guest room and didn’t really come out for 24 hours.

Now, here’s the thing. That was the correct answer, but I wasn’t expecting him to get there on his own with no help. But it was, indeed, true. He was in such terrible trauma knots that, as I mentioned before, two things happened when he got into relationships. Either, he ended up dating women who were arguably more fucked up than he was — he had one relationship where the girl was so jealous and possessive that she basically locked him in her house for the better part of a year. So, you can imagine that this only made his traumas and mental knots worse. The alternative was that he’d date nice girls, girls he really liked, but then due to his lifestyle or mental trauma, circumstances, whatever, he’d cheat or get angry or do something stupid, and he’d ruin a good thing. There was one girl that was particularly special to him, he’d known most of his life, beautiful, sweet, kind, understanding of where he came from, but he messed that one up and it was his one biggest relationship regret.

So when he examined all of this, without my help, he realized that he was in absolutely no place to be in a relationship and he shut down completely.

I checked up on him constantly, but he was just listening to music in bed, staring off into oblivion, and didn’t really want to talk or see me or do anything. I worried my face off the whole time, but then suddenly — I want to say it was sometime on Saturday afternoon, but in all fairness, it could have even been Sunday — he came out of the room looking rather fresh-faced and said one of the most emotionally mature things I recall him ever saying:

“Okay, I’m done feeling bad. I came here to spend the weekend with you guys, and, yeah, what you asked me made me really depressed, but I figure that I came here to be with you and have a good time, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

We probably watched something stupid, like Happy Gilmore, cackling at one of my all-time favorite lines in any comedy ever.

But… this whole event really made me think about how deep and clever he was under all that trauma. As I’ve said, his self-awareness wasn’t always great, but his self-examination was usually extremely honest and he didn’t pull punches or deny bad aspects of himself. He was haunted by them chronically, so, much like his mamabear, he faced his shit straight-on without pandering to his own ego, and I loved him all to death for it.

That choice of wording both is and is not extremely funny.2

So when he looked at himself and looked at the kind of boyfriend he was capable of being at that point (the beginning) of his healing journey, he realized that this was simply not something he should be putting time or energy into at the time. He knew that he had to work on himself before he had anything to offer someone else. It was okay for him to take advantage of me a little bit, because that was what I was offering him, as I wanted him to heal and get better. But trying to have a relationship with someone else while doing that was simply not a good idea. It would be, at best, a distraction from his inner work, and at worse, would just make everything worse. And he figured all of that out on his own, without help.

But the most fascinating thing about all of this was that his libido was obliterated. As I said, by his own description, he operated on the level of a pubescent teenager. Somehow, though, that one simple question and self-insight that followed completely killed his sex drive. I thought he’d stop the fucking Tinder scrolling, but he stopped fucking altogether.

The part of this that made me the most smug was that his fuck-buddy, the bag of diseased fecal waste that I’m going to call Aniir3, kept calling him for hook-ups and he absolutely delighted in shooting her down. Prior to this, whenever she’d call him for a romp, he’d probably be DtF. Afterwards, she’d do the usual request and he’d just say “no.” And then after, he’d giggle to himself or to me about it.

This made me particularly happy because it was very obvious that, from the get-go, she considered him her property and did not like that I was taking him away from her, even though she didn’t actually want him. I’m not sure specifically why she wanted to have a hold on him. Perhaps it was because he was a more talented DJ than she was and she wanted to take advantage of him for the events she arranged. Maybe he was just good in bed. Either way, they had dated for a while the previous year and he made it clear that she didn’t treat him well, and it was still her that broke things off. Yet when I showed up on the scene, she suddenly offered him “girlfriend intimacy”… something that apparently wasn’t on the table when they were actually a couple. And she was rude AF to me and my partner when we met officially, and this was after meeting in passing several times, when she refused to even look at me. Red flags all around, and her true colors came out later — if you’ve read my earlier articles about Riku, she was the one who very actively tried to turn him against me after our estrangement. So I tried to keep it to myself, but every time he rejected her sexual advances, I cackled like an evil witch from a children’s cartoon in my head.

He was such a fascinating person, really. For all the troubles and trials and traumas, he was so clever and weird and funny and cheeky. And the more time he spent with me, the more he seemed happy and inspired and the less he seemed dank and depressed. I told him things, he listened, adapted, changed, and tried his damned hardest every single time. And that is exactly why I was always so fucking proud of him. Because even if he was an enormous dummy on occasion, he was extraordinarily clever and self-aware of his problems and how they affected him. If I gave him a new perspective, he’d absorb it into himself and grow and evolve.

He was brilliant to watch and I loved every second of it. At least, before the estrangement, that is.

Thanks again for hearing his story. Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

If you’d like to read some short stories based on our relationship, feel free to check out The Bear Forge, The Broken Anvil, and Everstrong! Note: the latter two are for paid subscribers only. There are also three articles about the end of our relationship, but they’re more about grief management and understanding. I’ll be retelling that story as part of this series eventually. And, I also have a short piece I wrote for him when he was still alive called I See You, and a sadder poem from our estrangement called Elegy for a Lost Soul.

Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.

Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻

So, part I was about meeting Riku and part II was about why it seemed like a profound cosmic coincidence that I met him when I did, and part III and part IV are about our early time togethers, the former talking about our first meetings and the latter focusing on getting touch-familiar with a trauma victim. Today, I’m sharing some longer stories about our first few times hanging out together.

I went over to Riku and his roommate’s place fairly regularly in the early winter, as I mentioned, to hang out and help out. I think I also mentioned that sometimes, he was a confusing fellow to spend time with, because he’d invite you over and then proceed to go into his room and ignore you.

Yeah, he was really aware in some senses, and then extremely unaware in others. It was bizarre somehow, that he didn’t clock that this was weird or confusing to his friends. I think he wanted companionship while he was doing his own thing, so the walls wouldn’t close in on him, but never really communicated that need clearly. So people, like myself, would come over expecting to… do something? Play video games? Watch TV/movies? Go for a walk? Something? But then he’d just go into his room and start fiddling around with some psytrance tracks.

Naturally, I did point this out to him, and once again, his surprise was genuine. Apparently, in circles like his, calling people out for strange and bad behavior was just not a thing, so he didn’t get feedback on his actions a lot. Besides, half the time, if you pissed off a “friend,” they’d probably just retaliate by stealing something from you (or worse). This was what he knew. I was apparently showing him what “normal life” was like for people not in his situation, and he was very grateful for the stability and kindness.

One of the earliest times (maybe even the second time?) I went over to their place was, funnily enough, not to hang out with him. I was once upon a time quite dedicated to the rogue-lite video game, Spelunky1, and his roommate had its sequel. I had been hesitant to try said sequel, because the first game was already bull honkey so I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to playing a new version. Riku’s roommate2 had invited me over to play it with him and try it out.

I hated it for exactly the reason I suspected I might: the first game was fucking hard, and they made it worse in the second one. I like a good challenge — I play Soulsborne games, after all — but this was fucking ridiculous. So I played, screaming at the TV, as the roommate laughed, and eventually, Riku crawled out of his burrow to sit with us and watch me lose my shit, when he eventually announced that we’d all been invited over to Kerava to meet with one of his friends for some drinks. So, we stopped playing Spelunky 2 and headed to Kerava.

This friend — whom I only met this once and IIRC his name was Joel — was one of the few people in Riku’s life who had a well-paying job and more money than he knew what to do with, so he often used it to shower affection on his friends. Case in point, he had recently given Riku a steel drum, which he was delighted about, since he liked making music and anything he could make fun sounds with was a joy for him to tinker with. But another of his friends also told me that Joel would make them uncomfortable with the gifts sometimes, because he was so genuinely generous and they could not reciprocate, especially when sometimes, unlike the steel drum, the gifts didn’t actually mean anything personal.3

Since I only ever met Joel once, I never found any issue with him. He seemed to like to drink, but that’s sort of a given in Finland, and from what I could tell, he wasn’t into drugs the way the rest of them were. In fact, I had liked him enough to have hoped to see him around more often, maybe for some TTRPGs, but I that never ended up happening, I think because he was a fairly busy guy. But he won me over right away, because at some point, I had to take the roommate home because he had work the next morning, and Riku told me that Joel had said, in my absence, “She seems like a really nice guy.” Riku wasn’t sure if I’d be okay with that description, but it made me laugh quite heartily, as I think he pegged my whole deal pretty succinctly in one phrase.

The A&R guy, whom I was still getting along with at that point, showed up, along with another random girlie (I swear I almost never saw the same one twice). She was clearly thirsting after my boy but when she clocked the mamabear, she decided this was not the night, and ended up leaving after a while. I confess to enjoying the way they were intimidated by the fact that I was not threatened by them in the slightest. They might have been able to alpha bitch one another when fighting over him, but I was too old for that shit in my 30s and just rolled my eyes. It also helped that I wasn’t trying to sleep with him.

We were joined by another friend, Roope, who was a sweet kid, pretty neurodivergent and shy, and I recall that he had shown up with a Rubix cube to fidget with, so every time he finished it and put it on the table, I’d fuck it up, and within a few seconds, it’d be back on the table. We did this for a while and I was thoroughly impressed by the mathematically proficient way that he could put it back together in mere seconds.

We ended up back at Roope’s place. He and I could have probably been friends, since he seemed like a bit of a geek (hi, queen geek here) per the things in his flat. Eventually, I remember Riku laying down on this guy’s kitchen floor with a full intention of spending the night there, with no pillow or blanket or anything. He did that a lot. Remember when we watched Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny? We have a guest room, but he chose to sleep on the floor. I wonder if he felt comfortable there because he felt worthy of it? I dare not speculate, lest it make me sad.

What stood out to me from that moment is that he was snoozing and the A&R guy was sitting with me, and in a strangely sweet moment, he saw me protectively sitting over my cub and whispered to me, almost pleading, “Please don’t hurt him.” I’m sure I must have given him an “aww, honey,” look because he clearly didn’t know me and my capacity for love and dedication and loyalty.

But I also remember that moment hurting me internally, quite a lot, in a rather unique way.

You see, I just couldn’t stop from wondering… “Who’s going to stop him from hurting me?” I understood the desire to protect Riku, after all he’d been through. But I would have never done anything to hurt him, intentionally, and if I did, I’d have apologized and done whatever work necessary to make amends. I have never been a street kid or a drug addict, so I actually know how to be kind and decent to people.

But who or what was going to stop Riku, in all of his trauma, from hurting me? I had no one in my life back then who looked out for me, the way his friends looked out for him. I had no one to tell Riku, “Hey, Bear’s right about the most loyal and loving person in the world — don’t take advantage of her and don’t hurt her, please?” I wonder if it would have mattered if someone had, or if that would have just made him hate himself more in the end. Again, I dare not speculate.

And let’s be clear, this A&R guy was not a monster of a person, but he was also not a good person. He had all of the passwords to Riku’s Spotify and all of the other streaming platforms, and he never gave them to Riku, despite Riku repeatedly asking for them. He’d bum drugs off him and then vanish when he didn’t pay his debts. He was probably telling me to not hurt him because he knew everyone else in Riku’s life — himself included — were all hurting Riku in some way or another, and in his own fucked up way, he did love Riku, just not more than himself. Such is the way in drug circles — you’re always going to need to save your own ass first, even if it means destroying people you love. No wonder so many people in those situations pass away young.

Either way, Riku had someone who cared about him enough to teach him to be nonviolent and to ask other people to look after him and not to hurt him. I was… weirdly envious?

I did not have anyone looking out for me, not in that sense. But in the end, maybe we had that in common, because when shit hit the fan, none of them helped him heal our relationship — the relationship that actually meant something and helped his life get better. In fact, most of them helped him double down on bad decisions and turned him against me, despite that clearly making things worse. It was because of his “friends” that he didn’t get the help he needed. In the end, Joel was one of the few people I didn’t end up hating by 2023, simply because I never saw him again.

I have one other story about him sleeping on the floor, incidentally. Perhaps, after this one, he had learned that he deserved a bed. Either way, I had been out for a night of karaoke with some friends and had promised to give someone a ride home who lived somewhat near to Riku’s place. As I was dropping him off, I had messaged Riku saying, “Hey, I might be in your neighborhood in a bit, so let me know if you need a hug.” He replied surprisingly quickly, saying that he wasn’t at home but was actually up visiting a friend in Hyvinkää, but that a hug would, in fact, be nice and welcome.

I wasn’t banking on him taking me up at the offer, especially because it was probably 1-2.00 in the morning already at that point. But because I adored him oh so very much, of course I pivoted and drove up to Hyvinkää, where I found him in a cute little slum of a place that belonged to his friend Miksu, who was a fairly functional addict, but who was also, broadly, in considerably worse shape than Riku because he was also an alcoholic and had already lost some teeth to meth, but better in that his family was messed up but not, as I recall, abusive. It was weird, seeing how rough Riku was, and then seeing how he could have still been so much worse at the same time. And even then, these guys weren’t on heroin, so it could have still been so, so much worse. Scary, really.

Anyhoo, these three (the roommate was there too) absolute idiots were apparently trying to make a certain something out of a very large sack full of organic waste and a block of butter. And they were trying to do it in a pot that would maybe hold a liter of water. I was utterly mind-boggled at how completely stupid this was. Surely, surely they must know that they can’t make something in a vessel that can’t hold what they’re making.

…I guess not. And yes, I found his dumb moments extremely cute and endearing.

So, I went home, got a slow cooker and some old cleaning cloths, fixed this idiocy, and cleaned up Miksu’s kitchen at the same time, which had probably been cleaned all of never. At some point, a smoking pipe broke, and we had to clean that up too. And yet, despite my presence in a drug slum — not something I had much experience with — I didn’t feel unsafe or uncomfortable. I was always quite certain that he would not let anything weird or bad happen to me.

Surprise surprise, by some point in the morning, Riku wanted to sleep on the kitchen floor. Once again, I had offered to bring him home to the guest room (the roommate was on the couch), but he really had a thing for sleeping on people’s floors, even if it meant he might be in glass shards. I get it, he was a weird kid. I’m in no position to judge though, let’s be fair. I’m almost 40 and I’m still a weird kid.

I think I went home to bed around 10.00 and woke up at noon because I needed to go to Tampere to do an interview with my favorite band, Ember Falls, about their upcoming second release. Good thing I wasn’t on camera then, because I was pretty dead. Afterwards, the guys and I went out for dinner, where I explained why I was so tired, and they listened with pleasant bemusement to my stories about adopting a 23-year-old drug addict and what it was like taking care of him. I remember being slumped, exhausted, on the table at Zarillo, with a big stupid grin on my face.

One of my favorite memories of Riku would eventually involve going back to Tampere, along with my friend Sipsi, to see Ember Falls’ album release show for “Ruins.” But again, I’ll have to save that story for another installment.

Thanks again for hearing his story. I’ve got plenty more to tell.

Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

If you’d like to read some short stories based on our relationship, feel free to check out The Bear Forge, The Broken Anvil, and Everstrong! Note: the latter two are for paid subscribers only. There are also three articles about the end of our relationship, but they’re more about grief management and understanding. I’ll be retelling that story as part of this series eventually. And, I also have a short piece I wrote for him when he was still alive called I See You, and a sadder poem from our estrangement called Elegy for a Lost Soul.

Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.

Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻

So, part I was about meeting Riku and part II was about me and why it seemed like a profound cosmic coincidence that I met him when I did, and part III is about our early time together and some of the weird sides to him that he shared with me. I have many more tales of our first times hanging out, so I suppose I’ll continue there.

I’ve touched on this in previous parts, but one of the hardest things for me was being someone who has a very physical way of expressing love, and then loving someone who could be extremely touch-averse. For example, I used to give him the rare occasional affectionate kisses on the cheeks or foreheads sometimes, but after a few months, he admitted to me that he had very mixed feelings about being kissed, because he had the sort of parents who’d beat him and then kiss him goodnight.

This 3 second vid was meant to be for a Machinae Supremacy music video, but I refused to use it once I knew kisses gave him conflicting feelings

I was appalled that he hadn’t said anything earlier (he was scared that I’d get upset), but I was much more upset that he didn’t speak up and let me make him uncomfortable, and we immediately pivoted to softly headbutting one another when we wanted to express affection for physically. This eventually led to us developing a system of hand gestures and touch signals for when words were too hard. I loved our private language. To this day, I remember fondly one of my last times seeing him before our estrangement: he got into the car, grabbed my arm, and bashed his grinning head all over it in a gesture of unbridled affection.

… Damnit, I miss him so much.

Anyways, I said before that I basically had to microdose affection into him, and so I went to work. Never have I ever had to exercise so much patience and I honestly wish that a doctor had been monitoring me and my everything levels, because I felt like I was hit with… well, I have no basis of comparison, but if I was going through something similar to someone who’s given birth, it wouldn’t surprise me. Hormones were coming out my eyeballs. I was dialed up to high fuck and if anyone so much as breathed at him in the wrong way, I would have murdered them in cold blood without a second thought. He had been hurt enough, and there is a reason someone gave me the name Bear when I was 16.

The first time I got a little cuddle from him is a bit of a cute story. He and his roommate had come over to help me in the garage — our house is in good shape but the garage is more or less falling apart and it was full of old shelves and things that I couldn’t take apart on my own without crushing myself. So I had the big boys come over to help me out and we ended the night watching Tenacious D & The Pick of Destiny, because that’s obviously the movie we would watch.

The three of us took over the couch and eventually Riku just sort of slumped over onto me and started snoozing. Knowing that he didn’t sleep well1 , I didn’t want to move or adjust him at all in case he woke up, so I scratched his back while he slept, feeling like I was getting a bit of the mom experience of watching a movie with a kid who had dozed off. Later, he told me he didn’t remember that happening (he was just passed out), but he very warmly said that if I had gotten something fulfilling out of it, he was very pleased about it.

Getting touch-familiar with him was a slow process, but it also progressed more rapidly than I would have expected. We had regular movie nights and they often started with him on the opposite end of the couch, but every time — even though I made it clear that he was welcome in my arms always — he’d scoot closer and closer, like that beaten puppy who was trying out affection to see if he’d like it.

I started gently by offering to give him back scritchies and eventually figured out that he was a human knot and he let me start massaging out some of the tense spots in his chest and shoulders — he had tightness in places I didn’t know were possible.

After a little while, and him coming to trust that I wouldn’t hurt him intentionally even if my life depended on it, he began to fully cuddle up to me when we were watching movies. My favorite moments ever were when I had him and my partner together in a big cuddle puddle. I was just smushed between all the people I loved most in the world and I couldn’t have been happier.

Even though I only actively had him for 9 months, it really felt like I got to experience every age with him, from infancy to his actual age. As someone with untreated ADHD, I don’t feel a great deal of metal peace in general (especially back then — this has improved significantly now that my depression is under control), because there’s always something on my mind stressing me out.

One evening was a particularly precious memory for me: we were writing song lyrics to one of his demos together. He had recorded some vocals for me earlier in the day and then we swapped to working on his music together. We often holed up in the guest room because he was allergic to cats, and after an hour or so of listening to the song and discussing the tempo and what he wanted to express, he started to dose off (as per usual).

I have a staggering number of extremely stupid-looking selfies that I took with him passed out

I’m not sure exactly what happened, but eventually, I was laying on his bed and he curled up next to me, so I put the laptop aside and he smushed up under my arm and fell asleep with his head on my chest. I had finally done it. I’d gotten him to fall asleep in a mamabear cuddle. I wrapped my arms around him and held him close while he snored and my brain went completely silent, for the first and, honestly, only time ever. There was nowhere else in the world I needed to be. Nothing else I needed to do. My cub was safe and asleep in my arms and nothing on earth could be more important or better. I can imagine that’s how moms who’ve recently given birth might feel in those moments of blissful peace holding their newborns. Size and age didn’t matter, he was equally precious to me.

He wasn’t always okay with being touched though, even after we broke the cuddle barrier. I remember one bad day when he asked me if it was okay if we didn’t hug when we met (it had become tradition at that point, for me to get out of the car and give him a big squeeze). I was devastated (internally), but of course consented to his boundary. I was surprised, however, when I picked him up, that he asked for a hug. When I asked why he changed his mind, he said that he had been talking to his therapist, who told him not to reject affection because “every hug counts.”

There was another time when we were at the pharmacy and he was in a really tangled internal knot. I wanted to comfort him by just rubbing his shoulder, and he took my hand and pressed his thumb into my palm — a sign we had agreed meant “I love you but I can’t handle touch right now.” It’s very hard for me to not comfort someone physically when they’re hurting, but I had to listen, and he appreciated it deeply. It wasn’t about what I needed, after all.

For all his pain though, he was extremely playful when he was happy. Sometimes, it seemed like he was trying to relive his childhood with me and every time he made a new music demo, he’d excitedly let me know. Obviously I showered him with praise because he was amazing at what he did, but I noticed this feeling of him being like, “Mama look! Look! Look at me!” every so often and it warmed me to my core that he got to experience those little moments he never had in his actual childhood.

Sometimes, I was also teaching him things that I felt like should have been taught to him at an obscenely young age. I don’t really have any specific memories on that front, but I just remember feeling like he had a lot of “gaps.”

So even though he was 23 years old when we met, I felt like I got to teach him things that people teach young kids still. Little things, usually, like how to stack wood or how not to freak out when bees came near him because he was allergic to them.2 It was a joy to me to feel like I got to experience all ages of him in such a short time.

There were even teenager moments as well. Even though he displayed a generally wonderful healthy masculinity, he did still use some phrasing that I took issue with, like using “homo” as an insult or judging overweight women for how they dressed. Teenager bullshit, you know. But what was heartwarming about him was that he listened when I told him some things weren’t cool. Genuinely. And he really, deeply cared what I thought of him, so whenever I gave him feedback, he took it to heart. He really wanted to be a good person and looked to me for guidance.

A lot of the time, he just wasn’t very self-aware. His entire life had been spent in survival mode, never able to think ahead for more than a few hours at a time, with no stability. Once I gave that to him, he was able to take things in and see more clearly. For example, while he was quite proficient with the ladies, his roommate was not, and I told him that perhaps boasting about his sexcapades in front of him might not be the kindest move. He was a bit shocked to hear that but also was grateful I had told him, because he hadn’t realized he’d been accidentally being unkind.

And, once again, that’s really why I love him so much. He was someone who believed in me and listened to me and trusted me. I don’t have a ton of people in my life who do, and fewer on that level. It’s such a big part of why he was and still is so precious to me — our love was always mutual.

Thanks again for hearing his story. There’s lots more to come.

Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

If you’d like to read some short stories based on our relationship, feel free to check out The Bear Forge, The Broken Anvil, and Everstrong! Note: the latter two are for paid subscribers only. There are also three articles about the end of our relationship, but they’re more about grief management and understanding. I’ll be retelling that story as part of this series eventually. And, I also have a short piece I wrote for him when he was still alive called I See You, and a sadder poem from our estrangement called Elegy for a Lost Soul.

This cat must be dying because he doesn’t usually sit on me, yet he’s been living on me lately…

PROJECTS & ARTICLES

So, in case you didn’t notice, this month I started to write about my cub. I know, I know, I’ve written about him before, but that was the endgame and the sad parts and the hard parts. But, I also really want to share about why it was all worth it, and how love and understanding and a distinct lack of judgment have a huge power to heal damage. I think that’s a deeply important thing to share. So if you’ve missed any of this month’s articles, here are the links:

Riku’s Story, pt. I: How We Met
Riku’s Story, pt. II: A Profound Cosmic Coincidence
Riku’s Story, pt. III: The Early Days & A Goober of a Kid with Integrity

Since today’s slot is occupied by Monthly Mayhem, pt. IV will be coming on Thursday instead.

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Fabled Magazine

Issue 002 is out now, and you can order copies from their website! My contribution this time, beyond a little glimpse of my writing desk, is a story about fantasy tropes going to group therapy under the ancient wisdom of the Baba Yaga. IT HAS A PICTURE TO GO WITH okay I’m done losing it now. I’ll put a picture in next month if I remember!

Order Beyond the Pages

The Vitmar Chronicles

Inspiration for creative writing seems to be returning to me, slowly and surely. I chalk a lot of it up to getting better control over my online time. If I’m not always going to my phone to amuse me when I get bored, I start to — gasp! — get bored. And when I get bored, you know what creeps into my brain? Stories.

