When your home is your prison
When I was living in England and France as a young person and was hoping to find a footing somewhere in Europe, I still had a home to return to. The returns proved reassuring because of course at the time, there were friends and family and familiar places and familiar proceedings and familiar culture. For a while, life would seem easier, but then after a few years, tedium would set in again and various social and practical issues would bog me down. I would become restless for change. I would get itchy feet. Now I think it’s glorious to have a home to return to. I no longer have one.
As a disabled person, you get run over, time and time again. People treat you poorly in other ways because they think of you as a person of lesser value. Look, if people indicate that your time and energy is less valuable than yours, then they are really saying that you are less valuable than they are. A lot of people hold this attitude because they’ve worked hard to achieve some kind of social status, but it doesn’t mean it’s okay. All in all, you probably get rejected more because of your poor social status. This is ironic since disabled people with chronic health conditions often have rejection sensitive dysphoria to begin with. In short, this is one of my greatest hang ups. I absolutely cannot tolerate being treated like a second thought.
Today I was abandoned by my trusted handyman. Turns out he wasn’t to be trusted after all. Of course it’s possible that I have misinterpreted the curt messages I’ve received, and perhaps misunderstandings have arisen because I’m stressed and he’s very busy. Something nevertheless happened that I’m very sad about. I tried to explain to him and his partner that I needed to be kept in the loop. I knew he was busy and was trying to fit in the visits around other more important business matters. But this is the problem. I so often get side stepped and made to feel unimportant. My handyman’s comms were most definitely very poor. He was snappy. It was not always clear if I was talking to him or his partner, and this was somewhat anxiety provoking because you adjust your tone to the person you’re addressing. And so I tried to explain that I was not a mind reader and needed clearer information about the reason behind all the delays. I’ve been waiting to get the kitchen floor fitted for two years, but of course the initial delays occurred because it took over a year to get the repairs done first. But then, after that, it’s been a long wait. My handyman helped me with lots of things during the busy summer and I was infinitely grateful for the help. I was under the impression that things would get easier in the autumn. Since it’s mid-October and I was still waiting, I started to feel impatient. Unfortunately, my attempt at communicating my needs was met with a cold shoulder and that was the end of ten years’ worth of friendship and help with things around the house and the garden.
This blog isn’t meant to offer deeper analyses of my life experiences and my emotional responses, or any complex philosophical pondering. But the truth is, I’m having a really hard time right now and think that I need to do a bit of ‘trauma dumping’ just to sort my own feelings. And in a way, I think my current experience is a reflection, and maybe a culmination, of all the horrible challenges I’ve gone through in the past ten years.
It’s difficult to acknowledge how cruel people can be, and how seldom they are able to hear the truth. Never mind if it’s ‘the’ truth, whatever feelings I have in the moment are my truth, and I should be allowed to express them without judgment. In this case, the truth was also the fact that my handyman’s comms were really poor, and always had been. He and his partner, who was often the one writing the messages, could have just acknowledged it and said ok we understand, and that would have been quite enough in way of a response. “We’re really sorry” would have been a good start, and then maybe a short description of their situation. Perhaps they felt they had said these things already but sometimes you just need to repeat the obvious in order to soften the taught atmosphere. It’s the sort of thing many of us would expect from the people in our lives we think highly of, yet seldom get when it gets to the nitty gritty of the relationship. I’ve had my fair share of these types of confrontations and they never end well because people are consistently unwilling to take even one look at their own behaviour, and don’t have the aptitude for analysis that I do. They don’t want to hear about my trauma because they don’t think it concerns them. The truth is that it does concern them because we’re in a relationship and I feel triggered by something. Unfortunately, a lot of people find it’s easier to do some ghosting or stonewalling than to admit that they might have offended someone with their words and actions. A lot of people would simply brush it off, perhaps justifying their stance with the usual “how dare they be ungrateful after all we’ve done for them”. I took things a step further by suggesting maybe he and his partner didn’t really like me and coming to this house. Sure, no one really wants to hear that they may have had some agenda they weren’t perhaps even fully aware of themselves. So I wonder if my suggestion hit the nail on the head.
It’s difficult to know, but for some reason they seem to have been dragging their feet, or rather, their minds. I picked up a degree of stress from them this year, not least as I was constantly reminded of how busy they were and could see they struggled to fit in the visits to my house around their other commitments. That’s all very well, and I full sympathy for their busy schedule, but there’s a point in this kind of scenario where you start to feel like a charity case rather than the employer who brings food to their table. I know it’s not much money, but it’s still some, and every little bit should matter! Warm feelings have a tendency to generate more goodwill. For instance, this summer I gifted them various foods and drinks and rounded the charges upwards in an effort to show my appreciation. I tried to explain that their busy schedule wasn’t the issue, of course I understood all that and had patiently been waiting for their help over the summer and autumn, the problem was that my patience was running thin as I felt side stepped and wasn’t receiving the updates that one would have expected. The couple disappeared on holiday without announcing it while I was waiting for some kind of itinerary. I chased them up and received a curt response about their absence. I was then made to wait another few weeks before I got a vague message about the next session. And then again, I heard nothing for another ten days or more until I messaged them and got a snappy ‘sorry’.