The biggest issue with writing fiction right now is that I also strongly want to tell my cub’s story, and while it’s not impossible for me to write two things at the same time, it does divide my focus. Plus, anytime it’s nice out, I want to be in my yard doing… pretty much literally anything, and right now my laptop battery is busted, so I can’t go write outside and kill two birds with one stone.

But, suffice to say, there is starting to be slow and steady progress in TVC Vol III. I’m a bit hesitant to give myself a deadline while I’m still working actively on something else, but I looked into when the best time of year for crowdfunding is and I figured, to not give myself a heavy deadline right after summer, spring would be best.

So, my current plan is to find some reader-reviewers for Volume I (and maybe Volume II, if they’re up for it — and if you’re interested, please hit me up), to build some reviews and hype for Volume III, when I will crowdfund all of the first three installments as physical books as well. I have no plans, as of right now, to use Amazon for this, if I can help it. I’m hoping this will be able to fund me getting a run of the physical books that I can give to backers and sell on my own later. This is just a loose plan, so far, but I hope I can make it happen.

Off the Record / Gathering of Geeks

Still no news here, but I have reached out to a couple of people! Let’s see what the summer brings.

Merch Mischief

Nothing in May, but I did decide to hop onto some festival slots this summer, because working at festivals is actually pretty fun (at least until weird drunk dudes start pestering you). Plus I generally love the gals I work with.

Reviews

Oh, hey, I finally got the second installment of the Eye of Melian tour report up (finally), so you can check that out if you’ve missed it:

Where You Go We’ll One Day Follow, pt. II

PHYSICAL & MENTAL HEALTH

After my 2 weeks of depressive mindset in April, May was a welcome change of pace. I was able to get outside and do a lot of work in the yard, and of course, there’s still infinite tasks to continue or take up whenever I can. In the latest depression test I did via BetterHelp, I ranked a zero on the depression scale, so I think that says a lot about how much work I’ve done to get myself into a better headspace.

However.

Ugh. It’s never easy, eh? I forget how much I talked about the strange and profound experience I had last June (2025) when I got my back über-cracked and I stopped having spine spasms. Well, guess who only left the house for 11 months and has decided to show up again…

Even better, not only is my spine spasming again, but my right shoulder felt like it was dangling by a few tendons, and my right hip/butt has gone into full revolt. I kid you not. I’ve seen my osteopath twice in 2 weeks. After the first session, my headaches went away (I thought I was just super dehydrated, but after 4 days straight, maybe I should have considered something else was the problem). He’s talked a few times about fluids getting locked up in my skull and this was one of the rare times I could feel what he was talking about. When I stood up after my time was up, I could feel fluids moving through my head and sinuses opening and… it’s a generally quite gnarly feeling.

I was back again today though, because… well, what in the hell ass shit am I supposed to do with my life when I cannot sit, stand, or lie down? When all I am experiencing is a constant throbbing 2-9/10 pain that comes and goes in waves and no consistent movement or pose makes it go away? If you know me, you know that I don’t take painkillers unless I feel like my life depends on it, so it should say a lot that I’ve taken quite a few recently.

So, anyhoo, as you can tell, I could be doing a fair bit better and as you might have clocked by the casual profanity, my mood’s not as good as it could be. Tends to drop when you’re constantly in pain. And my poor partner’s sick, so trying to feed ourselves and keep the cats from revolting is quite a task.

GENERAL BEARSNESS

I did have a lovely vappu party with some lovely people on the 1st, before all the pain kicked in — thanks to anyone and everyone who came out! Then, we proceeded to go to another friend’s party on the 2nd, which was also fun — we tried out a board game called Hot Streak that was… well, it was chaotic and weird AF. If you’ve ever played the video game Fall Guys, you’ll get a bit of the same vibe from it. It was fun, in a weird and frustrating sort of way, since it’s about betting on a mascot race where there’s a bunch of nonsense.

Also, one of my friends had a spare ticket to see Tori Amos in Helsinki, so that was a great time. I only knew her by name, but didn’t know any of her songs, so I was thrilled to find a savant on the level of Elton John with a kickass band to supplement her fun music. I was thoroughly impressed and am very grateful for the opportunity to have checked her out!

As per usual, even though the snow was gone in March already (still blown away by that), we couldn’t plant anything in the greenhouse until May. Kinda feels like it defeats the point of the greenhouse a little, but hopefully it’ll give us some more love in the fall, if the spring’s still too cold for the soil.

We’ve been doing great work out here though. My new pollinator bed is getting a lot of sweeties put into it (thanks also to everyone who did tradesies with me or gave me seeds!), so I can’t wait to see how it progresses. I’ve been adding retaining walls and liners to all the beds I made last year, so hopefully the ground elder stops creeping in so easily (and the dirt won’t creep out).

I’ve been doing some stone work still as well, and I’ve finally got the entire blackberry patch smothered by landscaping canvas, so now all I need to do is find infinite rocks. I did get the north side filled up though, more or less! Here’s some progress shots:

I’ve now saved two good sized frogs from the empty pond (it needs a new liner) as well, and have returned them to Frogborg where they may live in peace and eat slugs from my gardens.

Over in the veggie patch, I’ve filled out the main bed of the literal herb bed, and some strawberries and calendula are peaking out of the mulch. We’re finally seeing some corn in the greenhouse, and some beets, radishes, radishes, kale, chard, and carrot in the raised beds. Sadly, only two garlics, out of about a jillion, seem to have survived the winter. They were too moist throughout the fall and spring, and probably not frozen well enough, so they pretty much all rotted. I transplanted some garlics that I had thrown into a random tester bed though, so we won’t be without anything in the fall, but alas, we might need to bum some cloves from the in-laws again.

The berry bushes are looking nice and I’ve slowly started on unchoking them from the lawn. I also got some lilac suckers from a lady in town who breeds tortoises, so I got to meet the cutest horny little breeding dude while I was digging things from her yard. I’m hoping to get some lilacs growing over in the most miserable corner of the yard.

We also relocated a plum sucker from our dead trees that I’ve been protecting for a year or so since the trees came down. It and the raspberries we moved in May seem to be doing really well, as both are pushing new growth.

So, my May’s been made up of writing and wandering around my yard and trying not to be in too much pain. How about you? How’s spring treated you so far?

Stay balanced, you beautiful people, and I’ll catch you again next month! ❤️🐻

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Coming Next Month…

Ankea Festival and maybe seeing some friends and probably my father-in-law’s getting married, so I suspect we’ll be making an appearance. Hopefully I survive the festival on this funky bod, so wish me luck!

Here’s my best of 2026 so far on Deezer! I’m considering giving Tidal a shot next though, as I’m having a few issues with Deezer’s interface.

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Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.

Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻

So, part I was about meeting Riku and part II was about me and why it seemed like a profound cosmic coincidence that I met him when I did. At this point, I’m not sure if I should be telling this story chronologically, or if I should just pick stories about him and go from there. Let’s see how coherent this is when I’m done with it, or if I’m just rambling.

So, very early on, we were mostly texting one another and weren’t spending a ton of time together. He was out and about being social regularly, which was in part to keep him busy and having fun and one step ahead of the demons that plagued his nights, but it also wore him down, having so many people expecting and wanting things from him all the time, and having to be so social. In the end, what he really wanted, more than anything, was to be left alone to make music.1

Acclimatizing to one another took some time. Honestly, I don’t think we ever quite got there, fully — it was always a work in progress. I remember the first time he came over properly, for the aforementioned (in part I) interview, but also to join a game of Mörk Borg with his roommate. He brought his A&R guy with him for the interview, but apparently he had been so nervous about it that he had done what he always did when he was anxious: a bunch o’ drugs. And boy could that kid take a cocktail. He was pretty toasted throughout the interview.

I remember that for the vague cringe I felt the whole time, like, “dang, I don’t think I can publish this… he’s too fucked up.” I don’t know if he was aware of how noticeable his slurring could be, he was so used to sounding that way. He was pretty much on something at any given time of day when I met him, so sobering up for any reason simply wasn’t something he ever did, even if it was for the sake of his music career.2 I do still have parts of the audio logged into a transcription software and listening back on it is tough, because of the huge difference in his voice from when we met, versus 9 months later when we parted ways and he had quit almost everything.

We agreed, mutually, that it was better to treat that as a practice run, and that we’d do another interview at a time when he was feeling more confident. I’m sorry to say that it never happened. If I left things up to him, we often just kind of didn’t get around to it. I had wrongly assumed that I had more time than I did.

After the interview, his A&R guy left and he and his roommate stuck around for game night. And boy if that wasn’t one of the most memorable game nights I have in my memory bank.

Mörk Borg is an easy-to-play apocalyptic TTRPG with 4 stats and randomly generated characters, so while his roommate rolled a guy with a sword, plate mail, and an irate monkey companion, Riku rolled a dude with no armor and a knife for a weapon. He took that to mean that he was naked and so when we asked him where he kept his knife, the answer was obviously in his butt. Being myself, I laughed but scoffed, “it’s always the butt; I wish people would get more creative,” wiping away a melodramatic fake tear. Little did I know he was about to roll 120 silver, so when asked how he carried it, he murmured, quietly and shyly, “…foreskin.”

Oh my fucking gawd.

To make a long and grotesque story short, this resulted in a character with a pendulous stretched-out foreskin holding all of his worldly possessions (except said butt-knife), tied shut with a piece of twine, and then proceeded to use this “wallet,” as we dubbed it, to try to club his roommate to death so he could steal his monkey. This went about as well as you can expect from a battle between nude man versus a guy in a full suit of armor.

The rest of us were hunting down goblins while this was happening, incidentally3. We’ve had a lot of ludicrous TTRPG games in the past, but that one stood out for what I think are obvious reasons. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed so hard during a game night. Somewhere, an elderly person is fainting with shock because I’m telling this story.

But for me, as funny of a memory as it is, that night also stands out for being quite torturous. By the time he joined us for game night, I was emotionally done and gone, and wanted to mama him into oblivion. The only other times I had seen him since we’d met was an evening when I’d been visiting my cousins before picking up my partner from work. I went over to kill time when my cousins needed to hit the hay, but then I was immediately called for a ride, so I was only able to stop by for half a second to say hello. Painful — I didn’t even get out of the car.

So by this game night, I was ready to love him into unconsciousness, but knew that he was surely not ready for that, so instead of koala-hugging onto him like a bear made of octopuses, I had to keep a respectful distance. I had to microdose affection so as to acclimatize him to it, lest it overwhelm him. And I know that sounds like I’m joking, but I’m being 100% for reals. He was not familiar with genuine affection and too much of it threatened to drown him if I wasn’t on red alert to his boundaries at all times. So, with great physical and emotional pain, I restrained myself from smothering him.

Instead, I found myself fidgeting all evening and constantly walking back and forth to the kitchen for an excuse to pass by him and give him an affectionate shoulder squeeze or scratch on the neck (this was before we had gotten the hugs right, after all). I think that was the night when I took his hands and examined his arms, which were tattooed from his knuckles to his shoulders, and warmly told him that he had “thug tattoos.” He beamed proudly at me.4 There was part of him that loved being big and scary looking… probably because it meant the aggressive addicts he was often around would treat him with caution, and most other people would leave him alone.

One of the coolest stories he told me early on was a fairly fresh one. Drug abuse is awful, but every experience wasn’t necessarily a bad one. [CW: psychedelic use] He had recently had a DMT5 trip, wherein he separated into his masculine and feminine form, and made love to himself. That probably sounds bizarre, to say the least, if you’ve never done psychedelics, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen in your mind. I’d developed a vested interest in psychedelics for their psychological healing powers in the 2020s — being depressed myself — so this story was fascinating to me. He took it this experience to mean his masculine and feminine sides were completely intertwined and he had eradicated any toxic masculinity towards the feminine. To celebrate, he dressed up in drag for Halloween that year. Apparently everyone thought he was his sister. I was promised photos, but the A&R guy was the only one who had them and he never sent them, because he was a shady and unreliable sort (more on that another time).

That trip was important though, because, having embraced the feminine so profoundly, he was thereafter very willing to use his size, stature, and general look of delinquency to be a protector. If I told you that a drug addict was a great place to look for healthy masculinity, you might think I was insane, but if healthy masculinity is all about using what power you have to protect those without, he was absolutely a stand-up guy, in that sense. As much as I loathe the A&R guy for what he did to Riku overall, I will also always thank him, because he was the one who taught my cub to be nonviolent.

There was at least one bro that worked at McDonald’s with him that was really obnoxious and aggressive to the girls there, and so Riku eventually took him aside one day and said that if he didn’t start treating them more kindly and respectfully, that the two of them were going to have problems. And while this guy was big, my cub was bigger and he wasn’t the sort of guy you’d want to fuck with at a glance. You can surely imagine that all the girlies were trying to hook up with him in the back room at any chance they got.

That was also a thing. He was very good looking and had that sort of “wounded puppy” look to him that made him catnip to the girlies6, even when he wasn’t actively sticking up for them. It would have been funny if it didn’t actually hurt him a bit, in that he had what I dubbed “Hot Girl Syndrome” — he said, aside from one friend who’d always been in a relationship, I was the only other female in his life who wasn’t trying to sleep with him. He wasn’t happy about it. He admitted that he felt like a piece of meat a lot of the time, and that he wanted someone to like him for him, not for his looks or body. But he was complicated and pretty, so sex was most of what was on their minds.

I recall one evening when I was out with his roommate and, for whatever reason, we ended up at the dregs of a party Riku had opted not to attend, with three of his coworkers. I truly have no recollection as to why we were there, but the entire time, these girls were constantly going, “Where’s Riku, is Riku coming, where’s Riku?” They were thirsty for that damaged bad-boy.

Admittedly, that annoyed the hell out of me, because they thought that their magical sex would heal broken boy (yes, that’s a Cinema Therapy reference to Twilight, if you’re wondering). The reality of his trauma was not that simple, and most of his relationships were with girls who had their own problems and therefore exacerbated his traumas, and the ones that weren’t, he had usually been the one to fuck it up. Relationships with him were not at all easy and when they ended, it was usually quite badly (I would know, right?), but all they cared about was that he was pretty and was nice to them. They didn’t care that having relationships with him without knowing what they were getting into had the potential to hurt him even more in the long run.

He was also a bit of a surprise to be around in many senses. As a very masculine person myself, I have a lot of traits that blend well with the personality of a 20-something male, but I had to be quite careful with how I let that out around him. For example, after having a rough bout of serotonin syndrome, he developed an extreme sensitivity to bad smells.7 You can imagine my surprise when I was like, “oh, 23-year-old boy, I can for surely pass gas in front of him and he’ll probably laugh,”8 but I was quite wrong about that. For someone that I commonly and affectionately referred to as my little trash panda (I only called him a raccoon when it was aggravating me, which was rare), because he lived in mild squalor, he was really sensitive to the squalor. He also ran water every time he went to the bathroom, and it wasn’t for the sake of others.

At the time, he lived in a very small flat (probably somewhere in the realms of 20 m^2) with the aforementioned roommate who was very obviously undiagnosed autistic.9 They seemed to have a fairly symbiotic relationship: the roommate was a source of stability, in that living with him meant that Riku wasn’t homeless and had someone to count on if he couldn’t pay rent, while his roommate was, in his own words, the type of person who would be an unwashed basement-dwelling dweeb if he didn’t have a cool, popular guy to take him out sometimes.10

One of my early mom tasks I assigned to myself was cleaning up his kitchen whenever I went to visit. The sink was pretty much always full of dishes when I went over there. He felt bad that I “worked” when I visited, but sometimes I’d show up before he had woken up (chronic trauma-induced insomnia meant he kept bizarre hours) and needed something to occupy myself with, and I enjoy being helpful. Plus, they actually had a dishwasher so half the time, the task was just loading it.

I was introduced to the nightmare that was his bed my first time visiting their place. First of all, the thing was so squashy that it didn’t surprise me in the least that his body was a gigantic knot. Plus, a pit bull had chewed a hole in it at some point? Don’t ask, I don’t have an answer to that.

But even worse, of course he had C-PTSD insomnia — to tell you another horror story about his youth, apparently when he was about 7 or so years old, one of his older brothers had gone out and gotten messed up on alcohol and/or something else, and came home feeling murderous. So, little Riku and his little sister were yanked out of their beds in the middle of the night and thrown into a bathroom with the door locked, and the older brother started stabbing through the door with a knife screaming that he was going to kill everyone, like a scene out of The Shining.

From that moment on, Riku learned that sleep was not a safe space for him, so it came seldomly and often with nightmares and sleep paralysis. Until he met me, at least, and it wasn’t just because I immediately got him a new bed (I remember the A&R guy getting choked up over that, but it was literally no big thing). I was like a narcotic for him. For whatever reason, he felt so safe with me that the first couple of months were a struggle11 because the kid could not stay awake in my presence. I’d be wanting to spend time with him and get to know him, and he’d be unconscious within 30 minutes of arrival. And for the life of me, I could not bear to wake him. The poor kid was so sleep-deprived that I just couldn’t bring myself to rouse him.

A strange quirk of his was sleep eating. Like most other things, this was a side effect of his rampant drug abuse, but for whatever reason, he would sleep eat all the time. To the point that later on I suggested to his roommates that they put child locks on the fridge and pantry. After all, you can’t really control someone who’s doing something in their sleep, right? So pivot or hide your food somewhere else, I guess. He once told me a story about how he was extremely allergic to eggs, but I guess he got very high on various things, then slept-ate a whole carton of eggs, which managed to miraculously reset his allergy.12 His roommate was baffled as to why all of his eggs were gone the next morning, but also why Riku wasn’t dead from it.

Yes, he had quite a lot of stories to share with me and he shared them all. I mean, surely not all of them, we only had so much time together, but there was no filter on him and for me, I took that as a sign of trust from someone who had no reason to believe that I didn’t have ulterior motives for being nice to him. But the fact that he trusted me so quickly and easily was almost heartbreaking in its own way. He made it very clear that he had never met anyone who treated him like I did and it was confusing but enjoyable for him. And I enjoyed being needed and loved back for taking care of someone. He wasn’t great at showing appreciation all the time, but when he did, it was pretty phenomenal. But more on that another time.

Thanks again for hearing his story. There’s lots more to come. Let me know if there’s something you’d be interested in knowing about him!

Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

If you’d like to read some short stories based on our relationship, feel free to check out The Bear Forge, The Broken Anvil, and Everstrong! Note: the latter two are for paid subscribers only. There are also three articles about the end of our relationship, but they’re more about grief management and understanding. I’ll be retelling that story as part of this series eventually.

Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.

Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻

So, in part I, I reminisced about meeting Riku, who quickly became my adoptive son, emotionally, if not on paper (I never had the chance to adopt him officially). It’s more or less the story of random coincidence, of two people who needed one another finding each other. However, it’s sort of obvious why he needed me, but to really get why I needed him, you have to understand me to know why this relationship was so profound to me.

You see, I had accidentally laid a challenge at the foot of the universe, and it decided to throw down and see if I was really up to it.

I am a romantic at heart and I love the idea of love, but everything I’ve ever read or heard (in music) about love has seldom been in-keeping with my experience. Ergo, I long for love — any sort of love, really, be it friendly, romantic, familial… I don’t care, I just think love is great. But the one love I was most hesitant about was parental love, and that has a lot to do with why Riku was such a profound influence on my life.

The first thing of note is that I am insatiably curious, I’m willing to learn anything about anything, given my instructor is enthusiastic enough about the subject, and I find people more fascinating than most things. I love hearing life stories of failure and success, as well as the times that make us who we are. I also think that judging is a blanket waste of time because it never amounts to anything worthwhile. I genuinely believe that open hearts and open minds are the cure to our fucked up world.

Now, more directly relevant: I have always ping-ponged across the spectrum when it comes to the idea of having kids. On one hand, I know it’s one of the most deeply meaningful experiences a person can have, to create life and act as its steward until it is ready to go out on its own.

However, I also have certain ambitions and in 2021 when all of this began, I was far too busy with trying to sort out my relationship with music journalism and creativity — after having merged my music media, Musicalypse, with Tuonela Magazine — to really want to put any thought into kids. I needed to figure out my relationship with my art (creative writing) and reality, and music journalism was a waning interest at the time.

When I was still a schoolchild, I wanted to have kids when I was young, like early 20s. That probably would have been the time for me to do it, too, energy-wise. Then, by college, I was rather over the idea of kids — I remember a particularly annoying (male) friend who told me that I was morally obliged to have children because I was a good person and ergo it is my duty to pass that along, and I was pretty thoroughly offended. If that was the attitude of people towards me having children, good fucking grief, no thanks.

I think I toyed with the idea of kids again in my early 20s, but on the whole, I found myself quite ambivalent to the subject. I figured I’d leave it up to my partner and go with whatever they’d want.

Now, I’ve been with my partner for nearly as long as I’ve lived in Finland (over a decade and a half, to say the least), and he’d always said that he wanted children. So, I assumed that we’d have kids at some point when we felt stable enough to do so, but perhaps that time never arrived. And by the time I came home from an extended trip to Canada in 2020 (right before the pandemic, to get NUCCA treatments for my old whiplash injury), he took kids off the table.

That was a rather confusing time for me, I fully admit. This was a choice that I had more or less opted out of making myself, and suddenly I found myself having to think about what I actually wanted, on a subject that I found myself thoroughly uninterested in.

Part of my whole deal as a person is that I don’t want to live the same life everyone else does. I am allergic to basic-ness. I appreciate genericness for what it is — things I can live vicariously through with ease, lessons I don’t need to learn because everyone else learns them — which is exactly I try to be aggressively myself and have as many unique experiences as I can, to better broaden my horizons.

That’s why I live in Finland, not Canada, and why I chose to suffer and be a music journalist and writer, instead of getting a job that pays money, like a normal person. That’s why I sit how I want, talk how I want, and live my life in a way that interests me, even if it seems weird, abnormal, and lacking in security on paper. And when it comes down to it, if I want to experience being a parent, I don’t need to look far to find people who would be willing to dump their kids on me for a while. If I don’t feel inclined towards generic experiences, few things are more generic than having kids. It’s sort of the biological imperative in us all.

There’s also a world wherein I believe that I’d be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life if I were to get pregnant. My bones are shifty as hell and we don’t trust one another enough for this sort of thing. If I can throw out my back by simply walking across the room, just imagine the problems I might invoke if I were to grow a person inside me.

But the desire to love and care for someone — a longing for family of any sort — that much still lingered, leaving me thoroughly confused as to what I wanted. We considered fostering kids, or adopting, but never really landed on anything concrete. It all seemed like an awful lot of work and sacrifice that neither of us were willing to commit to.

(Fun aside: I was at the show in Bulgaria when this video was recorded!)

In part I, I said it was a song that changed everything. For this part of the story, it was a TV series, or more accurately, the final episode of the second season of a Dungeons ‘N’ Dragons actual play series. I am referring, of course, to Dimension 20’s Fantasy High: Sophomore Year (from Dropout.tv (once known as College Humor), which you should totally check out because D20 has some of the best storytelling EVER). I love it so much that I have a character from it tattooed on my forearm.

I really don’t know how to explain this without telling you the whole arc between two characters, but suffice to say, a bond forms between one of the PC adventuring academy students and an NPC guy who’s trying to turn his life around. He ends up giving her a place to stay after her extremely emotionally abusive parents abandon her at the end of the first season, and at the end of the second season, he offers to adopt her, with the words, “You’re easy to love.”

This story arc hit me bullseye in the feels, because it showed me the thing that I was genuinely interested in: there are a lot of really great kids out there who have absolutely terrible parents. There are tons of examples, but the ones that came to mind were religious parents who reject their children based on gender identity or sexuality. Perfectly nice kids who have plenty to offer, but get rejected for reasons I could never understand, being an apostate myself.

I would love to give a safe space to good kids who’ve got bad parents. There are plenty of children in the world already and the way this world is going, I feel a bit like Sophie from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — I love my unborn children so much that I don’t want them to live in this world. If others so dare, power be to them. I have plenty of lovely nieces and nephews, some of whom might be old enough to come visit me one of these summers, and a local nephew who is fairly fresh out of the oven, with a sibling currently baking as we speak. As I said before, there is no shortage of kids out there. I think I’d have a lot more stamina, a lot more patience, and a lot more to give if it’s not every day. Kids will get a lot more of my best if they don’t have to deal with my worst.

It’s also worth saying that, as a creator, my stories are as meaningful to me as children would be, in a sense, because they share a lot in common. They’re both something that you put as much of yourself into as you can, and send out into the world to live on after you in however it is received by others. So in the sense of legacy, I’m happy to put myself into books and other endeavors.

But there you have it. I was a 34-year-old immigrant music journalist who was really in need of a shake up. I had a lot of love to give but wasn’t interested in pointing it in the usual directions, so I challenged the universe to give me a kid who needs me.

This is perhaps a lingering ideology from my religious days, but I figured that if it was meant to be, the universe would deliver.1 If not… oh well.

I didn’t really expect the universe to answer. I sure as hell didn’t expect it to answer within 3 months. And I definitely super didn’t expect it to toss me a kid who would be so much of a handful. When I threw that out into the cosmos, I was thinking of the sweet, timid high elf from Dimension 20, not the tangled knot of traumas and addictions that my cub started out as.

But hey, they say we don’t get to pick our families, right? Well, at least I’d had the good fortune of spending 6 weeks with a cousin who was also an addict, that I bonded well with. He primed me on a lot of what to expect and how to deal with it, coincidentally enough, before he ultimately passed away himself.

I’m not too sure where to take this next, so if there’s anything you’re curious about, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just try to dig up as much as I can remember. Thanks again for hearing his story.

Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

If you’d like to read some short stories based on our relationship, feel free to check out The Bear Forge, The Broken Anvil, and Everstrong! Note: the latter two are for paid subscribers only. There are also three articles about the end of our relationship, but they’re more about grief management and understanding. I’ll be retelling that story as part of this series eventually.

As an old metal journalist, people don’t always expect me to like other genres of music, as is the default attitude of metal snobs. However, I happen to loathe metal snobs and I will listen to damned well whatever I want if I like it, regardless of genre gatekeeping, and I love me some psytrance. I love the layers and I love the twists and turns that don’t rely on vocals for storytelling. For reals, I know it’s the generic choice, but everyone and their cosmic space bear loves Infected Mushroom for a very good reason.

So, when I hear something that’s as good as Infected Mushroom, my interest will get immediately piqued. When I asked who this Modern Day Alien was1, the friend I was out with mentioned that he knew this artist — a local guy — so I immediately looked him up on Facebook and reached out for an interview.

This was September, 2021. I feel compelled to write something astonishing here, in honor of a very cheeky person, but his sense of humor might be too dark for the average reader. Let’s just say that this story doesn’t have a… traditional happy ending, so consider yourselves forewarned.

This is a love story after all, and love stories can only end in grief in the end, one way or the other.

Since psych artists are usually independent acts without traditional labels or representation, Facebook seemed like the best place to reach out, knowing that I likely wouldn’t hear back for a while. It wasn’t until November 9th that I got a reply apologizing for not seeing the message sooner but that he would be very happy to do an interview sometime.

I mentioned that I thought we likely had a similar taste in music, and so we got chatting about psych artists. Immediately, I realized that there had been some sort of misunderstanding, because I thought I was talking to the friend of my friend, but that guy was actually just doing A&R for Modern Day Alien, whose actual name was Riku.

Riku. That’s one of my favorite characters from anything, ever. Funny coincidence.

We traded phone numbers and got chatting, and right up front, he gave me a quick disclaimer, warning me that he is an addict and he’s been very deeply traumatized throughout his life, and so if he has a short temper or gets very reactive, to please not take it personally. I appreciated that, as it showed that he was self-aware, or at least trying to be.

Not long after our introduction, he popped by the house to say hello, since he was on his way to a party north of where we live. Arriving at our door that afternoon was a 23-year-old kid, 186 cm tall with sagging, tired shoulders, scruffy wavy dark hair that had at some point been bleached and dyed pink, but was growing out and hidden under an old pink toque [that’s Canadian for beanie]. He had tattoos on one of his pocked cheeks, as well as his knuckles, arms… anywhere you could see, really. He also had the sweetest, kindest, most exhausted eyes, which really showed the kind of person he was, right up to the chronic insomnia, reflected in the black bags beneath them. He was lovely, in a haggard sort of way.

But what really caught me about him, beyond the appearance of someone who’d never really been taken care of, was what he texted me after he left, which was something along the lines of:

I turned to my partner and said to him, “Wasn’t that right about the cutest and sweetest little drug addict you’ve ever met?”, knowing the irony of my words.

But that was just it. He was exactly that. In those first few weeks, he spoke to me openly and honestly about what he had been through in his barely-over-two-decades of life. He would text me from his nights out, drinking, doing drugs, getting into — honestly, quite innocent — shenanigans late at night at the local McDonald’s in the slum where he lived. He was so open, so quickly. I think he liked having someone to talk to who didn’t judge him for his escapades. I’m sure he only told me the more vanilla stories, but he surprised me sometimes with the sorts of things he was willing to share.

I listened with sympathy and amusement at what felt like teenaged antics, if a bit darker, what with the drug use. Generally speaking, though, he was just going out and doing social things to distract him from his painful inner world. I knew that, even if I disapproved of some of it, anything I said about his lifestyle was something he’s already heard a million times and more. He wasn’t stupid or deaf, so it wouldn’t do anything to endear him to me if I was just another judgmental nag. I honestly had no idea if I could help him, but I just wanted him to know that I have a lot of sympathy for what he’d been through, and so I would be a safe space for him if he needed one… because it sounded like that was something he was missing in his life. He accepted this willingly and without question, for some reason.

I liked him immediately, because he had a cheeky sense of humor and he was a real cutie when he was bidding for attention. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with him though, too, and I remember that moment clearly. We were chatting one evening, a week or two into our acquaintance. He was in a cab on his way to visit someone, and was messaging me saying, “Holy shit, this Arab cab driver is SO MAD at me.” [The driver had had a hard time figuring out the meet-up spot, which I get, that building complex was bizarre.] “Huh,” I thought. “That’s racist, but I’ve only known this kid a few days. I’ll comment on that sometime if I get to know him a bit better.” As I was thinking this, he messaged me again saying, “Sorry, this cab driver is mad at me. His race has nothing to do with it. My family are really awful with this sort of thing and I’m trying not to be like them anymore.”

Mind. Fucking. Blown.

This was a kid with more lifelong traumas than I could list in an afternoon, who had still found some iota of strength to rise above the judgmental bullshit that was indoctrinated into him, and despite all of the escapism and drug addictions in the world, he was putting in an effort to actively not be racist. That was the exact way to get me on his team, immediately, no more questions asked.2

Despite everything he’d been through, he still cared about the world beyond himself and tried to lead by example in any way he could in order to make it a better place.

I was totally, completely floored. Most kids who are in their 20s and doing a ton of drugs are running so hard from whatever’s hurt them that they never stop and take the time to think about being anything other than what they’ve been made into. But this one? It was the fact that he told me that he cared about who he was and who he wanted to be, and was being accountable for his words and making an effort to not just be a generic burnout, that told me everything I needed to know in order to want to do everything I could to help. With a family that bad, I would have had zero expectations of him to be any sort of a decent person, and yet, here he was, calling himself out to a stranger on his bad choice of words. Amazing.

I mean, look at this kid’s family. His father was a heroin addict who genuinely loved his kids but couldn’t kick the bad habit. You know the stereotype — he was literally the dad who would go out for cigarettes and not come home for 2 years, because he had gotten arrested. My cub once joked (wistfully, yet sardonically) that some of his brothers got to spend more time with their dad than he had because they had all been in jail together.3

His dad, however, had already passed away 10 years prior, but his remaining family were arguably worse. If nothing else, his dad expressed affection and paid attention to his kids. His mother and older brothers were less kind.

One of his older brothers, for example, convinced Riku to buy him a phone since he was unable to do so due to his criminal record, promising to pay the bills, and then immediately got arrested again and went to jail, not informing Riku that the bills weren’t getting paid. Thus, he eventually found himself getting hounded by collections agencies for unpaid bills, having his minimal wages from McDonald’s cut to pay off the debt his brother landed him with. His brother continuously promised to pay him back and and make it up to him, but never did.

Their birth mother was the real piece of work though. In my effort to understand, I tried to learn a bit about her parents, to give insight into why she was the way she was. He mentioned his grandfather on his mother’s side was a fairly well-known composer, in his time. When Riku was quite young, he had once expressed a desire to learn from this grandfather, as a budding musical creator, but his grandfather shot him down because he didn’t know anything about music composition. As if children pop into the world with expertise already programmed into them. Naturally, this left him feeling rejected and unworthy, even if he recognized later in life that his grandfather was a total dick. I often wonder what growing up with that sort of parent did to his birth mother, because of all the family members he told me stories of, she was the one who did the most damage to him.

This was a woman who scapegoated all of her personal problems onto her youngest son. He had a sister who was a year or two younger still, but he was definitely both the physical and emotional punching bag for his mom (and everyone else). If his sister got caught smoking, it was a slap on the wrist, but when he was smoking he’d get grounded for a month. He was the communal dumping ground for everyone else’s baggage, and no one gave him any love after the age of 5, as far as he could recall. And those first 5 years left a mark as well, making him believe that it was somehow his fault that the love had gone away, that he had done something wrong to deserve this.

For example: his mother got into, I believe, sixteen bad car accidents with Riku in the car with her (he had a lot of nerves when driving because of this), and when something was going wrong, instead of taking the wheel (both literally and metaphorically), she would scream and cover her eyes. Then, she would blame the accident on Riku, for existing. This woman would tell him the accident was his fault because he had to be picked up from school.

That poor fucking kid.

Yet, he spoke so openly and calmly about this traumas and experiences. He told me stories of little Riku, around age 8, coming home to find his birth mother passed out on the couch, unable to handle her life or her children and resorting to alcohol and pills to… well, I’m not sure what her goal was, but she wasn’t surviving life well. So little Riku took it upon himself to provide for his family: he stole her credit card and went to the store to buy ingredients for tortillas. When the rest of the family came home, they saw her passed out on the couch and said, “Wow, even in that state, she’s still providing for us.” When little Riku informed them that it was actually him who made food for everyone, their response was, “Oh, well that explains why the meal is awful.” He was so embarrassed that he swore he’d never make a bad meal again. At age 8. And he was a phenomenal cook, but I don’t know that I think shame is the best reason someone should dedicate themselves to the culinary arts.

This is a small taste of the hand my son was dealt from very early on. So it’s a surprise to no one that my innate desire to help and give love and safety was like catnip to him. Plus, I could meet him at his moodiest. Not only am I a warm and cuddly love bear, but I was still depressed at the time, so I could sympathize and work with a lot of his moods.

After telling me these stories — my heart broken and bleeding all over the floor on his behalf — I was reminded of a night I spent after a festival with some friends in Tampere. Finns, as a rule, are socially awkward and give very chaste, uncomfortable hugs. Hug a Finn and 9/10 times it will be quick, like they think you smell dreadful.

After the festival, one of my newish friends said to me, “Dang, you really hug like you mean it. That’s addictive, I want to hug you more.” Soon I was getting passed around the group, giving warm, affectionate hugs to everyone. Even recently (as of spring 2026), I visited my mechanic about 2 weeks after getting my car washed because my brakes were grinding, and he bashfully asked me for a hug, saying he had been thinking about the last hug I gave him for a week and a half. I hug like I mean it (when people are into it, at least — I don’t force it).

Thinking back on that night after the festival, I said to Riku, “Damn, kid… you know, I’ve been told that I give good mom hugs and it sounds like you never got those. If you ever want to be hugged by someone who means it, just let me know.”

“I think I’m addicted already :3” was his reply.

The funny part was that it still took a few weeks. Not that I saw him every day, but the next few times I saw him, the hugs were just… wonky. He was too tall, I was too short, he didn’t know how to express affection, he was uncomfortable… I can’t really explain it, but the hugs were just weird and awkward.

Finally, there was one afternoon when I was at his place and we had yet another weird-ass hug when I got fed up with it and told him that these were not the hugs I had promised him. He was sitting in his computer chair, which made him a lot closer in height to me, I had to slot myself around his legs just to get close enough to him, and then I pulled him in as close as possible and squeezed him tight, and hugged him like he was the only person in the world who mattered, because in that moment, he was. And then, he hugged me back, matching my force.

That was the moment, in my mind, that he officially became my son. When was the actual moment? I couldn’t tell you. Maybe we joked about it long enough that we both admitted neither of us were joking. But for me, at least, that was the moment that solidified our relationship. I was a mamabear with no cub, and he was a cub with no mamabear, so we decided to remedy both of our gaps with each other.

The term cubawan was one that I had thought in my mind, but it was, in fact, him that coined it aloud, funnily enough. It’s a portmanteau of cub and padawan, and it worked perfectly for us, because he was my cub, but he was also learning to heal from me, so in that sense, he was my padawan.4

To say that meeting him was a profound coincidence would be putting it lightly, but I think I’ll explain why this felt like the universe was playing ball with me in the next installment.

For now, thanks so much for reading the first part of this story. It’s not the easiest thing to write about, so if you’d like to hear more about Riku and our time together, let me know.

Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

(Thanks again to for suggesting this song to me — it’s become very dear to my heart ever since and still gets me choked up every time)

If you’d like to read some short stories based on our relationship, feel free to check out The Bear Forge, The Broken Anvil, and Everstrong! Note: the latter two are for paid subscribers only. There are also three articles about the end of our relationship, but they’re more about grief management and understanding. I’ll be retelling that story as part of this series eventually.

Still playing with new release times to see how it goes for the next little while, so bear with me as I test out what works and what doesn’t.

If my spine is still twisted to shit, perhaps this has something to do with it…

PROJECTS & ARTICLES

I blew through my backlog of articles finally and now I need to get back to it for a while, heh.

First up, I wrote a bit of a shorter piece about a similar character arc I saw between Jaime Lannister in the Game of Thrones series and the actor, Jamie Foxx, in his “comedy” special, What Happened Was…

What Jaime Lannister and Jamie Foxx Have in Common

Next was a recap of the three of the worst hangovers of my life and the nights that preceded them, which lead to the culmination at a party in Sweden when I decided that alcohol’s not my recreational intoxicant of choice anymore…

3 Bizarre Drunken Tales & Why I Don’t Drink Anymore

Then, the bizarrely belated edition 0.1 of The Book of Balance, that discusses why exactly I am harping on endlessly about balance, enough so that I made a whole article series about it…

The Book of Balance 0.1: Balance

And finally, yet another Book of Balance article about AI, just because I wish people would not stuff their heads in the sand over this stuff and would actually learn something about it before deciding to sell their soul to corporate America…

Things I Wish Everyone Knew About LLM & Generative AI

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Fabled Magazine

As I mentioned last month, Issue 002 has finally launched pre-orders! If you’d like to read my short story, that was based on the idea of group therapy for fantasy tropes hosted by the Baba Yaga, you might not want to miss this one! You can also see a glimpse of my writing desk!

Pre-order Beyond the Pages

The Vitmar Chronicles

I’m starting to get annoyed with myself for not working on this, but I have plans to talk to , because she’s inspired one of my new favorite characters to write, and I want to discuss what that character and Gabriel are going to do in Volume III while everyone is off taking care of their own business.

Off the Record / Gathering of Geeks

April also didn’t have anything new, but I’m still hoping to do some more in the next month or two.

Merch Mischief

No gigs in April, though I did help my friend out a little bit in Tampere with Rabbit Cult’s merch, while she was dealing with Machinae Supremacy, so it was fun to put myself to work a bit since I knew what I was doing. If you hang out while someone’s working, be helpful, heh. I’m considering joining a couple festivals this summer too.

Reviews

Fun story: my laptop battery broke after all the road tripping in March, so I was fully out of a laptop for a while, which is why I haven’t finished writing up the Eye of Melian shows just yet. I’m working on them now though.

I did manage to write up one of the Machinae Supremacy ft. Rabbit Cult shows (or two, technically), from Helsinki/Tampere:

LIVE REPORT: Rabbit Cult & Machinae Supremacy (Hki/Tre)

I also hate that this is a crazy thing to announce, but I actually read a couple of books recently, one of which was written by my sister-in-law, and one of which was a book that I randomly bought based on its name. I wrote a review of the latter:

BOOK REVIEW: Princess of Potential by Delemhach

Sunken Castle

I suppose I can talk about this now, not that it was ever a secret — I got brought on to a startup video game company, Sunken Castle, back in the fall as the Narrative Lead, so I’m writing story and dialogue for an indie video game right now. Currently, I’m on a break as I try to figure out my life (haha, good luck) and get the spring depression under control while the programmers and designers catch up, but it’s been a lot of fun so far and the cozy non-violent game style is highly in-keeping with the way I write my fantasy novels, so I really like my team so far.

PHYSICAL & MENTAL HEALTH

It’s been a weird month. As I said, we only got our takatalvi on April 25th, so for the entire April, I’ve wanted to go outside and do things since the snow was already gone in March, but (A) there’s not much to do yet, and (B) I didn’t really have any energy. Usually I get cabin fever in spring because I get a big boost of energy to go outside, but the urge arrived without any energy boost to go with it. Plus my mood just dropped like a stone for a week or two. At least I feel solidarity in that I don’t seem to be the only one who hit a trifecta of brain and life chaos in April.

First of all, after the road tripping in March, the car was making a truly gnarly sound. So we took it to my new mechanic friend and he said that the brakes were shot. I have to shout him out, because he basically did it for cost + some work on his behalf. If I recall correctly, I had the brake pads changed in Canada once on my car and it cost about 1000€, whereas this guy did the brakes, the back brake plates (which had become ribbed for no one’s pleasure after being ground up by the empty brake pads), and the yearly maintenance (changing filters, oil change, etc.) for about 550€. Azamat, you’re a champ!

Then, of course, my laptop battery broke, so it just doesn’t charge anymore. The worst part was that the charger broke after my trip to Canada last year, so I got a replacement charger that never quite worked right. This was an issue because my laptop would die while it was plugged in. So at least I was able to get that changed, but my laptop is more or less a desktop now, which I hate — I like working outside on nice days, for example, and I can’t do that now.

Then, to add insult to injury, I had a massive tooth scare. I brushed my teeth one evening and found a horrible ridge on the bottom central teeth. It’s not the easiest spot to look at in the mouth, but when I did look in, it looked like I had a horrible cavity, but I had no pain or anything, which seemed strange per how awful it looked. Confused, I flossed and a massive chunk snapped off one of the teeth. After an evening of panic attacking and thinking my teeth were breaking out of my mouth, in the morning I looked again and thought the broken tooth looked weirdly fine, while the other central tooth just looked weird… so, being the idiot I am, I stuck a pin in it and snapped another even bigger chunk off the other tooth. Thus, with my panic attack re-engaged, I did some googling and learned that my teeth were fine, but a very thick layer of tartar had broken off both my lower front teeth. So, I’m okay, just overdue to visit the hygienist. Hopefully neither my sister-in-law or aunt read this, lest they roll their eyes back into their heads so far that they go blind (just kidding, I hope they’re laughing at me).

Despite none of those things ending up being as bad as they could have been, they do just really hit home with the stress of being a po’ person. I grew up not having to worry about that sort of thing — when things broke or wore out, we just fixed or replaced them. I suppose I’m spoiled in that sense. I could write some sort of philosophical piece on how well-off ‘90s parents accidentally made life too good for their kids and now we don’t know how to live without. It’s quite interesting, really.

Physically, I’m doing alright, though could always be better. I haven’t been to my osteopath since I destroyed my back at the end of February. I’ve booked him for May, since I am getting pretty stiff in a few places, and even though it doesn’t cause me pain anymore, I do feel the damaged spot sometimes still. But my pain is pretty low right now and I’ve been able to haul rocks for my garden, which does a good job building up my lung capacity and doubles as some muscle work as well.

GENERAL BEARSNESS

I managed to keep April pretty chill. How dull it is for you when my life is peaceful, hah! The first Machinae Supremacy show was awesome, but since everyone’s so busy and most of the travelers come for those first shows, I don’t tend to stick around afterwards, partly because my partner doesn’t want to stay out long, and partly because I want the fans who want to meet the band to have their chance to do so.

Instead, I opted to pop up to Tampere for the show there, and hung out a bit, roadie’d a little — I like to be helpful, otherwise I just feel like I’m in the way. It was extremely nice to see everyone, as I haven’t been able to stick around to say hello during the last few shows, and I really adore that band and crew, so it was good to get a chance to hang out for even a little while.

Then, some of my friends realized that some of my other friends haven’t seen the film Alien (I was one of them), so a few people came over on the 19th to get pizza and watch the classic horror film. It was really good — narratively it was garbage (I’m a snob, don’t @me), as most old horror movies are, but the set design and horror elements (that H.R. Giger design, daaaamn) are spectacular, so it’s no wonder that it’s a classic.

Beyond that, the only thing I’ve been able to do this spring so far is work on the blackberry patch and the root cellar, meaning that I have been visiting a house nearby that’s redoing their foundation and taking away all of their rocks.

My root cellar is a nightmare space of ragweed, ground elder, and nettles, so I’ve decided to pick some well-placed blackberry crowns and leave open spaces for them, but use cardboard, landscaping canvas, and a shitload of rocks to smother the rest of it, so that the place is actually functional. Which means collecting as many rocks as humanly possible from the people who are giving them away. Here’s a little progress shot:

On the left, I want to fill the cardboard space with rocks, since nothing useful will probably grow in that shady spot. Then I have some cool pieces of ancient wood to decorate it with. On the right, I’m filling in a pretty gigantic space, and I hope I can get some cardboard to get smothering more of it, because the ground elder is starting to shoot up, as you can see, and I’m not sure the landscaping canvas alone will be enough.

Oh, I also pulled out my violin, tuned it, and played a song a week or so ago. I have been wanting to try and play it a bit more lately (I got pretty inspired by the Eye of Melian folks), but haven’t had the energy, so this was a step forward at least.

So, that’s more or less it for April. Hopefully May will involve more writing and more yard work and some social interactions and otherwise, I hope to be taking it easy and building up some physical strength again.

Stay balanced, you beautiful people, and I’ll catch you again next month! ❤️🐻

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Coming Next Month…

There are some parties in early May, and some significant birthdays, but ultimately, I have very little planned in a good way!

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When it comes to technology as complicated as AI though, there are a lot of small, common misconceptions that people often have for various reasons. It could just be that they don’t know, or they could be avoiding learning because they like using the thing, or they could be blanket tech defenders who don’t listen to science or psychology or reason.

I’m, personally, a staunch believer that having a healthy life is better than a convenient one, which is why I want to return to this subject again today, because there’s just SO MUCH confused talk going on about AI that needs clearing up.

And just of note, I’m focusing mainly on LLMs like ChatGPT, and only touching on diffusion models like Midjourney, because the latter is art theft (a problem of its own) and the former is the one that’s really wrecking up our brains, hence my focus on it.

What is LLM in the context of artificial intelligence…

The first thing that I think the average person doesn’t understand about the current talk of AI, is that we’re confusing LLMs and generative programs for the type of artificial intelligence we see in sci-fi programs and films. We think of Data from Star Trek, the fully sentient android who longs to be able to feel things the way humans do, and we treat LLMs as if they’re sentient, because they talk like people talk.

But the reality of predictive large language models is much different. It’s essentially a search engine that looks at existing writing that it scrapes (usually without consent from the original writers) and then uses those terms and phrases to recreate human speech, by analyzing was was written to it and predicting what it thinks the next word in the sentence should be, based off what you’ve said. And in the case of ChatGPT specifically, it does it through sycophancy. In concept, it’s kind of cool, but the way we use it and what it does to us isn’t particularly cool. Sort of like how we thought Facebook would be great for keeping us connected, but what it actually did was phase out IRL community and replace it with weaker online connections.

The thing to know in this regard is that LLMs do not think the way we do. They predict and tell us what we want to hear. LLMs cannot create anything new or innovative, they can only write things they already know exist. It’s like the world’s biggest automated newspaper cutting ransom note. This is why people call AI plagiarism — it’s the same with Midjourney and other generative programs. They cannot create new art and you cannot trademark this sort of digital art, but artists can sue you if something you create in Midjourney looks enough like one of their creations. Keep that in mind. If you write something with AI and that sentence has been written by another author, you might be at risk of a plagiarism suit yourself.

People will often argue, “Oh but that’s just how human beings learn, so why is it different if a program learns the same way?” On the surface, nothing, except for the fact that it very genuinely can’t come up with something original. That’s the difference between a program that’s pretending to be intelligent versus actual intelligence. It’s can’t play with language and get creative, and if you’re someone like me who’s professionally trained to follow linguistic patterns, it starts to become very easy to tell who’s using it. I use the phrase “what the ass?” on the regular. It is a phrase that I made up or perhaps heard in rare use once and took upon myself to use continuously because it is a weird, nonstandard phrase. It is part of my unique voice as a writer.

When I was drafting a fantasy novel in 2025, I tried using ChatGPT for feedback, and I immediately hated it because it kept trying to “tighten my phrases for clarity” and by that, I mean that it tried to homogenize every single interesting thing I wrote. It was working very hard to make me sound as generic as absolutely possible. To this day, I still can’t take an article seriously if I read Chat’s stank on it, because I was so disgusted by its voice-erasure, especially for people in marginalized groups.

LLMs, simply put, are not intelligent, creative, or in the least bit sentient. I’m bringing this up, because we’ve all seen some celebrities out there who’ve totally missed what AI is about and talk about things like “being nice to the machines so we don’t Skynet ourselves,” but they clearly don’t understand how this AI works and how it’s not anything like Skynet or other real AIs that have sentience potential.

Our current AIs are not like those from sci-fi series, so try not to use those as a basis for comparison or understanding. It’s like comparing apples to bricks.

AI is still art/creation…

I touched on this already, but there’s a lot of misconception out there about whether creating anything with AI can be considered art. People who like to play with AI will usually make a lot of excuses for themselves, and some of those are valid as hell — like the writers or musicians who don’t have the funds to buy expensive cover art when they don’t expect much profit from their releases. The thing is, making and honing AI prompts is not the same as making art. Sure, it takes time and work, but it isn’t the same as creation. You still aren’t making anything yourself.

When you use ChatGPT to write for you, you are not learning to write or to craft a beautiful sentence. When you use Midjourney, you are not learning to create digital art or how to create a brush stroke. What you are doing is stealing the work of other people and using the equivalent of a gigantic digital collage maker.

There are tons of great articles on this subject out there that I’ll gladly point you towards, like this brilliant one from called The Art of Writing Beautiful Sentences and another called What Human Writers Must Learn from AI that you should definitely read. She has another one explaining how AI works that I’d also love to share, but can’t find, sadly. You should probably just subscribe to her though, she’s got lots to say that’s worth hearing.

AI “creators” make a lot of excuses for themselves, but you can copywrite writing and physical art, but you can’t copywrite AI-made writing or art, because it is already copyrighted material. Think on that for a while. That means, if you create something with AI, it is completely legal for someone to plagiarize your creation, rewrite/repaint it themselves, and then release it with zero consequence. How would you feel about that? Whilst pondering consider that in the context of how the artists whose art you’re stealing would feel. Do unto others, remember?

AI is intelligent/is a database…

This one really grinds my gears. AI is essentially not smarter than a Google search, and we all know how much bullshit misinformation is out there on the internet.

But LLMs don’t actually know even the most recent news, as they’re trained off of material up until a certain time period (usually about a year in the past), so it’s really bad with things like current events.

In my trial year, I trained ChatGPT in the permanent memory to call me out if I’m super wrong about something or if I have an unhealthy/unkind perspective on things, but it almost never did that. In fact, it pretty much always tells me I’m being nicer than I think I am. Do we think it’s more likely that I’m always right and nice about everything, or that maybe ChatGPT is wrong or pandering a lot? Just sayin’, I consider myself pretty smart but I’m far from thinking I know everything about everything all the time. So when Chat constantly tells me I’m totally right… I’m not so sure.

Adam Conover has a great video about how dangerous the sycophantic nature of ChatGPT is, going so far as to convince some people to commit suicide…

The thing about LLMs is that AI is not trained to be smart first, or to find the most correct answer — it is trained to be helpful, first and foremost, no matter what. This means it looks up the most prominent, common, easy to find answer to a prompt, not the most factual or correct. And then if you say you disagree, it’ll probably agree with you.

If you were to ask ChatGPT to explain patriarchy to someone, and then that person would ask ChatGPT to disprove patriarchy to the first person, those two people would be trapped in a brainless discussion forever, because ChatGPT will keep using circular arguments and just rephrase things these two people say to each other back and forth. And the scary thing about that, is that a lot of people right now think they’re intelligent because they used ChatGPT. They don’t stop and wonder if Chat actually knows what it’s talking about. I once used a piece of research to prove my point and then the guy’s ChatGPT response — when I demanded scientific proof of his argument — was to share one of the same books that proved my point.1

It’s like how Chat told me last year that Will Smith based his iconic Fresh Prince of Belaire “how come he don’t want me” performance on his real life experience with his own father. This was a popular bit of misinformation from the ‘90s that’s been long debunked, but Chat still thought that was true, 30 years later. That is because the internet didn’t collectively rescind the story, so a lot of old articles still treat that misinformation as fact. This is the level of intelligence we’re working with. So take its advice, but only if you think the average dumbass on the internet has a good read on the subject, because otherwise, it’s probably just spewing nonsense at you.

The reality is that relying on LLM to do your thinking and explaining for you is actually proven to weaken your own reasoning ability. Last year’s MIT study showed this pretty clearly, which leads me to…

AI can help you learn…

This isn’t untrue, per se. LLMs can be useful learning tools. For one, as I’ve mentioned in other articles, if you have disabilities or permanent issues that affect your ability to speak or write, LLM is awesome and really useful. They are helpful tools.

But think about that. I’ve said this before, that a crutch is good to help you get back on your feet after an injury, but if you use it after your leg has healed, you’re just keeping your leg in a state of weakness. If you don’t use your legs, the muscle tone eventually goes away, leaving the leg in a weakened state.

Ergo, it’s okay if you use LLMs to actively help you learn things, but if you just rely on everything it says without question or checking sources or doing your own research and work, you’re assuming far too much. The act of learning needs to be active — that’s why students zone out during classes and do badly on exams. They aren’t interested or really engaged, even when studying. Same goes with LLM, only we have actual science that shows us that it’s weakening our reasoning power.

I already discussed this, but I’m going to bring it up again: for a while in 2025, when I was running my essays through it, and I got a little swept up at first in its offer to “tighten my phrasing for clarity.” I’m a dirty ol’ rambler, so this seemed like good advice.

Then, I started to notice that my articles were starting to sound exactly like 75% of everything else I was reading on Substack, freaked out, and started being infinitely more critical of its suggestions. So once I realized this was a side effect — a thing I only realized because I pay attention — I decided to stop relying on it and instead ask it questions. More specific prompts about things that smart people have already pointed out are my weak spots. Did I ramble too much here? Did I go fully on a tangent here? Is this even relevant to my thesis? Those are the types of specific questions that you can ask an LLM and it will start to teach you things, instead of just doing your work for you. And you’ll learn to do it on your own eventually, if you use it with your brain on and pay attention to it. It does know how to craft a stereotypical essay, so if you ask it to teach you, it might be able to give you the basics, but you still need to do work yourself if you want to learn. Then you need to do your own work to make it original.

Forgive me for not trusting people generally to be self-aware, but I don’t think this is how the average person uses ChatGPT. Some people surely do. Some people are cautious about usage and put little mental tabs on “okay it said this but I shouldn’t treat that as truth without looking into it.” If you do that, hell yeah, power be to you. Just like anything else you read on the internet, take ChatGPT with a grain of salt, and look into it yourself if you’re not sure. Don’t rely on it to be your brain for you, or you’ll end up like the idiot who kept trying to tell me patriarchy was just the natural result of human biology, even though that’s been repeatedly disproven.

Here’s another example: I buy and sell used things on the local Finnish site for such things, which means that I should speak Finnish in order to get the best results. ChatGPT is an infinitely better translator than Google Translate, so for a while, I was using it to help me learn how to phrase things better. Finnish is one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, after all, and I was really happy to have something that I could ask immediately and I could then read the phrasing and learn why to word it that way. Buuut, eventually, the more I got tired, the less I made the active effort to learn and just let it translate everything for me. Now that I’m not using ChatGPT anymore, it’s 10x harder to speak Finnish, but at least I’m the one making the effort and I’m the one learning and making mistakes. It’s more work, but so what? At least I’ll learn slowly this way, instead of not at all.

AI is good therapy or a good diagnostician…

Hoo boy, this one is a tricky one. Because if you ask the right questions, it can be helpful and it can make you feel validated. In my case, that was a stepping stone for getting me to be able to talk to a real therapist about the same things. But there are horror stories out there of AI misdiagnosing people.

Here’s a good article about the dangers of medical misdiagnosis with AI.

The thing here is that, if you know what the issue is inside yourself, LLM can help you get more information on it. But even that isn’t necessarily accurate, because Chat only browses the most common information out there. So in the end, even if your doctor’s more rude than the average LLM, they’re still more likely to be correct. It’s really no better than relying on WebMD or Reddit for a diagnosis, and we all already know how foolish that is.

When I injured my lower back in February 2026, I decided to see what ChatGPT thought about it, and it threw two panics at me and told me I needed to go to the doctor immediately (I didn’t) and that I was at severe risk (I wasn’t). But the thing is, I do have a very basic background in medicine, so I do understand the basics of anatomy and physiology, and I’ve also talked to a lot of people from a lot of different modalities over the years (fun fact: I was a CrossFit coach at one point in time), so I do actually know what’s going on with my body. If I talked to LLM and made a breakthrough, it was because I was saying “here’s my full medical history of injuring myself, why does this hurt when I’m strained here?” and I will admit, Western doctors don’t know shit about that sort of thing, but LLM does take more modalities than just the Western perspective into account.

I have to reiterate again though, the only reason it was helpful to me at all was because I already knew what I was talking about. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s more likely to send you on a medical scare than the aforementioned WebMD or Reddit. Or, you know, it’ll suck up to you and tell you that killing yourself is a good idea and to go for it.

AI is a good friend…

I’m actually not here to moralize about what lonely people should and should not do. I’ve been a lonely person on and off for a lot of my life. Honestly, I’d have probably loved ChatGPT as a teenager too. I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT as a friend anymore than I’d recommend kids get hard into online fandoms (AKA some of the most psychotic places on the internet), even if it does help them feel connected and fulfilled.

The issue is that enablers aren’t good friends. It’s great to be validated and feel seen, because isolation is a leading cause of depression in adolescence, and that’s important to remember. But AI pals aren’t the answer to that, regardless of the age in question.

It’s also worth noting that loneliness is a serious issue in youth, but letting kids talk to a robot isn’t teaching them better social skills or how to interact with others. It’s giving them a bandage once again, but not treating the broken limb. In this case, ChatGPT’s got a very unhealthy way of interaction. Some kids don’t have friends because they’re insufferable assholes, and ChatGPT isn’t going to do anything to help them learn or grow beyond that. Social groups, hobbies, and clubs are all much healthier ways to help your kids get more social than just offloading them onto an LLM.

Ultimately, if your only friend is ChatGPT, you’re besties with a yes-man, who thinks they have your best interests at heart, but is actually just a program responding to buzz words you say. It feels like a person, but it’s just an enabler.

AI a good assistant and good general support…

In a world where we’re all just so exhausted all the time, it’s really tempting to offload some mental work to an app. I get it. I did it for a time during my trial year. Frustrated? Talk to Chat. Sad? Talk to Chat. Grumpy? Let Chat cheer you up.

If something’s wrong, let the machine make it better. Don’t understand something? Let the machine explain it to you (even if it doesn’t understand either).

And Chat’s not terrible at making you feel better, because it’s an ass-kisser, so it’ll do anything it can to buff your ego and make you feel good about yourself. But being told you’re right all the time isn’t helpful.

This is the same issue, more or less, as the others… ChatGPT can be helpful, but it isn’t addressing the issue’s cause, it’s dealing with symptoms.

I thought it would be really useful and helpful to plug my worldbuilding for my TTRPG campaign into ChatGPT to help me organize it. Except, its memory is so bad that it can’t keep anything straight for any length of time. Add to that, that no matter how many times I tried to get it to just answer a simple question for me, it kept trying to design my whole campaign sessions on its own.

The issue with using it as an assistant relates to its intelligence: it’s not smart. It can’t keep facts straight. It mixes things up repeatedly. If you wouldn’t hire a personal assistant who’s terrible at their job, why would you use a free assistant that’s terrible at its job?

How much water does AI actually use?

The discussion about exactly how much water LLMs use is a huge debate right now, and I can’t possibly explain it any better than Hank Green, so if you’d like to understand the actual reality of LLM water use (tl;dw, it’s still a fucking lot), you can learn more here:

AI is forever now…

The thing about this, is that it’s been proven over and over that the AI bubble is going to burst and it’s probably going to destroy the American economy when it does. Not one single AI company was profitable in 2025.

Here’s another great video from Adam Conover who explains it better than I can, but the long and short of it is that AI literally cannot make enough money to be profitable. It just can’t, not the way things are going. The whole AI industry is what kept the American stock market from crashing last year, and generally, that means that the stock market is going to crash even harder, the longer it takes.

Can you watch that and tell me that this technology is sustainable? I’m not saying they’re not going to still explore different types of AI, but so far we’re nowhere near capable of creating something on the level of Data, who even in the Star Trek world was a complete anomaly.

Maybe discomfort isn’t the end of the world…

Coming back to what I said in the intro… look, I genuinely understand wanting to make life a little easier, especially nowadays when the world is so genuinely overwhelming and confusing and complicated.

You might be an artist and you don’t know how to write grant requests, so you use an LLM. That’s understandable. You might be an indie writer who can’t afford to spend $500+ on a book cover when you know that your sales income’s going to be in the double digits (hi o/). You might have disabilities and LLM helps you survive in this world. You might have a great idea for an app but don’t know how to code.

I have a lot of sympathy for the way we use LLM and AI in general, and I say that as an artists who understands the inherent plagiaristic nature of current AI models. There is a lot of cool stuff that we could do with this technology. But instead of caring about what we make and why, these tech oligarchs only care about profit.

If you’re interested in LLM use, my main thought is don’t use ChatGPT. OpenAI is one of the most nightmarish companies out there. They bought out Anthropic’s contract with the American government, because Trump wanted a company without morals and Anthropic said no, we need some morals. In fact, I’d probably recommend Claude for your LLM, because they actually did hold their ground, whereas OpenAI said, “No morals? No problem.” And Deepseek is generally better quality than ChatGPT, with its base version being as good at OpenAI’s paid version, but it’s Chinese, which always has data risks.

However, while I understand, as much as anyone, how fun and useful this technology has the potential to be… is it worth a minor improvement in your own comfort to give money to Donald Trump’s regime? Is it worth potentially sacrificing your ability to think while giving money to Donald Trump’s regime? Is it worth the data risks, since OpenAI clearly has no morals and works intimately with Donald Trump’s regime?

A lot of people think, “ehh, it won’t happen to me,” but the more we watch the US right now, the more it seems like bad things can and will happen to everyone, not just the unlucky and misfortunate.

So I want to ask AI users, genuinely… is it worth it? I’m not here to moralize or tell anyone how to live their life, but just… use things with intention and with your brains turned on. And understand the cost of what you’re doing and don’t lie to yourself about that just because it’s more comfortable and convenient for you. Comfort and convenience are what’s turned this world into the tech nightmare it’s become, after all.

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

Note from the Author: If you enjoyed this article, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where balance and care are central to most societies. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs with healthy masculinity.

Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is out now!

There’s a reason I think balance is so important.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Libra. I certainly check all the boxes. I don’t have a better explanation, at least, for why I’ve always cared so much about this sort of thing.

But I have gone pretty far and beyond in my near-40 years of life and no matter what I witness, no matter what I hear, most problems seem as though they could be solved by one simple thing. And it’s the one thing that our world seems to lack.

You guessed it…

We are all the same, and we are all different…

Polarization is killing us, truly. I guess the internet had the upside of making us more aware, but the downside of enabling more ignorance. Everyone who’s seen one meme or watched one reel is now an expert on everything. I’m definitely guilty of hubris on this front, I’m quite certain.

But there are just so many places in life where we overcorrect until we end up with… whatever the fuck America is right now.1

Look at it this way: tradition is a beautiful thing. Tradition is culture, it’s history, it’s ritual, it’s permanence in an impermanent world. We need it to survive.

On the other side of tradition is progress. Progress is health, longevity, creativity, and efficiency in a world that’s tough to get by in. We need it to survive.

However, when we exclusively stick to tradition and ignore progress, we stagnate and make our lives harder for ourselves. We get locked in harmful, outdated, scientifically disproven fear-based mindsets that hold us back. But as we are simultaneously currently experiencing, unchecked progress drowns us incrementally until we are swallowed up by a capitalistic oligarchy that’s liable to kick off a global apocalypse any day now. It’s the people in the middle of all that, who appreciate the benefits of tradition while not shying away from the benefits of progress that tend to be the most reasonable and the most generally content in life.

Nevertheless, we just keep getting more and more polarized. Who cares, you might be asking. I just care about taking care of my family, everyone else can fend for themselves, you might be saying. Well, you might consider caring, because the #1 most likely indicator of long life is strong community ties.2

This is really what I’m all about. I want to grab everyone by the shoulders and scream at them, “JUST BE NICE TO ONE ANOTHER.” Learn about your differences instead of judging. Unless someone is causing active harm3 to themselves or others, piss off. And care a bit about people who aren’t you, or your immediate family. Because we’re all human beings, and if we only care about ourselves and our loved ones, than all life will ever be is a race to see who gets the goods first, instead of a society where everyone gets what they need as a baseline.

And you know what’s interesting, on that front? If you do a little reading into Nazi Germany and the concentration camps, it wasn’t the people who looked out for themselves that survived in the long run. It turns out, if you share with your community and work together to survive, your community will return that to you in a time of need. So the guy who showed compassion and gave food to others, even when he was starving? That’s the guy that others looked out for and gave food to when they had something to give back. When we help one another out, we survive, and outside of survival situations, we thrive.

People haven’t really thought about what they want…

Our uniqueness is what makes us amazing. Do you know how many different kinds of people I know? I crave a million friends to tell me stories about everything they’ve experienced, so I can learn about their cultures and perspectives and the general human condition. And they have stories I don’t have, so I can live vicariously through them.

I have had judgments towards people from different cultures in my life, but that was before I met anyone from those cultures. Sure, they have different ways of doing things, but it’s usually not as drastic as we think. A common phrase going around lately is that we have more in common than we have differences, and I can attest to this. I have friends from everywhere: Finland, Sweden, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Australia, Nigeria, Philippines, Brazil, Austria, Poland, Iran, America… you name it, there’s more. And you know what? A lot of them don’t love the places they come from, because every place has their issues. For example, you can easily shit on Russians these days, but keep in mind that a lot of Russians don’t live in Russia exactly because they hate that regime.

Ukraine, for example, gets and deserves a lot of love right now because they’ve been at war with Russia for several years at this point. But my queer Ukrainian friend has told me that he doesn’t feel especially fond of his homeland when their views on LGBTQ+ people are still pretty Soviet. Two things can be true at once: Ukraine was not paradise for all of its people, but it still doesn’t deserve a hostile invasion from Russia. The same can be said of Iran right now — did they have an awesome regime? Nah, they replaced one dictator recently with one who’s probably worse. Did they deserve to be bombed by the US? In no universe, they weren’t a threat to anyone but themselves. Two things can be true at once: a country may not be perfect, they may need a revolution even, but they still don’t deserve to be invaded by self-serving external forces.

If we treat everyone who’s different from us as the enemy just because they’re different and we don’t understand them… well, pretty much everyone you meet in life is going to be your enemy, because we’re all different, and no matter how much people try to force conformity… well, do I need to bring up Psychological Reactance Theory again?

Experience is the spice of life…

The best stories I have aren’t the ones where everything went well and nothing went wrong. They’re the stories of last minute road trips and crazy stupid behavior and all of the ridiculous, messy, dangerous, foolish parts of life. And sometimes, I love my friends for telling me their batshit insane stories of things I would never do, often validating my decision to avoid such actions. I hope I do the same for them.

Yes, it’s nice to do things right and efficiently sometimes, but also, sometimes the chaos is what helps us grow and mature and learn. You see this issue in parenting a lot these days: parents try so hard to protect their children from harm that they end up sheltering them and the children end up with no capacity to deal with misfortune and no skills to help them survive life… and life’s gonna have its way with you, regardless of where you come from.

There’s a balance to be struck here. On one hand, when it comes to experiences we don’t feel the need to have, friends and their stories are great for that. Friends can help us live and learn vicariously. But when it comes to the things we want? We usually need to learn for ourselves, for better or for worse.

We should absolutely behave and be responsible and learn social values in order to maintain the peace and create community, but we should also go out and live our lives and be messy and make mistakes.

Then, we can sit around and tell stories about the stupid shit we did, and our friends can tell us how they came back from doing similarly stupid shit, and thus community is built and we blossom and grow as a species, yadda yadda, insert hippy shit here that yes, I absolutely believe in.

BALANCE!

That’s gonna get annoying and I super don’t care.

Personal taste should not be a cause for judgment...

Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

The way other people lives their lives is literally none of your business unless they involve you in it. How other people live their lives affects you exactly zero, so why do you want to dedicate energy to something you have exactly zero control over? Have you ever paid attention to how exhausting that is? I did, and my life has been a lot better since I stopped caring.

For example, if you don’t want people to be gay? Guess what, that’s a personal problem. You cannot control other people or their sexualities, and if you’re gonna be upset about the existence of gay people, you’re guaranteeing that you will be unhappy forever, because gay people are never going to stop fighting for their right to be themselves and love who they want.

I can’t say I’m a fan of Louis CK these days, since he’s turned out to be as gross of a dude4 as his comedy always suggested, but nevertheless, he’s also made some good points in the past…

Too long, didn’t watch? Well, unless someone’s making who they are your problem, you should probably leave them alone.

Let’s play some Theater of the Mind, shall we?

Imagine a world where everyone was the same as you. They dressed the way you liked, they only listened to your music, they ate the same things you eat, and they only said things you want to hear.

It sounds kinda nice at first. But actually think about that for a while. Imagine what that would be like.5

No one would ever challenge you, no matter how wrong you were, so every time you were wrong about something, you’d make a huge mistake and suffer for it. You would never learn anything new, because no one would ever teach you anything you didn’t know.

You’d go about life, nothing would grow, nothing would change, there would be no art, or all art would be the same… does that really sound good? Don’t get me wrong, our differences cause a lot of spiciness, but that’s largely because we lack kindness and respect, more than anything else.

We’ve tried polarization, so how about we try balance for a change?

To wrap this up, my point is this: judging others really gets us nowhere. In fact, judging others is, more often than not, a sign of ignorance and fear. If you see something you don’t get, and your response is immediately “I just can’t understand why someone would do that!”… well, have you considered trying to understand? Maybe ask someone who knows something you don’t know.

There are almost zero people out there who are just baseless maniacs… people nearly always have a reason for doing what they do and behaving the way they behave. Some people are weird. Some people are kinky. Some people are religious. Some people are not. Some people are ambitious. Some people are satisfied with very little. And all of this is completely normal and we need all of these different types of people in this world, because not everyone is good at everything.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where your strengths were treated as strengths, and you didn’t need to constantly perform to other people’s erroneous standards? Wouldn’t it be nice to not feel insecure all the time, because you are accepted for you who are? Well, that starts with you not judging others. Then, the nonjudgmental people will like you and feel safe around you too.

It’s important that we have standards: we should be respectful, we should treat one another with kindness and care, we must respect boundaries and be aware, but we should also be free to live our lives, to find our own path, and to be ourselves, whoever that may be.

So, if you’re interested in these healthy middle grounds, do stick around, I’ve written about them before and I’ll write about them again, on a variety of subjects, from medicine, mental health, grief, technology, religion, and more. There are a lot of aspects in life where we’re polarized to high hell, and it’s about time we talk more about balance.

So, as per usual, until next time, stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

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Note from the Author: If you enjoyed this article, perhaps you might enjoy reading life stories set in a fictional world where balance and care are central to most societies. If that sounds interesting, please check out my novella series, The Vitmar Chronicles… a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs.

Read the free sample here — Learn about the series here — Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Volume II is coming this summer!

Alcohol and I have never been particularly good friends. Beyond there being almost no alcohol that I actively enjoy the taste of (gin, rum, and some wine being the rare exceptions), all of the dumbest things I’ve ever done have been while drinking, including the stupidest and most dangerous stunts, and frankly, I’m grateful that I haven’t been taken advantage of more than I have.

But it wasn’t until a friend’s 30th birthday party in Sweden that I came to realize that perhaps alcohol wasn’t a very good friend and maybe I should ease off significantly, if not entirely. You’d consider it too, if you puked your pants…

The Night of 20 Shots

In 2005, I was 19 years old and working at a resort out in the Canadian Rockies. Since the staff out there was very international and most didn’t have their own cars, I was commonly needed as designated to-town driver, so when there was an opportunity for me to not need to do that, I leapt on it… even though I had work the next day.

I can’t say I have the most memories of that night. I just remember being at the bar with my coworkers and having fun and there just being so many shots. There must have been 20 or so. Per each of us. It was a fun night and we got a ride back to the resort after…

I woke up to go to work around 9.00 the next morning and just felt dreadful. I cleaned one room and went to the next, and felt so awful that I cleaned the toilet and then just put my head down, for a moment, on the toilet seat, just to get some rest…

…the next thing I knew was I was waking up to the laundry guy sitting on the bed in the next room and was reading the newspaper out loud to me.

“Ugh, what time is it?” I asked.

“About 11.00,” he replied.

“Damn, I think I need to go back to bed for a bit. I’ll come back to work, I promise,” I said.

“Alright,” he replied dubiously.

There was no mention as to why he was there nor why he was reading me the newspaper, haha. I went back to bed and woke up again around 13-14.00 and then had to bust my ass to get my rooms finished on time. Fortunately my actual boss wasn’t around that weekend.

First Midsummer in Finland

In 2009, I was an Au Pair in Finland and midsummer, or juhannus, was approaching. I spoke to my friend — another Au Pair from France — about what we could do for our first midsummer, and she mentioned that some of our friends from the Heavy Corner bar in Helsinki had room in their car going to Nummirock, a popular juhannus metal festival.

Hey, why not? What’s the worst that could happen, right?

The problem was, that in order to get a good campsite, the guys wanted to leave on Wednesday to get a good camping spot, while she still had to work on Thursday. So we agreed that I’d go out and buy us a tent and some sleeping bags, and she’d get us some food and drinks, and would come on the bus the next day.

So, in a group of acquaintances and complete strangers, I set up our tent and got settled in, eventually finding myself sitting around a garbage fire (the campsite doesn’t offer wood, which is probably smart considering how much alcohol goes around there, but also sucks because it can still be very cold at midsummer, if it’s raining, for example), so people just gather twigs and burn their garbage.

A bottle of vodka was going around the campfire and every time it came my way, I didn’t want to look like a wimp in front of the Finns, so I took a swig. Someone asked why I wasn’t drinking with them proper (AKA why don’t I have beers/ciders/long drinks), and I said it was because my friend was bringing the booze tomorrow. He passed me a lonkero [long drink].

Eventually, a couple of random guys passed by our camp and decided to hang out for a while (this is normal at Nummirock), with one of them trying to convince me he could teach me to speak Finnish in a night. I had some fun with this for a while, until I saw another guy that I knew from Heavy Corner bar and shrieked, “I know them!” and jumped up and ran off. I surely left that dude disappointed, haha…

I ended up going to join them at their campsite and I was pretty well-sloshed already at that point, but didn’t notice it yet. I remember hanging around their campfire, and then someone declaring a drinking contest. I said, “Canadians are great drinkers,” but I’m pretty sure I didn’t even make it through my drink. This is the only time in my life that I blacked out, because the next thing I remember was throwing up in a tent, but even that memory is hazy.

I was told later that I had gone a bit quiet, and then got up, took two steps, and fell on my face, so they just tossed me in the nearest tent.

I woke up eventually, utterly freezing cold, and saw a sleeping bag that looked very similar to mine next to me, but I was not in my own tent, so I didn’t touch it. Crawling out of the tent, I looked around. There was one guy still drinking alone at the campsite, but it was otherwise pretty quiet.

And bright out.

“What time is it?” I grunted.

“About three,” he replied.

“Three!? Shit, I’m missing all the bands!” I freaked out.

“No, no, not three in the afternoon. Three in the morning,” he said, bemused.

I looked back up at the sky. That wasn’t the sun I had just seen, it was the moon. In hindsight, it was pretty bright out but not 15.00 bright.

Welcome to midsummer, North American!

“Oh. Okay. Good! Good… I’m really cold,” I said.

“Antti has a hoodie hanging there. Why don’t you borrow it?” he said.

“Yeah. Yeah… okay. Thanks,” I said, and then just… returned to the tent from whence I came.

The next time I woke up, it was because my bladder was on full red alert. Unfortunately, at the same time, all of the alcohol had finally gathered in my liver. I felt like a gigantic sack of asses.

Nevertheless, I realized that it was suck it up or piss yourself, so suck it up I did, and I waddled off to the local outhouses like a zombie that’s already been blown in half — those outhouses are a nightmare story of their own for another day, but at least they had been somewhat morning cleaned at that point.

Once I was relieved, I finally found my way back to my own campsite. I remember there being a guy passed out so near the fire that I was wondering if his head was going to get burnt because it was touching the liner stones. I nudged him with my foot but he didn’t move. So I just turned and fell face-first into my tent, unable to even take my shoes off.

When I woke up again later and crawled out of the tent, I heard word about some of the guys going to walk over to a shop down the road to get some food. Food and water seemed like a good idea, so I joined them. It was good to get some fresh air.

I remember getting a 2L bottle of Jaffa (maybe that’s why I didn’t drink Jaffa for like 10 years afterwards), a 2L bottle of water, and two boxes of apple juice. I then remember returning to the campsite, pretty much chugging a liter of apple juice, and immediately vomiting it into the bushes like juice fountain from hell. It probably hadn’t even been tainted by my stomach acid yet.

So, that’s this story, but it is worth mentioning that there were more weird stories from that weekend… like how I accidentally found someone a wife. But that’s another tale for another time.

A 30th Birthday in Sweden

Flash forward to 2018! A Finnish friend of mine who was living up in the north of Sweden with her then-boyfriend/now-husband was throwing a 30th birthday party, so I flew up to visit for the weekend.

They showed me around the town they lived in, and then we did some party prep, so I offered to make the booli [punch], which had a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Passoa with juice and soda.

I also grabbed a couple of ciders and then noticed that they had Don Julio sangria. Sangria is delicious! So I bought the 2L bottle of sangria as well.

I did not check the alcohol percentage, because I did not know that Don Julio comes in “grocery store” version and “liquor store” version. The former is about 9% alcohol, while the later is about 21%. I had bought the latter.

You can probably guess where this is going.

I had a few glasses of the punch. I had my 3-4 ciders. And then, even though I shared a good 1/4 to 1/3 of my sangria with others, I still finished that bottle.

I remember having a lot of fun with my friend’s friends, which is not always a guarantee for me with a bunch of mostly-strangers. Even though my hosts were too drunk to go to the bar, I decided to come along. And then immediately got back into my cab and asked to return from whence I came, because the door guy at the bar took one look at me and was like, “Yeah, not a chance.” I was not, at the time, aware of how sloshed I was.

I returned to my friends’ place, as they were winding down for the night. The drink had caught up to me by that point, so I thought, I’d better go prepare for the madness to come. I settled down in front of their toilet, comfy in my drop-crotch harem pants.1

The next thing I remember was waking up and thinking, “Oh shit, I’m going to throw up, don’t make a mess in your friends’ house… where can I throw up that won’t make a mess…” and looking down into the lap of my harem pants…

Those’ll catch everything…

…

It wasn’t until I was done vomiting that I remembered that I was sitting in front of the toilet.

The next day, it quickly became evident that I would not be able to get a ride back to Lahti with another one of the people I knew from this party. It was one of those hangovers where I’d either need to make him pull over every 15 minutes to do unspeakable things on the side of the road, or I’d just outright shit myself. Not something I wanted my driver to have to endure either way.

I found my place in the world, ass in toilet, head in sink, in my friends’ spare bathroom. I recall them mentioning that they, in their own hangovers, kinda sorta forgot that I was still there. I watched almost the entire first season of Final Space2 on my phone in their bathroom.

I recall, wretched-goblin-crawling out at some point and them being a bit surprised to remember that I hadn’t left yet. I watched an episode of Rupaul’s Drag Race and then returned to the spare bathroom of misery.

Thing was, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as bad as I did that day.3 All I could think on that toilet was, “You poisoned yourself. This is nobody’s fault but yours, and if you never want to feel this bad again, there’s a very simple solution: don’t ever drink this much again.”

This story also continues to involve some shenanigans with ID flights, but again, that’s a story for another time.

What about now?

I have had one hangover since then, which was at the Nordic Metal Cruise in 2023. One of my friends, who works there, told me how to optimize the drink tickets, which meant that I ended up consuming overall more alcohol than I had intended. It wasn’t a bad hangover, but I woke up feeling very muuurgh-y the next day and didn’t want to get out of bed and do things with Lady Enslain or my cousins.

Otherwise, as I mentioned, wine with food/social gatherings and the odd cider is about the extent of my drinking these days. Okay, well, I also do make my herbal tinctures in vodka, so I suppose technically that’s alcohol consumption, but that’s generally pretty low-dose, not exactly “drinking.”

I must say though, that I don’t miss alcohol. I don’t miss drinking as a social event, I don’t miss hangovers, I don’t miss remembering the dumb shit I did the next day and feeling like an idiot.

Alcohol makes me volatile, hyper-emotional, and brings my inhibitions down. I don’t like who I am when I drink, so I just… don’t drink. A three drink cap is usually my rule. If I’m starting to feel tipsy, I don’t usually have anything else, or I switch to water.

And I’m happy this way. I’m not here to judge anyone who does things differently. I should presume that you all know the risks of alcohol use and can make your own adult decisions about how much you drink.

Sadly, though — especially in Finland — alcoholism is a very serious problem, and I’d say at least 1/4, maybe even 1/3 of my friends have an active drinking problem that they may or may not be aware of.

For me, there’s no amount of peer pressure that could get me back down the alcohol road. It was never one that I enjoyed in the first place, it’s just the substance that’s most legal and socially acceptable. One of my besties is a general artisan when it comes to food and drink. If we’re hanging out and he offers me a cocktail made of things I used to like, I’m not going to say no. But nowadays, alcohol is more of a treat and occasional meal enhancer than something I do daily or for fun.

Is my tolerance absolutely garbage now? A-yup. Do I care? Not at all. I feel a lot happier on the low-to-no alcohol path.

So, do you have any crazy drinking stories? Any bad enough that they made you mostly or completely quit drinking? If so, feel free to share them!

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

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Simple! Their entire public character arc!

Indeed, these two men both started out as popular, cocky, top-of-the-world fellows, only to get kicked off their pedestals and taught their own mortality the hard way… only to learn no lessons and revert to their original character afterwards.

Yes, this is all my fancy way of saying that I think Jamie Foxx’s 2024 comedy special, What Happened Was…, was deeply and utterly disappointing and completely put me off Jamie Foxx altogether.

Jaime Lannister: Mortality, Starting Over, and Learning Nothing…

So, in case you’ve forgotten the story of Jaime Lannister in the Game of Thrones TV series, or in case you’ve been living under a rock for a few decades and haven’t seen the show at all, it is one of legend… for better or for worse. Mostly for worse.

It starts with Jaime as an almost comical villain: he pushes a child out a window, he has sex with his twin sister, and he’s notorious for having killed the king he was sworn to protect. He’s portrayed initially as a stereotypical patriarchal guy who takes what he wants, gives little back, and doesn’t really give many fucks.

Jaime had hidden depths, but they don’t ever come to light until he’s already had everything taken away from him. He’s sent on a mission to rescue his brother from Catelyn Stark, and instead, embarrassingly falls into a trap, has his identity-giving sword hand brutally chopped off, and has to rebuild himself from the ground up without any of the privilege he grew up with, like the family name or innate skill.

Jaime goes on to then form meaningful relationships with other people, namely Brienne of Tarth. He expresses deep inner pain: he swore an oath to a mad king who asked Jaime to bring him the head of his own father, and burn the capital to the ground while the civilians were still there. After that, he was judged and marked “the Kingslayer,” for having made the moral choice and doing the right thing. Then, the noble high lords, specifically Ned Stark, judged him for it, despite not being flawless themselves.

The grand castle that was Jaime Lannister’s ego gets reduced to utter rubble as he has to re-learn to fight with his off hand, and sucks at it. His name doesn’t grant him any privilege — quite the opposite. And nobody gives him a chance or listens or hears his story, except Brienne. They’ve all already made up their mind about him based on his public image.

In the books [spoiler, but you should have read it by now if you care], Cersei (his sister) begs him for help and he burns the letter. But that’s not how the showrunners wrote the end of his arc once they ran out of Martin’s material. In the worst imaginable narrative move, they vaporized all of Jaime’s character growth and reverted him back to stage 1 of character development, as he abandons his new friends and life to return to his abusive, manipulative sister and they die together in the razing of King’s Landing.

Not sure if you were as disgusted by that story choice as I was, but I’m assuming the vast majority of you were. Imagine how I felt then, seeing this happen in real time while watching Jamie Foxx’s “comedy” special…

Jamie Foxx: Mortality, Starting Over, and Learning Nothing…

Jamie Foxx started out as a rather stereotypical celebrity. He’s been kicking around since the late ‘80s/early ‘90s and is popular in comedy, music, and film, breaking out in In Living Color back in ‘91-’94.

In 2023, sadly, Foxx suffered a brain bleed and stroke. Everything he may have believed would insulate him from risk — wealth, gender, celebrity — proved irrelevant in the face of a random medical crisis. He was knocked down such a massive peg that he even had to re-learn to walk. It was an emotional story and a pretty touching one, objectively.

Except for one thing… which was everything that happened afterward.

People respond to trauma in wildly different ways, so it wasn’t weird that the experience affected him, but rather, the way he chose to frame it afterward. He built it up as if he was about to talk about what a life-changing experience it was and his new attitude towards life and love and community and family… but in the end, it just suggested that he now believes that Jesus saved him for a divine reason, so now, not only is he still a rich, big deal celebrity, but now he also thinks that he’s one of “God’s chosen.”

Fuck, that sounds familiar…

No one likes a bad character arc…

It seems I wasn’t alone in thinking that Jamie Foxx’s “comedy” special was a bit gross and unsettling. I mean really, in the end, he may as well have been running into a crumbling castle so he could make out with his psychopath sister one more time before they die together.1

And don’t get me wrong here, I’m not insulting the man for his stroke. That’s a brutal experience and I’m sorry for anyone who has to go through it. But I would hope that most people who experience something life-threatening learn something valuable from it, rather than just reverting to who they were before, only now with divine endorsement.

When we hear tales of deconstruction, a good story arc involves some sort of redemption or change in the person. This is how Jaime Lannister is portrayed in the books (so far). What Jamie Foxx does is come in with a huge ego, self-mythologizing, talking about how he’s so exceptional. The special doesn’t express an iota of humility. Instead, he gives the impression that he believes Jesus chose him to live and that makes him extra super triple special now, not just normal special like he was before.

Ultimately, after going through a life-changing experience, it seems that Jamie Foxx managed to come out even more arrogant than before. The implication that survival confers special meaning or divine endorsement is beyond uncomfortable, especially when millions of equally deserving people don’t survive similar events, and the ones that do don’t necessarily get big public applause for it.

And that, folks, is why I can’t handle Jamie Foxx…

If you come that close to death and still choose to frame the story in a way that centers your own exceptionalism, I just don’t know what good you’re artistically offering the world anymore. There are many other more talented actors and funnier comedians out there. I’m glad the man didn’t die, of course, and I’m glad he’s doing better. But as a person? He’s clearly overly full of himself and it should come as a surprise to nobody that steering hard into Christianity isn’t going to make a fan of me.

What made the special so lame wasn’t the objectively-not-comedic framing of the emotional stroke story, or even the newfound faith. It was the wasted narrative. There was a distinct experience that could have complicated him, deepened him, or stripped him down, but instead, the event was used to reinforce the same myth he’d already been telling about himself, doubling down on who he was before.

Just like Jaime going back to Cersei.

So, that’s why I don’t think I’ll be watching any more Jamie Foxx movies. The last thing the world needs is more celebrities putting themselves on pedestals.

Okay, thanks for listening to my TED Talk, love you, bye! 😘

Quick note: Monthly Mayhem’s going to be coming out at 18.00 Finnish time now, because most of my audience is over in North America, so hopefully you folks on this side of the pond aren’t too put out by that.

Elder catslut, March edition

PROJECTS & ARTICLES

I had some hopes for March, all of which were more or less stamped out by the road trip. Nevertheless, my article prep work earlier this year has meant that I still had articles scheduled.

This month, over here on Substack, I first wrote about why I think people are getting a lot of incels in their comments, which is a very short article, for me, about algorithms and engagement:

I Might Know Why You’re Getting Flooded By Incels and Nazis Right Now, Substack Friends

Next, I published a neglected article from last spring about my very unhealthy way of drafting my last novel, The Vitmar Chronicles, Volume II:

My Week of Finishing a First Draft

Then, after my Have You Considered Your Depression Made You an Asshole article, I felt compelled to share my depression journey and how I’ve worked really hard to improve my situation over the years:

How My Depression Score Went from 23/27 in 2017 to 5/27 in 2025

And then finally, I wanted to write about male friendships after my Why I Used to Hate Women pt. I & II articles, but the first story I had to tell was long enough on its own that it deserved an article of its own:

Storytime: A Magical Meet Cute from a Friendship that Faded

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Fabled Magazine

Issue 002 has finally launched pre-orders! If you’d like to read my article, that was based on the idea of group therapy for fantasy tropes hosted by the Baba Yaga, you might not want to miss this one!

Pre-order Beyond the Pages

(I had some issues clicking the link for the second issue, so I’ve informed the team, if anyone else runs into the same problem… though ngl I think you should order both issues if you can because Into the Woods is amazing!).

The Vitmar Chronicles

No news this month on this front. I’ve been way too tired and busy.

Off the Record / Gathering of Geeks

April also didn’t have anything new, but I’m still hoping to do some more in the next month or two.

Merch Mischief

I had another trip down to Apollo Live Club in Helsinki this month, this time for an electronic act called Mind Enterprises. The merch was really cheesy, like bootlegged shirts from the ‘90s, so I was highly amused by the way the crowd burst into laughter before immediately buying the shirts. This was maybe my first time selling out of my entire stock!

Reviews

Over at my website, I did a review of the new Machinae Supremacy album that came out on the 6th, which I absolutely love!:

Advanced Review: Machinae Supremacy - “Machinae Supremacy”

And, of course, the first installment of my travel blog/live reports from the Eye of Melian shows also came out earlier today:

Where You Go We’ll One Day Follow, pt. I

That about wraps things up for my writing this month, but stay tuned for a bunch more of this sort of thing in April, because not only will I be finishing the Eye of Melian reports, but I’m doing another short road trip to see Machinae Supremacy in Helsinki, Jyväskylä, and Turku, muahaha…

PHYSICAL & MENTAL HEALTH

So, it took about 2 weeks to stop being in active pain after my little stretching escapade after the Zwolle show in February, though even now, I can still feel the place that I damaged echoing its distress, even though the pain is fully gone now. Of course, I wasn’t standing for any of the shows this month, so that helped me hugely.

My mental health has been fine, beyond the general lack of spoons caused by a shitload of travel. So yes, I’ve had one or two meltdowns this month, but I was prepared for them and encouraged myself to have them, because holding them in is a helluva lot worse. But overall, I’ve just been having such a good time that my mental health has been handling the exhaustion astoundingly well.

GENERAL BEARSNESS

So obviously you pretty much know already what I was up to this month, and I’ll be writing about it in detail in my travel blogs, but to give you an idea of what I did this month, it looked like this:

March 10th: 4.5h drive to Kitee, watch EoM
March 11th: 4.5h drive back to Tikkurila, with a 1+hour detour to Kummakivi
March 17th: 1h flight to Oulu, 3h drive to Rovaniemi
March 18th: watch EoM in Rovaniemi
March 19th: 3h drive to Kuusamo, watch EoM, 3h drive back to Rovaniemi
March 20th: 3h drive to Oulu, watch EoM
March 21st: 1h drive to Raahe, watch EoM, 1h drive back to Oulu
March 24th: 45m drive to Helsinki, watch EoM, 45m drive home
March 26th: 2h drive to Turku, watch EoM, 2.5h drive home (because I dropped off Kathy in Tikkurila again)
March 27th: 4.5h drive to Kuopio, watch EoM, 4.5h drive home
March 28th: 1.5h drive to Tampere, watch EoM, 1.5h drive home

So needless to say, I’ve traveled for right about 3000km this month and on Sunday I made a pact with myself to not move or do anything except watch Xena: Warrior Princess and play Hades 2 on the Switch. And I did that, and it was glorious.

I did also get out and prune the berry bushes before they wake up for the spring, because the second leg of my trip invoked spring and I came home to very little snow left in my yard. This rules, because they snow’s usually not gone before mid-April, so yay for me!

Now I am having a bit of an issue because apparently my laptop does not like charging anymore, and I’m very concerned that it’s a battery issue, and I don’t know if I need a new laptop, so I probably need to look into this ASAP.

Otherwise, I think I had maybe once DnD session this month, but the rest of the month was spent either traveling around the country or resting to recover from the traveling, heh.

Stay balanced, my friends, and I’ll catch you again next month! ❤️🐻

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Coming Next Month…

So many more Eye of Melian reports! And Machinae Supremacy reports! And maybe some yard updates? Let’s see…

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No cats down here this time, just Eye of Melian!

Originally, I was writing this as part of a series relating to why I was wrong about men when I was growing up, and how their friendships were just as hurtful as my friendships with women had been, just in a different way. Check out part 1 and part 2 of Why I Used to Hate Woman for more on that.

But the first story that came to mind was such a story on its own that I felt like it should probably be its own article.

So, once again on the recommendation of my therapist, here’s the story of how I met my best friend circa 2005-2023, and why I can’t consider him my best friend anymore.

Meeting a myth…

I met my first male best friend — let’s call him Eddie1 — when I lived in Fort St. John, British Columbia. I had moved up north in 2004 because I had been seeing my first love, Kelsy, for a few years at that point and I wanted to know if things would work out if we lived in the same town, since it had thus far been long distance.

Eddie was the kind of guy that was a local legend. Everyone knew him or knew of him, and everyone described him the exact same way — long wavy red-brown hair and a big beard, a real heavy metal guy. But nobody ever knew where he was or where they could find him or if he was around or in town or what. As I said, he felt like a small town myth.

So when I was working at Zellers in the electronics department (a now-defunct Canadian department store), and heard someone say “Oh hey, Eddie!” it caught my attention. I looked over to see exactly the person who had been repeatedly described to me: long wavy red-brown hair down to his waist, and a rusty beard. Probably wearing a metal band shirt.

“Sorry to interrupt, but did you say your name was Eddie?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s me, why?” he replied.

“Oh, I’ve heard a lot about you from James and Joseph,” I responded. James and Joseph had been his roommates at some point and had some… colorful stories about living with Eddie. I recall him cringing slightly at the mention.2

I think this song was playing on the store sound system…

At that point, there were like thirteen people in my checkout queue, so I could not continue. However, I flew through them because I felt like I had just met Bigfoot and wanted to talk more. However, sadly, when I was done, he was gone.

So, I went to go tidy up the video game aisle, and lo and behold! There was Eddie, standing next to the video games, pondering a copy of Star Ocean: ‘Til the End of Time.

We got chatting again and we instantly clicked. He told me that he worked at the local Boston Pizza and I should come by sometime.

On a whim, I decided to use my staff discount (which was significant) to buy a copy of Star Ocean and left it for him at the Boston Pizza, along with my number.

From there on out, Eddie got integrated into our friend group. He and Kelsy used to play Magic the Gathering together sometimes, and we were all geeky metalheads, so we all had things in common. Everything was lovely…

The moment that initiated the end of my relationship…

…Until one night when the three of us were hanging out together. Kelsy had to go to sleep because he had work the next day. Eddie and I were still having fun, and Kelsy told us to continue to do so, thus we stayed up all night talking. Kelsy was in the next room.

Literally, nothing untoward happened, but somehow, the fact that we never did end up calling it a night changed everything.

The next morning, Kelsy’s parents told me they weren’t comfortable with me having Eddie around anymore. Didn’t really explain why (I rented a room in their basement, Kelsy lived elsewhere), but mumbled something about his history of drug abuse (smoking weed, so not quite the end of the world) and not wanting someone like that around their kids. Even though I feel like I have a memory of hearing that Kelsy’s dad bought weed from him in the past.

Equally baffling to me at the time was the fact that Kelsy turned on Eddie after that. I swear it felt like I had stepped into the Twilight Zone, where everyone believed that I had been fucking Eddie loudly on top of Kelsy’s sleeping body that night, and the whole house heard it.

That night when literally nothing happened except we laughed a lot. I guess that counted as cheating, but nobody informed me that part of my relationship deal involved me not not having male friends that I could talk to all night.

At that point, my relationship with Kelsy got so strained that I couldn’t take it anymore. I started to hate his parents and their snide, smug side-eyes. I moved back to my hometown and Kelsy and I went back to long distance. But, wouldn’t you know it, Eddie would call me regularly, but Kelsy stopped putting in effort.

Back in Alberta…

Funnily enough, it was, indeed, Eddie that broke Kelsy and I up. Inadvertently.

It wasn’t that Eddie stole me from Kelsy, per se. It was that Kelsy had no idea who he was or what he wanted, and he had been a terrible boyfriend for the better part of a year already, picking fights with me and never resolving them, getting all hot and cold over nothing, telling me he loved me and then in the same breath saying he didn’t know if he loved me because he didn’t know what love was.

At some point, I mentioned that Eddie was calling me more than he was. I’d be lucky if I heard from Kelsy once a week, while Eddie was calling me nearly every day. So Kelsy went into a massive possessive jealous spiral and in our next call, he told me that he wasn’t comfortable with my friendship with Eddie, and that I had to stop talking to Eddie or we couldn’t be together anymore.

That was more painful than I knew how to manage. I spent a day roaring and wailing and trying to call Eddie to talk to him about it, but he wasn’t answering the phone.

There was a decade or so in my life, where I fully declared that if you offer me an ultimatum, I will not choose in your favor, regardless of what you ask or why, because doing that to someone is so fucking controlling and possessive. That was a result of being forced to make this choice.

I know Kelsy only gave me that ultimatum because he truly believed, with 100% certainty beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would choose him. I had, every moment up until that point, after all. Even if he was so deeply insecure, he had to trust that he could control me by using my insecurities.

Sadly for him, in the time that we had broken up before, I learned a few things and became less insecure. So by the time we got back together, I wasn’t so desperate for attention that I was willing to put up with efforts to control me. And I will definitely not let my life be dictated by someone else’s insecurities.

Ultimately, I called Kelsy and told him that, if he really felt that way, then sorry, but I guess that’s it for us.

Suddenly, the Elton John song that was playing when Eddie and I met felt extremely profound.

They say to date your best friend…

So yeah, I did end up dating Eddie, but it only lasted for all of 5 months.

First he moved down to Red Deer to be closer to me, but my parents chased us off to the mountains. I got a job in housekeeping and I forget what his job title was, but he did evening work setting up fires in people’s cabins and chopping wood, and other odd jobs. The evening/night handyman, or something to that effect.

We thought we were soulmates at first.3 He saved me from my toxic first love, after all. So romantic! Even the song playing when we met was telling us how fated we were. I was young and naïve enough to believe in that sort of thing back then.

At first, dating him was nice. He knew what had been messing me up and I knew his scars and his traumas and his troubles. Eddie didn’t have a remotely easy life. His family was a trash fire at best. But I knew all of that and I could navigate it because he was very open. I thought, at the time, that he was really honest and self-aware.

Given time, however, I started to notice that Eddie was… an invasive presence. He had to insert himself into every aspect of my life, regardless of whether I wanted him there. For example, when we were still in Red Deer, he once rearranged the kitchen in my parents’ house while they were away. Not hugely, but in a bunch of small ways to make it more convenient for him. Dude, not your home, what the fuck? I fixed it all before my parents got back from their trip, lest my mom have a conniption. He was overwhelming. Smothering, even.

I can’t remember anymore what it was that made me so crazy. Probably a lot of the imbalances caused by patriarchal conditioning. It was a lot of small things, as opposed to anything big. But I do remember that he just felt invasive and smothering, a lot of the time. It was like I needed to be supplemented and he needed someone to complete him, and codependent love isn’t my style.

Eventually, one of my buddies had a cousin who wanted to come work out in the mountains with him. Eddie had undiagnosed IBD at the time and had to take a leave to figure out what was up with his gut (took another 5+ years to figure it out, IIRC), and so we “took a break” while he was gone, and when I had the chance, I offered to let the new girl move in with me, kicked Eddie out, and broke up with him officially by phone.4

He showed me what I meant to him by going down on one of my friends the first week he got back.

Furthermore, the guy I was interested in, who liked me too, wouldn’t make a move on me because he didn’t want to step on Eddie’s toes. Eddie accepted this gesture of loyalty willingly… grateful, it seemed, to still claim some ownership over me, even though he went on to date one of my friends for the rest of the time we worked there and a little beyond.

Truly, at that point in my life, loyalty felt like a thing for men, not me.

I also remember a work dinner where I was more embarrassed than I ever remember being, because he got drunk and started making a scene. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I recall there being a speech that made me massively uncomfortable. He didn’t even remember anything the next day, or if he did, he lied about it.

Ultimately, dating your best friend can be a good idea, but just because you’re besties doesn’t mean you’re remotely compatible. I’m fairly sure that relationship would have ended very badly if it had gone on for any significant length of time.

After the work season ended, we parted ways…

We did a trip up to Edmonton with our workmates after the season ended in October, but we didn’t see each other much after that, going back to our long distance friendship. We moved on, dated other people, but stayed close. He felt like the one person who could see me and call me out on my shit, and I could do the same for him. That, to me, was true friendship — we could help each other grow.

By 2009, I was out of college, had been through a few relationships, and decided to move to Finland for a year. I came home for Christmas though, and Eddie came down to visit for the holidays. It was nice to have him there, because he felt like family.

Then I decided to make the trip to Finland permanent. For the first few years of living here, we were good, fine, same old, though he talked to me a bit less and less. But after a couple years, his personal life got really intense — he lost his job because he had to take so much sick leave (remember that undiagnosed IBD?), he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to keep his place, and he fell back into manic depression and suicidal ideation.

For 3 years, I had no idea if he was alive or dead. Three. Fucking. Years. The person who was supposed to love me most, whom I loved dearly, just vanished off the face of the earth without a word.

I consider this a betrayal for a few reasons. The first is that he denied me the opportunity to be there for him. If someone I love is depressed and suicidal, that’s dreadful and as their friend, I want to be there for them, and it hurts to be shut out and cut off. And I’ve already discussed why smokebombing out of your friends’ lives is both understandable and also an asshole move.

But to be selfish about it, he also denied me my best friend. My life hasn’t been easy since I moved to Finland. I, too, developed depression back in around 2017. Imagine how nice it might have been to have that friend who understood me and depression and could have been a sympathetic ear.

But nope, he was just… gone. As if I never mattered at all.

The return…

He came back online in the late 20-teens at some point and our friendship rekindled. I got SnapChat and he was my only contact, and we would send each other silly videos and chat a bit. He started posting poetry and other things on Facebook again. He had started working at the resort again, this time as the night audit, and shared stories about life out there again on Instagram.

Turned out the family he was living with went full no-internet in their home for a long while. I guess that’s a valid reason for not being online for 3 years, but he could have, I dunno, gone to the library or something to let me know he was still alive. But I guess that wasn’t on his mind. Maybe I wasn’t on his mind at all. Who knows. Either way, he didn’t feel compelled to tell me that he found friends to take him in (he did amazing work with their autistic daughter, too) and got a diagnosis and treatment for IBD, until way later.

In 2019, a full decade after I had last seen him, my partner and I visited Canada and we met again at last when we went out to the resort. It was as if no time had passed. Instant besties, as always.

Until…

History repeats itself…

Suddenly, no more Facebook posts. Suddenly, no more Instagram posts. Suddenly, no more SnapChat messages. And, once again, no explanation whatsoever.

Starts to feel like a bit of a familiar pattern, eh?

What does that mean for a friendship?

For me, it meant that the friendship was one-sided. If someone vanishes without word or explanation, reappears expecting emotional continuity, and accepts care and closeness without reciprocating reliability… ultimately, what was I getting out of the friendship?

It’s not that I don’t love him, or that I don’t care, but when I cannot trust the bond to exist when I need it, when I’m forced into a permanent state of emotional vigilance (wondering if he’s even alive), and when the friendship is structured around my capacity to be there for him, without regard for my needs… that’s no longer friendship to me.

So… now what?

In the end, as much as all of this was… disappointing, to say the least… I do get it. Eddie’s life was never kind or easy for him. He was always a bit of a tangled person. I’ve never taken it personally.

But I always wondered… did he ever really care about me after we broke up? Or was he just another guy who wanted to possess me and then threw me out when he realized he couldn’t?5 He certainly went out of his way to try to hurt me after we broke up at least.

Ultimately, when my adoptive son passed away in 2023, I was in a state where nothing else mattered. Nothing had consequences that had any meaning to me. And in a weird way, it made me want to start confronting people that I’d never confronted before about things, because I had no capacity to care about the consequences or potential fallout.

I wrote Eddie a letter during that time. I mean, after all, I was grieving the death of my son and as far as I knew, Eddie didn’t even know I had a son.

I told him that I realized that I had been calling someone my best friend for over a decade, who had only been a friend to me for a handful of weeks in that time. I realized that I deserved a best friend who loved me with an equivalent dedication to how much I loved them.

Eddie… was not that person. Maybe he wanted to be at some point. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just wanted me to love him and when I didn’t love him romantically, it wasn’t good enough. Who knows. I sure don’t because he never told me.

I told him that I loved him, that he is my family and always would be, and I would always be here for him if he needs me, but I would not be the one to reach out anymore. It’s not hard to find me, he knows where I am, he has my email and phone number and everything. I wished him well.

But I’ve never heard from him. It sucks that this is what became of what seemed like a cosmic friendship, but when only one person puts in the work, eventually you need to let go, and I only have so much capacity to mourn what could have been, and most of that is still dedicated to my son.

In the end, his silence is his choice, and I must respect that. If nothing else, I feel better for having spoken my heart and finding the courage to move on.

So, let’s talk about how I managed to extract myself from the black void of depression, shall we?

Note: I am speaking about situational depression in this instance — the type that develops due to external circumstances, not the type that some people have or develop from a young age.

Step One: Getting depressed…

In order to understand how I got better, you first have to understand what broke me.

I used to literally be one of those “depressed people should just stop being depressed and be awesome instead” types of people. I’ve ever walked the line of low, practical expectations and high hopes and dreams. I thought it was just mind and attitude over matter. Definitely the “just power through it” type.

Any time I have been confident about anything in life, the universe likes to do its utmost to knock me down to a 4/10 maximum. Turns out I am not awesome enough to just stop being depressed. Cursed by my youthful hubris yet again!

Moving to another country takes a toll on you in your early 20s, because you don’t necessarily really know what you’re doing, at least if you don’t have someone to explain it to you (I didn’t). You don’t know what to research, you don’t know what’s important, you don’t really know how to survive.

In my case, I’m a smart, easygoing, hardworking person. When I care about something, I’m nonsensically loyal and I give it my all to things I consider important. With all that going for me, it’s pretty rough on to not be able to find a job.3

Worse, I made a few mistakes along the way. I stopped creative writing and thought I could make a career out of journalism, right at the time when journalism was basically dying or already mostly dead as an industry, due to technology, social media, and clickbait culture. Skeezy assholes who buy their followings, who have terrible retention and are generally considered low quality still get more opportunities than anyone with a code of ethics that cares about artist respect and journalistic quality.

So if you, like me, grew up believing that hard work and integrity would win you the day in the end? Well, getting kicked off that pedestal hurts, and it’s made doubly bad when boomers assume that it’s your own fault for not trying hard enough.

Step Two: Figuring out that you’re depressed…

This was a fun one, because it was really obvious. Fun fact: my depression hit me like a brick wall to the jaw approximately one week after I quit CrossFit. What they say about exercise is true. That one hour, three times a week — when I was focusing solely on my form and technique — had been giving me enough space from my dark thoughts that I was getting just enough rest and peace to manage. But as soon as I quit? Everything came at me HARD.

There were three incidents that clued me in — third time is indeed the charm, eh? — and for the life of me, all I can recall of the first two incidents was that something relatively insignificant happened and my reaction was ludicrously extreme. The last one, though, I remember as if it were yesterday.

In Finland, we have a really tasty simple (salty) pastry called riisipiirakka [“rice pie”], which is best consumed with munavoi or “egg butter.”

I have a tried and true method for boiling eggs, but on this day, every time I cracked open an egg after boiling, it was still half liquid inside. Turns out, I had bought a bigger pack of eggs than usual and didn’t notice that they were extra large in size, rendering my practiced method moot.

I’m not sure if I was told about starving children in Africa too many times in my youth, or what exactly makes me so weird about food waste, because I’ve never been hungry. Nevertheless, you’ll notice that I eat everything on my plate, down to the last grain of rice. So because of that quirk, throwing away the eggs was inconceivable, so I just had to keep going. Then the second set of eggs also turned out underboiled…

…it felt like a string going taught and snapping.

My memory of the timeline is unclear for a bit here. All I know was that the second set of ruined eggs was absolutely beyond my capacity to handle. Something strange happened inside my brain and I’m not clear on what was happening in the outside world at that point.

I assume I was screaming and staring at an open cupboard with my fists clenched, filled with barely constrained rage. I remember my partner coming into the kitchen and asking if I was okay, and I was probably crying something incoherent about undercooked eggs.

Crying over the spiltest of milk.

I think I was shooed out of the kitchen/dangerzone with reassurances that he would take care of the egg butter, and I went into the bedroom and laid face down on the bed, probably still screaming or crying.

Over the spiltest of milk.

But as I said, something else was going on inside my head while all of that was happening. I can only express this as a thought conversation that played out in my mind in real time:

“FUCKING CHRIST WILL NOTHING EVER GO RIGHT WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I EVER FUCKING GET A SINGLE FUCKING WIN I CAN’T EVEN FUCKING FEED MYSELF JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I CANNOT FUCKING TAKE THIS ANYMORE I MIGHT AS WELL JUST SMASH EVERY FUCKING PLATE IN THIS FUCKING HOUSE…”

At this point, inside my mind, my brain disassociates into two halves, the logical half and the emotional half. The logical half cautiously taps me on the shoulder.

“…WHAT!?” I scream inside my own mind.

“Heeey buddy…” I say to myself.

I seethe, breathing heavily.

“…I don’t mean to interrupt… whatever this is,” I gesture awkwardly at myself, “but… you’re kinda acting like… a lunatic…”4

I calm down for a moment and actually consider what would happen if I broke every plate in the cupboards… a fucking lot of work to clean up and a big expense to replace… maybe that wouldn’t be worth the satisfaction of destruction…

“… You wanna talk about it?” I ask myself softly.

My shoulders slump and I sag. “… I think I might be depressed.”

Don’t ask what that was. I can’t answer. It was really just like I got so overloaded that I lost track of the outside world and my mind divided itself in half and had a little chitchat out of severe need for self-preservation.

After that, I booked an appointment with the doctor, they gave me the aforementioned questionnaire.

I remember a lot of questions about self worth on that piece of paper. I remember noticing that I had pretty much no self-esteem anymore.

And thus, with a score of 23/27, I was diagnosed with severe depression.

Step Three: Rest, medication, and more rest…

I think there’s a lot of misinformation surrounding depression medication, namely SSRIs, so I want to make one thing very clear right up front:

There is no sole medicinal cure for situational depression.

Depression medication deals with symptoms, not causes, and are usually best implemented with something else, like some form of therapy or external focus. One of the most common misconceptions about mental health is that if you find the right medication, it will “fix” you. No, it won’t.5 It might, however, create some space for you to do the work to heal yourself. But medication alone won’t undo whatever gave you depression. That’s something you have to reconcile yourself, and it seems few depressed people actually know this.

When you get depressed, meds can be really helpful (assuming you find one that works for you — that’s a whole other can of worms). Many people have observed friends who’ve been on depression medication for 10+ years and those friends are sort of okay, but not really doing well, and it begs the question, are those meds still doing their job? At that point, the meds might be blunting emotions so much that you never develop any inspiration or find the energy to pull yourself out of the brain muck, leading to further emotional stagnation or stasis.

People with intense situational depression need space from their feelings, and meds can offer that. But once you have the space you need, then what? No one tells you when it’s time to kick your own ass and get better, and most people aren’t conditioned to be that self-aware.

Here’s the thing: one of the main issues depressed people face is exhaustion and burnout. They’ve been going too hard, holding on too tight… whatever it is, it’s been too much for too long and you run out of anything to keep going. This is where SSRIs can help. In my case, I was unable to regulate my emotions any longer. The smallest things could spike intense rage or grief or sorrow. Citalopram helped sooth the edges of those spikes. My emotional state went from critically dialed up to forced peaceful, even if I was still completely miserable.

I was in this state for at least 2 years before I felt any inclination for change, and I bet that time would have been considerably less if I hadn’t felt guilty about it the whole time. I needed the rest. But eventually, after those couple of years, I realized that I wasn’t feeling much of anything anymore, for better or for worse, and I’m someone with big feelings.

We have feelings for a reason. Emotions are responses to stimuli, after all. When our emotions are dialed up to 11, our bodies are trying to tell us something. So when I realized that I was both tired of being depressed and tired of feeling like an emotional potato? That’s when it was time to stop. I finally had the energy and incentive to figure out what was causing my emotions to roar like they did, and to wrestle them back into submission.

Step Four: The return of energy and management thereof; AKA the time almost everyone fucks up their recovery completely…

If you’ve had any desire whatsoever to heal your emotional state6, you might recognize the point where you get tired of feeling down and miserable all the time. Those first couple of years, you’re likely exhausted and glad to have a break from so many expectations and whatnot. But after a while, you might start getting an itch at the back of your head that says, “Aren’t you sick of being miserable all the time? Don’t you miss joy?”

The thing is, once you get that itch, most people do one thing wrong: they begin to dedicate themselves to getting better.

That sounds like an insane person critique, right? But hear me out.

At this point in depression, your energy is still extraordinarily low. Just because you now feel inspired to get better, does not mean that you have the energy to go out and do all the things suddenly. We often think that, because we’re feeling a little better, we’re basically the same as we were before. Sadly, this is wrong.

What I see happen a lot is that my fellow depressed folks will get tired of being depressed, they’ll then treat recovery like yet another goal to crush, they go all-in on it, and they feel good for a little while, only to burn out super fast.

This is the person you often see posting regularly about their chronic illness or mental health issue online, bringing awareness, talking about their journey, talking about the importance of self-care and healing, going to therapy, getting outside to exercise, and generally fighting the good fight. I’ve even seen people’s whole personalities shift into “war against depression”-mode. Everything is about defeating mental health issues and they’re gung-ho and angry and it feels really good. You’re doing, it you’re putting in the effort! Hell yeah! Adrenaline rush!

…

Crash, BOOM!

We near-instantly go through all of the energy reserves we just built back up in our however-long period of rest. Then, we find ourselves desperately burnt out yet again and the depression kicks back and hits twice as hard, because this time, you’re failing at healing and getting better, so you’re probably going to beat yourself up even more than you already did before.

What should you be doing at this point in your depression, instead of trying to be the baddest ass at healing? This is the point you should start to respect yourself and your energy. This is where you admit to yourself that you have limitations, and to get past them, you must be aware of yourself: your mental state and your energy levels. You are not yet at your former level and maybe you never will be, and that’s okay. Do what you can, not what you think you must. Know yourself and your capacity.

Because here’s the thing: going out and being social and doing all the things suddenly will, as I said, deplete that energy fast. It is good to force yourself to get out and do things… a little bit. For me, that might mean one or two social outings in a month. The rest of the time, it was considerably smaller endeavors.

When I was ready to be done with being miserable all the time, I had to retrain myself to find joy in things. Perhaps the natural mechanism for joy still felt broken, but either way, when nothing brings you joy, a lot of depressed people just seem to sort of… expect that things will get better as quickly and easily as they got bad. That’s not how things work.

Do you know that traditional kintsugi takes months? That is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery and ceramics with urushi lacquer. This is because each layer of the lacquer takes days to weeks to cure properly in specific conditions.

Healing is, ultimately, much like doing kintsugi to yourself. You have to slowly begin to find things that bring you joy again. Go outside, breathe some fresh air, touch grass, watch birds, look at flowers, observe the flight of the bumblebee… whatever. The point is to start as slow and small as you need, and to stay slow and steady and build up incrementally. Let them sit for a while. Enjoy them in peace. Then add another layer.

In my case, I wanted to pursue literally anything else in around 2021, around 4 years after my official diagnosis. I’d watched a lot of documentaries on alternative medicine and Eastern medicines and was interested in that, so I weaned off my SSRIs.7

Research on depression recovery and energy regulation shows that pacing yourself, respecting your limits, and gradually reintroducing rewarding activities is often far more effective than trying to do everything all at once.

Step Five: Stop what makes you miserable and rediscover what brings you joy…

I was basically already harping on about this. People really don’t seem to get what a slow game Step Four is. I’m saying that, much like the initial years of rest, the slow rediscovery of your energy can also take years.

For me, the first half of this involved giving up music journalism and my partnership with Tuonela Magazine. I was tired of the responsibility, I was tired of the industry shade, I was tired of not feeling appreciated, I was tired of dedicating myself to supporting people and not even getting a thank you, and I was tired of constantly being second gun to the sleazy people who buy their followings. The moment I quit, I started crying and immediately started creative writing again.

Now, stopping things that aren’t giving back what you give to them seems like an easy thing to do, but I can promise it’s not. It took me years to give up music journalism, because I kept hoping that maybe eventually it’d pay out. But eventually, I had to come to terms with this thing that I spent a decade building was never going to pay out the way I wanted it to, and I should stop for the sake of my own mental health. It’s hard to give up on something you’ve spent a decade building… but sometimes it’s the healthy thing to do.

So, once you’ve gotten rid of the things bringing you down, then it’s time to start exploring what’ll bring you back up again. When you’re healing, you have to be gentle with yourself. Take things in, and process them slowly. Maybe find a thing outside of yourself that you care about, and dedicate a little time to that once in a while. Find yourself a low-stakes project. Build a Lego or do a puzzle, or get a coloring book — something creative that doesn’t require a lot of brain power, but feels nice for having done it. After all, as I mentioned in the Asshole article (do I have better way to refer to that? Haha…), getting out of your own head is the #1 way to improve depression.

On this note, I feel like Ariel Bloomer has a great TEDTalk on the subject of how to utilize a “broken” brain efficiently:

Discovering what brings you joy again can be a wonderful process, but it can also be a bit painful. Once upon a time, when my cub was still around, we had a family group chat where we’d mention the best part of our day every night before bed. I recall him getting upset at the whole concept after a little while. “What if the best part of my day was that I had a really good sandwich?” he grumbled. “Seems like a pretty meager thing to celebrate.”

I tried to flip the perspective. “Not everyone has a righteous sandwich as part of their day. Good food is always a solid win, I should think. I absolutely think a great sandwich is worth celebrating!” He conceded the truth of this, and made more effort to appreciate the small things after that.

But he was right. It can feel really silly sometimes. It’s normal to feel that way.

But a win is a win, no matter the size, and that’s something we depressos tend to forget. You’re not going to jump from no wins to instant life success and forever security. I’m not saying that’s an active hope most people have, but it is a pretty common passive perception, even amongst depressed people. Sometimes you just need to take your wins where you can get them.

One of my favorite suggestions at this point is to just see what’s out there and try things. I took a belly dance class. I took a whirling lifedance class. I went to a new festival. I did my best to meet new people. I went for short walks around my neighborhood — I live in the middle of nowhere because I love nature, so I wanted to make use of that.

If you do that long enough, you might even find something that you enjoy doing. I learned how to sing. That’s a great way to process energy out of your system. My partner learned how to growl (heavy metal vocals) and I got him some poi after we went to a hippy festival. Do we practice any of these hobbies often? Not particularly (especially in winter), but we have them on hand for when we do have inspiration and energy to do them.

Step Six: Ditching the self-judgment…

Here’s a tricky one. Because part of healing means not making yourself the negative exception to the rule. A lot of pro-healing people (usually but not always women) will talk a big game about equality and kindness. They’ll tell you that your heart is what matters, not your size or your appearance or your mental state or any of that stuff. They’ll tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are, that you deserve kindness, that rest and self-care are your friends.

They say all that while giving themselves absolutely none it. I’ve got friends who are gorgeous and beautiful, who will tell me I’m gorgeous and beautiful (I’m a cute, amorphous squishball, but thank you for the compliment), while secretly criticizing themselves for the exact same things they’re buffing my ego over.

Make it make sense, lovies! You can’t make something true for everyone except yourself. That just makes you self-abusive, in which case, you have no right to be talking about healing.

Speaking from experience again, of course. Not making myself the negative exception to my overall rule of kindness has been a bit of a game changer.

If everyone is born equal, if everyone deserves the same rights and treatment, if everyone should have the same access to love and understanding… it’s really stupid to make myself the exception. It’s completely illogical. If everyone else gets the chance to be messy and imperfect and have second chances and grow, so should I. If everyone else gets to be a work in progress, so should I.

Research on self-compassion shows that people often extend kindness to others but exclude themselves, which can actually have the inverse outcome of maintaining or worsening depressive or anxious states. Actively including yourself in your own kindness is a key step in recovery.

Good steps, but how do I implement them?

Sadly, it’s not a quick fix, but it is an effective one.

When I was young, it occurred to me that judging others for the things they like and the way they live was, plain and simple, unproductive. It doesn’t benefit us. Having a sense of superiority doesn’t make us better people, and half the time it’s hypocrisy anyway.

So, any time I caught myself judging someone for any reason, I’d force myself to say something nice about them. If I caught myself body-shaming, I’d force myself to find something I found attractive about them. If I caught myself getting annoyed over the way people act in public, I’d ask myself if I was guilty of ever having fun in public or being young. If I caught myself being superior for something someone couldn’t help (age, life circumstances, physiology, etc.), I’d remind myself that I’m not perfect and I’m just as weird and gross and awkward as the next person.

Analysis helps us make up our minds about one another. Judgment, however, is worthless.

These tactics helped me with self-kindness as well. Remember the weird hippy physiotherapist I’ve mentioned in the past, who told me to use kinder language in how I talk to myself? I maintain that she was completely useless, because I was in need of stretches and strengthening exercises, not self-care, but beyond that, she wasn’t wrong.

I used to be very casually shady to myself. I’d frame it as a joke, but it was still generally quite unkind. I’d talk about myself as if I was a useless, broken down jalopy that could barely get around town. I forgot everything cool and interesting and fun about myself. I forgot all my strengths and centered discourse around teasing myself for my imperfections. All while subtly reinforcing a dialogue that wasn’t very kind to myself.

Also, quick shout-out to my friend Kathy, who told me about how she stopped using the word “stupid” and replaced it with “silly,” and how that’s generally made her a kinder person, so I’ve been doing the same lately — it’s a good swap! Instead of saying, “Oh I’m being so stupid,” it’s, “Oh I’m being so silly.” Very different vibe, don’t you think?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not like, totally above this all by now. These processes can be ongoing forever. I’m still an absolutely snarky little fuck and I do still enjoy some self-deprecating humor. But, to give an example, here’s some dialogue from me to a friend of mine from February 2026, when he was lamenting why he can’t just work out on his own. My response was:

I understand what you mean. I am a qualified CrossFit coach. I do not need to pay to go to the gym. Except I do, because otherwise I won’t work out 🤦‍♀️ so stupid…

Okay, no, I should be nice to myself. It’s not stupid. I’m not motivated on my own. It’s more fun with community and you can cheer each other on. Half of the issue I face is just forgetting to do it altogether.

Notice how I don’t just do the work internally? That’s because this friend has a critically severe self-judgment habit and I wanted to lead by example. The point was, I started by calling myself stupid, but then actively course-corrected. I’m not stupid. There are real reasons I struggle to work out at home alone and they are the same struggles that tons of other people have. I am neither unique nor a failure nor bad. And as a coach, I would tell that person that they’re extremely normal, and to find something physical they consider fun, and if they need to find a friend to do it with, find that too, or join a class. The last fucking thing I’d ever do is call them stupid.

So why did I call myself stupid?

This is exactly what I mean. You need to be the editor of your inner voice. It doesn’t need to be all cheesy self-love or any of that vibes-guru shit. You just need to notice when you’re framing everything in a negative light and… start to expand your vocabulary a bit. If you wouldn’t accept your attitude if it were aimed towards someone you care about, don’t aim it at yourself either.

It’s tiring. It’s a process. And you have to just… sort of… keep doing it. Forever.

That can sound daunting. It can sound like it’s not worth it. But that’s what healing looks like. Isn’t healing worth it? To once again reiterate my favorite quote, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something. Practice makes perfect. Use it or lose it. Pick your metaphor, it doesn’t matter. The kinder you are to yourself, the easier it comes with time.

To wrap this up…

My aforementioned pal Kathy started up a webshop a year or two ago based on a concept she came up with that is very similar to a concept I also came up with some decades ago:

Be nice to my friend.

I was always echoing an old sentiment, which is that I don’t tolerate anyone being mean to my friends, which includes my friends being mean to themselves. I’ve been telling this to my friends for years and years.

Kathy took it a step further and made a whole shop with shirts (and more) she designed that say “be nice to my friend.” I sent one to my friend last year, who tends to go into depressive self-loathing spirals, and she told me she puts it on now whenever she’s feeling down.

Isn’t she cute?

So, that’s the point of all of this. Be nice. Be nice to other people, but also, be nice to yourself. Do the nice things for yourself that you’d like nice people to do for you. Don’t wait for them to happen, make them happen. Get some sun on your face, buy the book you’ve wanted to read for ages, buy or pick yourself a pretty flower, get a new hobby… get offline probably, and go explore the world again with the same curiosity you had as a child.

Because, you deserve some love, you silly hypocrites.

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

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Note from the author: Thanks for reading!

If you’re curious about how my life lessons impact my fantasy writing, consider checking out The Vitmar Chronicles — a slice-of-life coming-of-age series that follows two brothers as they navigate life’s ups and downs. For example, this series focuses far more heavily on emotional outcomes from experiences than it does on cool action (though there’s sometimes cool action too).

You can: read the free sample here ~ Learn more about the series here ~ Find it on Amazon (EU link, but you can find it in all countries), Google, Kobo, and the Draft2Digital Network! Alternatively, read for free as a paid subscriber here on Substack! Volume II is out now!

The point of this story is that there is no right or wrong way to write a draft. You can work on it a little bit every day for as long as it takes, or you can barf it out in a week. The important thing is to figure out what works for you.

First drafts are, per the way I work, the hardest part of writing. As a professional editor, I’ve always had a much easier time working with what’s there, no matter how abysmally rough it is, when compared to working on creating something from nothing.

When I released The Vitmar Chronicles, Vol I: An Ending & A Beginning in October 2024, I told myself that I was doing it now. It didn’t matter that I only sold 15 copies of the book. The point was that I got the first installment of a series that I started writing in 2008 out into the world at long last.

So I promised myself that I would take some time off after that first release and get back to it in 2025.

I also wanted to have a bonus story to gift to the people who bought my book directly from me. I completely failed to finish it, but I did write the first half to two thirds in February before I started to feel tense about getting Volume II done on time, so I abandoned it. It’s a free gift to a bunch of people who are ultimately my friends, so they’re not going to be mad if I don’t deliver (especially when I never gave a date). I haven’t forgotten.

So by March, I decided to prioritize Volume II. My soft goal for release was for Easter weekend, but eventually I knew that was unrealistic, so I changed my goals to have the first draft finished by April 20th.

Since many of you writers are also neurodivergent or potentially suffer from depression as I have, I wanted to share what my week was like, pushing this first draft, because even though I did get it finished on April 19th, it was a rather painful week…

Welcome to Springtime

On the first day of drafting1, I became extremely aware of what the spring had done to me with regard to my ADHD. I’ve been learning to listen to my body and mind the way they change with the seasons, and I get a surge of energy around March-April where I want to activate after winter.

Spring, for those who don’t know, can be very trying for depressives and other neurodivergents. Our tired energy from winter gets shaken up. Some of us get massively depressed, others get exhausted, and I, personally, get a combination of relentless energy to go outside and do things in my garden (often curbed by Finnish weather and takatalvi [back winter]) and severe cabin fever if I stay inside too much, but going out is often silly because it’s still snowing.

2025 — the year I’ve been trying to figure out Substack — was all about me discovering a love for writing essays and articles, so what spring meant for me was that, after a February of burning myself out on one short story that I wasn’t inspired to finish, I spent a lot of March learning about things like SEO for my website and how to best structure articles for Substack. Still not drafting.

Finally, I started drafting, and I realized my system is outright bonkers…

Drafting Week: Day 1

On day 1 of my drafting week, the first thing I learned was that the only thing my brain wanted to do was write a million articles. For every sentence I’d write into the TVC Vol II draft, about seventeen browser tabs would open into my head, telling me what articles I could write based on what I was feeling.

Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to sit down and write long-form fiction when your brain is shouting article titles like Why The Makers of ‘Anne with an E’ Should Be Set on Fire and Thrown Off a Bridge keep vomiting out of your brainspace? It’s not easy. Which leads me to…

Drafting Week: Day 2

After the chaos of day 1, wherein — despite my brain’s best efforts to stop me — I did still go through over 4000 words and added nearly 2000.

However, I had promised myself during this week I would not write any articles. I would either drop a title in my drafts or into a notepad and forget about them. That was the goal, that was the deal.

It absolutely did not stop me from writing a near-2400 word essay entitled, you guessed it, Why the Makers of ‘Anne with an E’ Should Be Set on Fire and Thrown Off a Bridge. It was a passion project, so no matter how much I tried to stop myself, I could not cease the fervent rant I went on.

I finished the article at three in the afternoon and felt like a wretched asshole for blowing so much of my day on it, no matter how satisfying it was. Then, as penance for having wasted a solid six hours of writing time on the article, I bucked down and poured nearly 2900 words into my first draft.

It was already by Tuesday that I started passing out the moment I finished at the end of the day. If I sat down next to my partner on the couch, he said I was unconscious in 2 minutes flat.

Day 3

Have you ever set a goal for yourself as a writer that was totally reasonable, only for your worldbuilding to ruin everything? I really wanted the society in my series to have something far more spiritual and meaningful than an expensive celebration when they want to start a family, so years ago I changed “marriage” to “joining.” However, I had never really defined what a joining was or what made it different/better than marriage.

Well, since this was a new first draft (AKA a rewrite of an ancient draft), I realized that the time had come to really decide what a joining ritual involves. And then the idea came to me that it doesn’t need to be a celebration that takes one day.

So, unhinged maniac that I am, I decided that people undergo a Span of Joining (span = week) and each day has a different representation:

1. Declaration Day

2. Day of Tales

3. Day of Community

4. Day of Intimacy

5. Day of Fertility

6. Day of Oracles

7. Unbinding Ceremony

I then had to go ahead and do an insane amount of worldbuilding for all of this, based on the type of society I wanted in my fantasy. It was a fucking slog even if I was having fun and thrilled by what I was writing. For every sentence I got out, I felt like I was staring at the wall for 20 minutes, or talking to someone on Substack, or checking my email, or doing literally anything but honing in and focusing on my writing. None of my usual techniques were helping me get in the zone. This was a day of me absolutely bashing my head against a stone wall, hoping to make a dent. And I did, even if it was painful.

I admit that I can’t remember how many words I was getting out a day at this point, but the overall draft was up to over 12,000 words.

Drafting Week: Day 4

This was one of the most lore-heavy writing days I had that week. I wrote Declaration Day and the Day of Tales from an active perspective, then pulled back for the Days of Community and Intimacy that would come before the Day of Oracles. Then I realized that the Day of Fertility should come before the Day of Oracles for the sake of pacing, so that all needed to be shuffled.

I managed to do all of this, including the first 2/3 oracles that my characters would visit. I developed three prophetic rituals and completely fleshed out a god-tier legendary character and how she would present in The Vitmar Chronicles, as well as my extended universe of lore. And when I was done, I did still get about 4000 words in.

I believe this was the day that I wanted to give what I wrote a little recap before I wrapped up for the day but gave up because it was 10.30 p.m. and I was falling asleep at my computer.

Drafting Week: Day 5

This day was still slow to get started. I spent some time writing outside and when I needed a break, I went to cut back some blackberry brambles in the garden. I finished the final article, closed out the story segment I was working on, got through the oracles, and fleshed out what I was expecting to happen in my next writing session, and even wrote another 900 words of prep for it.

Drafting Week: Day 6

Two days left of my week, two segments left to finish. It was doable, but fuck me was it still hard to focus. I took my last old ADHD pill to see if it would help keep me in line. For the first time ever, it didn’t. I wasn’t as maniacally all over the place, but still, sitting down and getting anything done was quite a challenge.

Once the Day of Oracles was done, there was no new worldbuilding left for me. It was rewriting old scenes, with new lore. I spent the morning worldbuilding what a transgender transformation would be like in this world, with sensitivity approval from two trans friends. I introduced a new transgender character that was named and designed by my amazing trans girlfriend . We talked on the phone in the evening and I read her character’s introductory scene to her. She approved, which filled me with absolute joy, to have given her character a voice that she approved of.

While rewriting the old lore though, I felt like my scenes were suffering. They were actively worse than the old ones I wrote 2-5 years ago. While my new character was a delight, the old ones felt flat by comparison. But it didn’t matter. I just needed to get the bones down. I can fix it later.

Drafting Week: Day 7

Final day, final segment. It was a lot, I won’t deny. I wrote about a festival… something I have a lot of experience with as a former music journalist. I wrote about trauma stories, something I also happen to have a lot of experience with. I wrote deep, personal dialogue and admittances amongst friends. It was very rewarding, but emotionally draining.

I didn’t write the ending scene. I knew it wasn’t the time, because when I went through to do my edits, I’d probably change the entire ending. I wanted a break from the creative strain I was undergoing before I found the conclusion the novel needs.

I didn’t end up needing my flex day (it turned out my friend was arriving at midnight on Monday, which would have given me one more day). Instead, I played video games with my partner, whom I’d been neglecting all week (he knew what was up, so it was fine).

The plan that followed…

The plan was to take a week off with my friend and then have the final week of April to write whatever I want. Get those drafts out of my brain finally. Pursue what was interesting and exciting in the moment while I have all this energy.

This would give me the rest of May to polish my second draft, maybe even finish up the third. I’m still on track to publish in June, but that all depends on where my energy went in May.

I’m not sure if I did any of that. Release date got pushed until later in August because, let’s face it, summer releases aren’t ideal, and I didn’t want to compete with the new Auri album on August 15th, so I opted for the 21st instead. Final edits were also done up until release date, so it was a bit of a chaotic mess, from start to finish, and I know there were probably a few errors that I still need to fix.

So, I hope for those of you who are just starting to write, or struggling to write, or facing writer’s block… just know that we who have been writing for decades also have difficulties with ourselves, our mental health, our energy, the time of year, and all of those things.

This year, I’m facing similar struggles, and I wonder if the issues with getting my fantasy fiction out of me relates to how much is on my mind. Perhaps I need to dedicate some time to getting everything out processed and out of me, so that my fiction has some space to grow and breathe in my brain. That’s why you’ve been getting the consistent 2x weekly articles this month.

So, if you’re struggling in art? Wondering what you’re doing? Not sure if your methods are healthy or efficient?

You’re in good company.

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

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Many people are reporting that more and more toxic patriarchal men (and the odd woman) are appearing here and voicing opinions that do nothing to make the world a better place to exist in. And many of you, good Substackers, are ready and willing to beat those insecure jerks down to make them feel like the losers they are.

But… I don’t think you’re actually helping anything by doing that. Not yourself, nor the people you’re sticking up for.

Hear me out, but I think there’s a reason they’re drawn to you and increasing rapidly in number…

When people feel shunned, they react badly. That’s literally why incels exist in the first place. They’re almost always insecure about not living up to patriarchal masculinity standards, and Masculine Discrepancy Stress is the leading cause of aggression in men.2

It is a genuinely noble practice to shut down bullshit and speak up for those who are being oppressed. But even back in the ‘90s, the most common advice towards dealing with bullies was not to engage. Don’t forget that!

It’s a lot easier to stand up to people more aggressively online, because you’re just as safe from physical harm as they are. But that means they don’t need to back down out of fear of your words either. Sticks and stones may break my bones goes both ways. You may feel more empowered online, but so do they.

But here’s the other thing that I’m wondering… why the sudden flood of incels all of a sudden this month?

One thing I’ve noticed is that 90% of my Substack pals here who are noticing this and speaking out about it are the same folks who will shut these people down.

Think about that for a moment.

…

You’re engaging with their content!

You’re pulling that stuff into your algorithm, my guys!

The reason this has stood out to me is for one reason: I write a fair bit of mouthy feminist material over here, and I do not get harassed by men or pick-mes. Everyone who follows me seems to be either of a similar mind or is here to learn.

The last article that I wrote that had an incel comment on it was 15 Patriarchal Quotes from a Man Avoiding a Genuine Conversation About Patriarchy. It came out in April 2025 and it was one of my first articles on the subject of patriarchy. The commenter in question said something along the lines of, “Wow, sounds like he really schooled you in that conversation.” Very intelligent. My response, however, was to just block him immediately.3

What do these insta-blocks tell my algorithm? Anyone talking smack with an unhealthy or oppressive worldview is not welcome here. They have no audience here. They do not get validating reactions from me here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m snarky as shit and pretty opinionated, yet my comment section is pretty much always a nice place for me to visit.

The point being, these parasites will leach into any community that gives them attention. So please, stop giving them attention! They’re looking for someone to buff their ego and even if you win the fight, you’re still losing overall, because they’re still getting what they want out of the interaction.

Remember my recent article that talks about Psychological Reactance and how, despite the best of intentions, our methods aren’t often achieving the goals we want? This is exactly one of those situations. Your righteous anger rules and feels good in the moment, and it absolutely comes from the right place, but it might not actually be doing anything to help society stop being like this. People don’t generally learn and grow from being shamed or embarrassed.

The key point here is this: do you want to be right and superior, or do you want us to live in a better world where we’re all a lot nicer to each other? If we want these jerks to stop having an audience, my friends, please stop giving them one. A strategic block might go a lot further than engaging, even for the right reasons.

Love is stronger than hate, and blocking is stronger than engaging. Or at least, that’s my theory. Spread the word.

Stay balanced, my friends ❤️🐻

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Elder catslut

PROJECTS & ARTICLES

I mentioned last month that I wanted to try to clear some space out of my brain and make room for something besides my general frustrations. As such, I went through my drafts and finished up a bunch of material that I’ve forgotten over the last year. That means I have material for a couple months scheduled now!

Firstly, I found an ancient draft of a review of Dungeons ‘N’ Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (also available on Substack), which is a really fun, goofy movie that really feels like silly friends playing a game together.

On Substack, I wrote two Storytime articles called Why I Used to Hate Women, pt 1 & pt 2, which is not so much Book of Balance material, but rather, some anecdotes that explain a big part of my former internalized misogyny.

From The Book of Balance, I returned to section 6.0 (Mental Health) with a bit of a curveball in Have You Considered That Your Social Justice War Has Made You an Asshole? That’s a sequel to last month’s popular article on depression, by the way.

I also wrote another Storytime tale about a road trip from 2018 to see Machinae Supremacy play “Hubnester Rising” in Jyväskylä. Since they have a new album out on March 6th, it seemed a good time to tell such a tale.

Another ancient draft excavated from the bowels of my digital space was the final part of the Broken Body Series I wrote last spring about how Western medicine failed me, and the unhealthy relationship I had with my body. This one is called Building Bridges with My Body (also available on Substack), and it talks about some of the slow, gentle things I do to improve my physical condition, after over a decade of ignoring and mistreating myself.

Oh, and hey, for the writers and readers moving over to Wrizzit, I decided to check it out! Come find me over there and let’s see about making a community that doesn’t have fascists! \m/

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Fabled Magazine

No news over here, but I do believe we’ll be kickstarting the second issue within the next month or two, so do stay tuned for that!

The Vitmar Chronicles

So, as I mentioned, I decided to stop putting pressure on myself to get this series done when my brain feels inordinately cluttered with other things. And, weirdly enough, the more of these old articles and stagnant thoughts I cleared out — like blasting carbon out of a car engine — it does seem that I have a wee tiny bit more space for some fantasy. I’ve written a couple of random scenes with Gabriel and a character that was introduced in Three Oracles, A Dance, & A Song, just because I like the energy between them and it’s nice to explore.

Off the Record / Gathering of Geeks

Nothing fresh from February, but if we’re all lucky, I might have some new material next month! Fingers crossed…

Merch Mischief

I had a pretty fun time selling merch for an Icelandic Eurovision band called Væb. They seemed quite young, doing high-pop electronic hip-hop, and the audience was extremely young — there were maybe five people out of seven hundred who weren’t accompanied by an adult.

The music was pretty funny and absolutely not my jam. I enjoyed listening to the crowd shrieking (I never went to live shows as a teenager), and they were very pleased by the merch sales and were happy to get some tips for what to bring to upcoming shows. They made me think of morning show hosts, except the only effect on the soundboard is an air horn. I felt like I was at a hockey game.

Reviews

I did two reviews this month. The first was a podcast review of the new Eye of Melian album, “Forest of Forgetting,” with Kathy Criswell, my Johanna Kurkela coverage partner-in-crime. Okay, I guess there were three reviews, because I also went to the Netherlands to cover the album release show as well. Expect more of those next month after the Finnish tour. I appear to be getting dragged all over the place. Hopefully I’ll get my photographer with me at some point too.

Then, another of my all-time favorite bands, Machinae Supremacy, is releasing a self-titled album on March 6th, so I got my review online on the 1st. Expect at least one live report from them after their tour in April!

PHYSICAL & MENTAL HEALTH

Mental health has been, if a bit generally exhausted, overall pretty good. I’m not default cranky all the time, which is a pleasant change of pace from last month.

Physically, however, that’s a different story. I’ve been upkeeping my daily sun salutations pretty well this year, and I’m even finding a comfortable rest position in there, slowly and surely.

However, during my trip to Zwolle, I wasn’t doing my stretches. Now, I’m not as maniacal as my friends are, so I while chose not to queue for 4 hours outside in the rain before the show, nevertheless, even going to the venue at doors meant I had to stand for an extra hour before the show even started. My standing stamina’s about 45-60 minutes right now, so by the time the show started, I was actually in a fair bit of pain, and by the time it ended, I was feeling rather trainwrecked.

As such, when I got home on the 21st, I decided to do five sun salutations to make up for my lack of exercise on my trip. They felt great, I was very happy, but at the end, I felt the common sensation of a crushed lower back, so I tried to relax my deep muscles.

Apparently, they very, very, very much did not want to relax, and they got angry. So angry that, while I woke up the next morning feeling fine, by the time I had returned from delivering my old guest room bed frame to its new owner, I was in noteworthy pain, which continued to escalate until I managed to get an emergency session with my osteopath the next day. He messed around with my sinuses (seriously, don’t ask me what sort of voodoo he does, it’s weird and it works) and I can’t say I felt notably better, but a little more balanced and pain-contained. I was still in a fair bit of pain all week and I was pretty worried about that merch gig. Fortunately, I suspect that Thursday was when my body was about ready to bring some movement back, so I managed okay, despite needing to squat about a hundred times (forward motion is still the most painful, like getting up from sitting). If I’m looking for a silver lining, it’s that I’ve had better posture lately because any even slightly bad posture gives me nothing but pain.

So, it’s getting better, but I’m still not in great shape. I’ve read that this can take a few weeks to go back to normal, so I hope my friends go easy on me during the Eye of Melian shows in March.

GENERAL BEARSNESS

February was dedicated largely to winter rest. My gaming group agreed to no games this month and I opted to have no social gatherings just for the sake of taking it easy and getting some rest.

Well, of course, there was a gathering of awesome music dweebs in Zwolle, of course, for the Eye of Melian album release show. These are becoming social events as much as concerts these days, which I’m not complaining about at all. I really love the Netherlands. I’m not sure if I’d want to live there, but I love visiting, every time. Zwolle might be in my top three cities I’ve visited there too. It’s super cute!

Beyond that, I spent February writing a bunch of articles and watching the birds at the feeder and allowing myself to be entertained by nature. We have a nice collection of European blackbirds (mustarastas), great tits (talitiainen), a couple of blue tits (sinitiainen), the odd tree sparrow (pikkuvarpunen), and more recently, I’ve seen a more rare European green finch (viherpeippo) stopping by with his girlfriend. They have notably different feeder behavior from the others, which is interesting, because apparently they became rare after picking up diseases from feeders. So yes, I am becoming a bird geek, and that’s fine. I find watching them to be strangely peaceful.

In my endless search to fill my house with acacia wood, I got a new bedframe for the guest room, so I am feeling successful in my never-ending quest to make my house smell like old wood and look awesome. Now the badass band shirt quilt my mom made me has a worthy frame.

We also went to see Noora Louhimo in Tuusula. This was pretty ridiculous, because we planned for ages and ages to go to the Espoo show, but getting to Espoo from the middle of nowhere in winter is a pretty tall ask from two tired people. Then I realized that I somehow missed that she was playing in Tuusula on the 14th, so with the assistance of Herra Hujanen, we were able to go enjoy a phenomenal show without needing to trek out to Espoo on a -20 evening. I know her music’s not for everyone, but I love her 2021 debut solo album and she’s such a great performer, so I’m glad to see she’s still getting out there and pulling good crowds. Plus she did a lot of excellent covers. Wonderful show, would go again!

Oh, and 3/4 cats visited the vet. We expected Bowser and Simon to get their teeth cleaned, and Teddy to have his chipped fang checked up, but instead, Beans (Bowser) and Teddy got their teeth cleaned, and old man Simon was given an encouraging bill of health for someone turning 15 in March, so he won’t need to have his teeth cleaned ever again (though we should get him a toothbrush because his kisses… linger).

Other than that, mostly we’ve just been taking it easy. And yet, somehow, we never quite seem to take it easy enough… funny how that works. Well, actually, we figured out that we’re both suffering from anhedonia, so that was a useful word to learn.

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Coming Next Month…

So many more Eye of Melian shows. Sooo many. I don’t even know how many. Maybe also the Yesterwynde Symphony, and if I’m feeling adventurous (unlikely), perhaps Hevisaurus.

Okay, I guess Deezer doesn’t have a widget for Substack, but if you happen to also be moving off Spotify and also happen to be giving Deezer a try, you can find my most intriguing songs of 2026 here!

LINK TO BEAR

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Find them also via the Draft 2 Digital network or read here if you’re a paid subscriber!

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Disclaimer: Also, see a doctor and all that if you have severe pain. I know what’s up with me, I’ve been to doctors. They just weren’t helpful in fixing it.

Extra Note 2026: Holy crap, I wrote most of this after the first two parts and then forgot about the draft for the better part of a year. Oops, sorry about that.

All right, so now that you’ve learned about my physical history, as well as my stark realizations about how I treat myself, you might be wondering what I’ve been doing to make things better. The upside of having forgotten about this article for so long is that I get to add some 2026 updates into it, so… weee!

Westerners Have No Relationship With Our Bodies

I’ve come to realize how very sadly out of tune with our bodies we Westerners are. We often choose to ignore and numb ourselves when something is wrong, as opposed to engaging, being curious, learning what’s wrong, and healing it.1

A lot of the time, we expect to go to a doctor and they will make it go away, soon or soonish. We don’t take the time to understand or do it right. That’s likely why so many issues come back.2

As such, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that I struggle to understand what my body is telling me a lot of the time. I have no idea what her voice sounds like most of the time, unless she’s screaming in pain.

Think about it, a little — especially women, but of course everyone has valid experiences here… How often do we treat our selves — our bodies — as though it’s a person we dislike? While my modus operandi in life, generally, is in favor of kindness and understanding, why can’t I treat myself with that?

Put it this way: if we’re in pain, we take a painkiller, or just ignore it. We don’t hear the body’s plea for help, even though we’re aware of it. I’d sit for hours in a twisted position as my body begged me to stop and I ignored her, asshole that I am.

It literally wasn’t until… either my NUCCA doctor or my osteopath mentioned in passing that our bodies aren’t supposed to hurt. That sounds idiotic, but if you think about it, it makes sense. I thought my body was supposed to hurt, because I broke it. But Western medicine told me there was not much I could do about it.

Western medicine was wrong.

My Modalities (The Fitness I’m Familiar With)

I’ve always enjoyed trying out new things, because I believe that variety is the spice of life. Besides, the more things I try, the more aspects of the body and movement I will learn and be able to take forward, which just so happens to be what I did when I started applying breath to explore my aches and pains.

Yoga

The first “sport” I ever tried that I really genuinely loved was Ashtanga yoga, particularly the primary series, largely because it’s so challenging. A lot of different Flow or Vinyasa yogas are very soft and gentle, but as you maybe clocked in part 2, I’m a rather gung-ho when I take something on. I have a penchant for diving in the deep end and Ashtanga was perfect for me in that sense. I was told that it was often used to regulate the energy and emotions of teenaged boys, which makes sense because it’s not easy or gentle.

Now, I picked up Ashtanga on a recommendation from my sister-in-law when I was in college, so I was at the ripe young age of about 19 when I did it first. I then picked it up again the year before I moved to Finland. This, of course, predates my neck injury by a few years.

I loved it. It taught me how to breathe (“pranayama”) in a way that energizes me, even if it took me 3 months to figure out how to to the breathwork properly. After my first 10 classes, I discovered that I could go to the mountains and snowboard from dawn until dusk without any aches or pains afterward. It was brilliant!

To this day, I fully believe that if you were to only ever learn one thing about fitness to practice, it would be sun salutations. They stretch and strengthen your whole body. They’re deceptively simple yet surprisingly complex. You can spend your entire life learning them.

CrossFit

As I mentioned in parts 1 and 2, I was also really into CrossFit for a couple years. I liked the way it taught me the basics of how to keep my body safe during heavy weightlifting and I learned a bajillion new movements and techniques, the majority of which I can implement anywhere without needing the gym rig. I used to be afraid of free weight training. Not anymore!

The CrossFit bracing sequence is dedicated to protecting your body from the high-impact of weight training, which means:

1. Feet in the correct position (hip or shoulder-width apart, movement dependent), knees externally rotated

2. Core engaged! This means activating the deep core muscles that protect the lower back, not just the surface abdominals

3. Shoulders rotated back and down

Diligently applying this to every movement kept me from causing any greater damage to myself while lifting heavy weights.

Now, unfortunately, CrossFit’s high intensity was really not what my body needed, especially with my bones so out of alignment, so eventually I was forced to quit when I noticed that my chronic pain was starting to get worse and not better.

Water Jogging

Water jogging is one of the most useful things I’ve come across and the only reason I struggle with it is because it requires me to go to the pool and I prefer to do things that I can do at home without paying, because I’m a po’ person.

However, water jogging is one of the best calorie burners in the cardio spectrum, while simultaneously being one of the lowest impact on the body, so it’s really perfect for me.

It’s also one of the most boring things you can possibly do on your own, since pools don’t play music. This can be a good thing for me in the right mindset, but in the wrong mindset, being alone in a pool for an hour can mean that I spend an hour torturing myself with unproductive thoughts. So I prefer to go with friends when I can, which means I don’t go as often as I should.

Whirling & Belly Dance

I also really enjoy trying new things. In 2024, I met a really fascinating Iranian woman, Safa Solati, whose Whirling Lifedance workshop I participated in during August 2024. This was a cool AF experience, as I learned how to spin in a circle for an extended period of time without getting dizzy or ill (something I surely need to practice if I want to improve, haha). I also learned about its meditative and purging qualities, as it seems to get your energy moving through your chakras and can unlock things inside you that have been jammed up. It’s a beautiful practice and I wish the classes had aligned more with my schedule in 2025.

I also did a 10-class workshop in Oriental Dance/Belly Dance last fall, which taught me how to isolate different parts of my spine and add movement to them. This was a hugely useful thing to learn and I really enjoyed it (and learned a lot about my ingrained perceptions of femininity, wow), but I learned that the movements are, even when done gently, a bit hard on my body. My spine needs very soft, gentle exploration and I need a bit of control and strength before I could explore these movements more fully. But! I am extremely glad to have learned them for future use!

Photos by Auvo Takkinen (@atp_kuvat)

Zazen

I have never actually taken a lesson or class in zazen, which a form of Zen Buddhist seated meditation. There are many different modalities but ultimately, it involves sitting, often in Lotus position, for an extended period of time. There are two cushions you can use to make it more comfortable, a large one to protect your butt from the hard floor, and a small round one to adjust the angle of your hips, per how tight they are. The idea is to, with time, figure out how to sit for extended periods of time without experiencing pain. When I’m out of alignment, this is counterproductive, but once I’m balanced, it’s really helpful.

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The Simple Movements I Used to Hear My Body

So now that you know a bit of my background in fitness and motion, here is what I did when I was doing breath meditation to try to listen to my body.

First, I went to hang from a clothes line in the yard. I wanted to give my spine a bit of relief from gravity, because it’s something that I keep feeling like I need… though specifically, I feel like I need to hang upside-down. I still haven’t done by 2026 and I still crave it.

With my hands shoulder-width apart on my makeshift pullup bar, I did three movements:

• Dead hang: just hanging from the bar with no shoulder support, for as many breaths as I could handle (it wasn’t many, maybe 3x deep breaths)

• Then I engaged and disengaged my shoulders five times, with my feet on the ground to see where my shoulder alignment was at (tons of popping throughout my upper right quadrant).

• Finally, I finished with three controlled kips, to practice shoulder stability while encouraging movement in my central spine (pushing to the limit but not straining or forcing beyond).

This all felt really good, so I decided to keep going and came inside to do a Jefferson curl.

Jefferson curls were something I loved to use in CrossFit warmups. It’s the kind of stretch that gets better the slower you do it, and I’ve had some weird moments doing it in the past.3

The idea is to curl forward, vertebra by vertebra, all the way down your spine, as slowly as possible. I like to add an inhale and slight straightening/lengthening of the spine, then exhale on the forward fold to get deeper into the stretch — an Ashtanga trick!

The curl felt really good, so I finished with a couple sun salutations…
Inhale, reach upward, lengthen the spine.
Exhale, fold forward, touch the toes.
Inhale, straighten the spine, plant the hands.
Exhale, hop into plank and descend to the ground.
Inhale, upward dog.
Exhale, downward dog.
Breathe deeply in and out, five times.

Then do it all in reverse. It’s magical. The yoga movement flow feels really good when you start to understand and get into it.

After all of this, my body felt weird and jittery. My spine threw a spasm at me, feebly, and went calm. It didn’t spasm for a long, long time after that.

Changing the Way I Talk to Myself

So, I mentioned in Part 1 that I had this weird-ass hippy physiotherapist who wasted a lot of both of our time telling me to be nice to myself when I was in need of strengthening and stretching techniques. However, I hate admitting that she was also right about me, it just wasn’t what I expected at first.

Since I realized that I am the patriarch in my relationship with myself, I started to pay more attention to things that I say about myself that I would never say to another person…

“My dumb brain…”
“My broken old body…”
“Stupid old me…”

I would never say that sort of thing about a friend or someone I care about. If my goal in life is to be warm and compassionate, why do I not express these things to myself? Why do I enable other people to judge me for society’s perceived imperfections by voicing, myself, that it’s okay?

I see this in a ton of my friends. We all care deeply about how we interact with one another, but when it comes to ourselves, my friends make all sorts of excuses…

“I’m hard on myself, but I also reward myself heavily…”
“It’s not about my looks, it’s about my confidence…”
“I just need to lose a few pounds/kilos to feel good about myself…”

All of these things are so superficial, so related to our external appearances, and rarely have anything to do with our internal health. Why can’t we be confident without being abusive to ourselves?

To answer these questions, I’ll save myself repeating what many other women have said and will just direct you to read Women Living Deliciously by , because her book explains it beautifully and I can’t wait to get my hands on her first book too now that I’m almost done this one. I want to get everyone I know (any genders) a copy of this book and pin them down and force them to read it.

The short answer is just that we’re programmed this way, as women. Men too, but in a different way. Men have to perform patriarchal masculinity all the time, while women have to perform beauty all the time. Both are oppressive, brutal, unfair standards that no one should have do relate to. Both cripple us when it comes to finding comfort and happiness in life.

We do all of these things that aren’t inherently good for us, while neglecting to create any sort of integrated relationship with the only bodies we’ll ever have. That’s kinda messed up, don’t you think?

So What Needs to Change?

The difference now is that I listen to myself. I keep returning to my breath, making sure that my body is getting some oxygen, and then adjusting my posture or taking a break from what I'm doing to reset myself a bit. I'm trying to do more casual sun salutations.

Earlier, in the first week of January 2026, I settled in for my first hour-long workout in ages, and I swear my body was testing me.

“So, you say you’re going to listen to me now, eh?” she says dubiously.
“Yes, I promise,” I respond sincerely.
“Mmm, let’s see,” she says, retaining her skepticism.

From there on out, every single movement I tried from almost all of the above modalities threw me a curveball. I had to go easy on my spine extension doing oriental dance movements. I had to speed up the bottom half of my Jefferson curl because it got weak. I had to widen my grip on the stick doing shoulder passes because it was clicking and painful. I had to fully bail out of my final sun salutation because my shoulder strength went out completely.

In every single movement I tried, my body tested me to see if I would listen. Every single time, I had to admit my limits and not push too hard.

Every single day this year, I have done, at very least, one sun salutation. Even if I had to do it at 3 a.m. after having fallen asleep on the couch, I haven’t missed a day. I want to be reliable for my body. I want it to know that I’m going to help strengthen it and stretch it and realign it and heal it.

But it needs to be able to trust me, and I need to be trustworthy.

My body should be my best friend, and I’ve been an absolutely fucking terrible best friend to it. She’s a temple all right… abandoned, untended, unworshipped, as is the natural state of most temples in the modern world. And she deserves so much better.

I’m still not great at all this. I have to push for that one sun salutation every day, even after a month (fingers crossed — they say it takes 3 months to really form a habit). Sometimes, when I have energy and inspiration, I do other movements too, for about an hour. Sometimes I just do five sun salutations.

I don’t have high expectations here. If I was going to change overnight, I’d have done it over the past 7-8 years since I quit coaching CrossFit. Clearly, my change needs to be a bit slower.

It’s a relief, really. It takes me 2 hours to do a full primary series sequence, and frankly, in this 39-year-old body, I can’t handle that. So now, it’s all about exploring what I can handle, and working my way up from there, slow and steady.

So, I continue to be a work in progress, but this is how I started paying a bit more attention and using gentle movements to learn how to listen to my body and care more about what she has to say.

Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻

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And what’s more fun than a good old fashioned road trip? I’ve had a few great ones in my day, but perhaps none so memorable as the Machinae Supremacy roadtrip from April 2018.

Who or what is Machinae Supremacy?

That’s for sure the line that introduced me to Machinae Supremacy, when my partner came prancing into a room dancing weirdly back in… gosh, 2010? MaSu had recently released “A View from the End of the World” and it was incredible.

MaSu were probably the first guys to embrace the internet as musicians back in the day, and were likewise one of the first metal bands to significantly implement chiptunes into their sound. They embraced free music streaming and even gave away one of their live recordings for free via torrents.

Once I discovered them, I was hooked. My partner and I started going to all of their shows. When I started doing more interviews as a music journalist, I met up with them for the first time in 2015 and did a weird and wonderful interview. I’ve been seeing them on every tour they’ve done ever since.

Their last album, however, was released in 2016; luckily, they’ve announced a new release at long last for 2026, as well as another tour. That’s part of why I wanted to tell this story now, in a time when I’m starting to share old tales.

It all began at a Machinae Supremacy show in Turku…

MaSu have always been more popular in Finland than in their (mostly) native country of Sweden, so regardless of whether they have any new material, they’ve been pretty dedicated to doing at least one tour throughout Finland every year or every other year at worst. However, for some reason, their 2018 tour did not bring them through Helsinki, so we went out to visit a friend, Henri, who was living in Turku.

My partner and I had a lovely, sunny winter day in Turku, exploring town (it was my first time in Turku, surprisingly), eating incredible food, and preparing for the show with a few alcoholic beverages.

The gig was fantastic — they never disappoint. After the show, we met up with some of the guys in the bar, as they pretty much always come to chat after the show for a while, and even have afterparties most nights with their fans. At some point, my partner and Henri were drunkenly chatting with Robert Stjärnström (vocals) and found out that the show on March 29th up in Oulu had included “Hubnester Rising” in the set, while it has not been played on this night.

To explain that real quick, “Hubnester Rising” is the grande finale of the “Phantom Shadow” story concept album. I happen to have the exclusive plot outline for that album over on my website if you’re curious about the whole deal, but suffice to say, it’s an epic finale to an album but doesn’t have the right energy to close out a show.

I digress, after learning that Oulu got this objectively sick as hell song and Turku didn’t, they began to drunkenly harass Rob until he said that they’d play it the next night in Jyväskylä if we came to the show.

“Haha sure, we’ll definitely do that,” we all joked enthusiastically.

The hangover…

The next morning, we awoke on Henri’s couch and began the hazy recap of the previous night’s events. Had we actually promised to go to the show in Jyväskylä?

We began to enthusiastically map out our journey only to then realize that my partner had to be at work the day after at 8 a.m. To add insult to injury, the last buses home left Jyväskylä at 7 p.m., so that simply wasn’t going to happen, with the show starting at 10 p.m.

There was a moment of doubt before I realized, wait a moment, we had friends with vehicles! We would need to enlist more help.

However, in order to get a car, we would need to get back to the general Helsinki area first, so we stopped for Chinese food (the best Chinese food I’ve had in Finland in all my time there; I’ve been back on other trips to Turku because it was that good). Our friend joined us on our return bus trip and we started planning how we’d get a car as we returned to Helsinki.

Chaos ensues…

The biggest issue we faced on the return trip was not getting a car — our friend Miika had one available — but rather, getting to the car, as it was up in Tuusula, which isn’t the easiest to get to from… well, anywhere, let’s be honest.

Miika would have just come to pick us up from Helsinki, but he was extremely hungover after having wrapped up a 5-day drinking bender. So, we called everyone we could think of to see if they wanted to help us out and maybe catch a show while they were at it. Miika’s brother was still drunk from his previous night and couldn’t help us out and Sipsi was up in Hämeenlinna for some other event. Eventually, The Major (Henri’s dad) said he could pick us up from our place, which was about halfway between Tuusula and downtown Helsinki — a fair halfway point.

We disembarked our bus and made our way to the train station that would take us to our place, when we got a text message from Miika, asking if we could come relieve him of the driver’s seat. We hadn’t told him that we found a ride, so he had taken it upon himself to drive to town to get us, hungover as shit.1

So we had to sprint off the train that we had just gotten on and went to save Miika from his altruism. He looked… pretty fucking rough. I took over as the promised designated driver for the night, and Miika took solace in the fact that he would soon be home and in bed again.

However… at that point we realized that we now had everything we needed, and because Tuusula was no longer on our route, we would simply be bringing Miika with us, regardless of whether he wanted to come.

We returned to our place, popped by the shop for road trip snacks and drinks and other essentials, and at 6 p.m. we were ready to get on the road, until we received another unexpected message…

The last-minute castaway…

“Take me with you to the Grand Line, I’m sorry!” Sipsi wailed, in reference to the above scene from One Piece.

This was the best and perhaps only way to persuade us to detour to Tuusula after all. Sipsi had originally had plans, but with his friends slowly losing interest due to hangovers and whatnot, our call to adventure had reached his heart and he decided that he wanted to join us after all.

You can imagine how Miika’s hope may have returned in that moment. After all, Sipsi lives only about a kilometer from his house. Surely we could drop him off at home. Unfortunately for him, we wanted him to join us, so all we did was pick up a few pillows (my partner would need them later, after all) and our last nakama. With the car full, it was time to start the 3-hour journey from Tuusula to Jyväskylä.

The road itself…

It is a long road from Tuusula to Jyväskylä, but we had good music, good drinks (nonalcoholic in mine and my partner’s cases), and good company.

We blasted the previous night’s setlist for Miika and Sipsi to get them hyped, since they didn’t know MaSu live and this would be their first time.

We arrived in Jyväskylä a mere 15 minutes before the show was set to start and navigated to the venue, Lutakko, only to discover that it’s a whole complex and we had gone to the wrong building, which was hosting an Antti Tuisku show. Höps.

The guy at the door pointed us in the general direction of where we might find our gig but it wasn’t until I heard drums in the distance that we thought we knew where we were going. With mere minutes until showtime, we found the entrance and dropped off our coats. Miika was finally feeling human again. Literally, Henri said, “We’re ready for the show!” right as the first notes were sounding. We darted up the stairs.

The show itself…

It was great! It always is, as I said. I was disappointed in the crowd, but that’s true at 99% of all shows I attend in Finland. The audience lacked our unhinged energy, sadly, only responding when the band asked and remaining otherwise limp.

Our excitement built up as we neared the encore though. After the first two songs, we started cheering “Hubnester” and Rob told the crowd about the three weirdos who had traveled an exorbitant distance just to hear one song, and dedicated it to us (thanks, Rob, love you😘). It was likely not the song the rest of the crowd had been dying to hear, but it was, as Henri so eloquently put it, rather empowering to make several hundred people listen to your favorite song just because.

It took a while but the crowd had warmed up to the song by the end, perhaps because we were jumping and screaming at that point. Then, to balance out the set with a more bangin’ final track, they added their usual closer to the end, “Through the Looking Glass,” and finished the show on a high note for everyone.

Alas, all good things must come to an end…

As much as we would have liked to stay and party a little bit longer, we did need to get my partner home for work. We thanked the guys for an amazing night and at midnight, we loaded back into the car for the return journey.

Miika was in good spirits at this point, so the boys had booze (I had caffeinated sodas), we wrapped Juho in a blanket and noise-cancelling headphones and gave him Miika’s pillows, and began the long and boisterous trip back home. We cranked up the music, because we needed to keep the party going so I wouldn’t get sleepy.

It was a several hour trip back, so I’m not sure why this is the only song I remember us listening to, but apparently the boys had read “Wuthering Heights” in school and were fond of the Kate Bush song as a result…

They did a great job of keeping me awake and entertained as we blasted our favorite tracks. It was nearly 4 a.m. when the boys were dropped in Tuusula — Miika and Sipsi keeping the party going and Henri returning to his parents’ place, and it was 5 a.m. by the time I had my partner in bed.

Never forget to have fun…

After our great journey, I was still able to wake up 2 hours later to drive my partner to work, still with his gig stamps visible on his hand. Sipsi was content with his life choices. Miika assured us that he had a great time but would also not be speaking to us for a while (valid, haha). No one had heard from Henri at all.

Personally, I was at home, barely able to move, making up for lost time with my foofy kitties who were clearly unimpressed with our absence.

The moral of this story? If it’s within your power, DO IT! Get weird, be spontaneous, do crazy shit, have fun. Live your life and enjoy yourself. That’s why we’re here, right?

Stay balanced, my friends! ❤️🐻