Something in me broke, I just couldn’t hold things together anymore, and so in spite of feeling worried that the response could be negative, I explained that I’m not a mind reader and cannot be expected to know why all the delays are occurring. I added that I’d been left hanging for months, which was a simplification, but message apps are not great places for meaningful analyses. I also wondered whether they actually even liked me at all, which was probably a silly thing to suggest. As it happened, my feelings weren’t well received and I didn’t get any response at all. Perhaps all they heard was some kind of complaint about their inefficacy, which wasn’t the point at all. I received a curt answer that I should just get someone else to do the jobs. Again, whether or not it was meant as a rejection, the curtness raised my stress levels several notches, so whatever I tried to explain about my background and how it affected my reactions probably sounded too complicated for these people. Again, all I had was a clumsy messaging app, and so I tried to write an email, but it was ignored. You try to assume responsibility for your emotions but then you find that it means f*all to your opponent, and it’s devastating. Stonewalling is a very flakey and selfish standpoint. In fact they simply refused to listen to anything I said, and that was the worst part of it all.
Stonewalling is not only the death blow to any relationship, it’s also completely inhuman. Nazis are born out of this. Why do people feel entitled to withdrawing instead of meeting the other person half way? When people want to talk, you should perhaps consider it your duty as a fellow human being to hear them out and respond to the best of your capacity. Very often it’s all that’s required to loosen up a tight spot, because the tightness is typically a sign of stress and a deep seated feeling of rejection. I don’t know if I sabotaged the relationship from fear of being rejected. It’s possible. I have some powerful hang ups. When you see the signs that point to a possibility that you’ll be abandoned or that you’re only being helped and humoured out of pity and not because you’re well liked, then stress starts to build up, and other life events have a tendency to add to the burden of stress so that the situation eventually blows up.
We all make mistakes and have bad days, and as a person with chronic health conditions, you’re likely to have a harder time in managing your irritability and anger. There’s often plenty to be angry about because disabled people aren’t usually treated very well by society at large. You should be allowed to process your feelings whether you’re likeable or not. People should have at least a basic understanding about the power of being able to listen to other people’s life experience and whatever challenging emotions they are struggling with. You don’t have to be a therapist, just a fellow human being, but this is where things seem to be going awry in today’s world. A lot of people don’t really want to be a genuine fellow human being because they themselves feel bogged down , and yet they also complain that other people are horrible. It would seem to be a vicious circle. It’s also a conundrum that you wish you could just get out of altogether, because a lot of your efforts to be that good person are completely wasted on people who really don’t give a shit.
Unless I have misinterpreted their silence, I also think the opponents sabotaged something by not responding to my distress, and that’s a deeper insight into their own way of handling business, and a deepening, more meaningful relationship with me. It confirms rather than denies the initial fears I was harbouring. I was told they would not refer me to anyone else because I was rude and might talk to them in the same way. My handyman has known me for ten years and has never heard a rude word from me, so it’s a ridiculously childish thing to use as a weapon. I always thought we got on marvellously and I never said a word about any sloppy work because it wasn’t important to me, what was important was the flexibility he had and the joy I sometimes felt when we collaborated. All of the behaviours that have appeared since seem incredibly immature, and it only goes to show that even in real life, it’s difficult to assess people’s level of maturity, because people tend to hide their true emotions.
When my mum’s flat needed to be emptied, we found a local guy she already knew who didn’t ask for money to do it. Some boxes with photographs were left behind and I went to pick them up when I visited Finland for the last time in 2016. Unfortunately, this guy was not at home and had not put all of them out. Later on, when I inquired about the boxes, he said sure, he had them still. But then he stopped answering my emails. I wrote to different emails I found online but never received a response. I assume he just didn’t want to deal with the whole thing. But why not say something as a token of respect? Stonewalling is a childlike response, it’s how we dealt with friendships when we were twelve. It scares me that adults still act like this. It’s sinister, because in the deeper sense, it reminds me of the common ways of waging war when the somewhat hopeful element of diplomacy is removed. The icy cold stance is a cold war. The irony is that people who refuse to engage are basically agreeing with the opponent’s point of view, or so it would seem, at least. Surely, if you felt wronged, you would try and correct it? I knew my view points could be perceived as provocative by someone who thought they were being charitable and helpful, and I tried to explain what I meant but was not allowed to have whatever feelings I had. These things always happen when people are cracking under stress, but that is also when the truth comes out. If you put a lid on other people’s feelings, it’s essentially a reflection of your own emotional constipation.
The incidents reminds me so much of experiences I had in the past when I was dating men who would take their time to respond to my messages. I also had a few friendships like this. It was a long time ago but I remember just how incredibly agonising it was. I would overwhelm those men with questions and theories about their agenda, and I would always find that they were really not that interested, but also that they were very self-centred and lacked genuine empathy. We all know what men are often like, and it’s a real travesty. Although in this case, a woman has been involved, it’s possible that her partner has told her not to engage. The amount of hurt I feel has a lot to do with the act of stonewalling itself because it is exactly how I used to feel when I was rejected by the men I was trying to reach on an emotional level - and the truth is that I did deserve their full attention and nothing less. It was not about being in love, it was about the fear of not being liked and seen. It was the fear of being rejected in favour of someone better.
Ignoring a person and their needs is one of the most efficient ways of degrading them: it’s the essence of the human power games and it starts when infants are being ignored by their parents. Whether or not my parents ignored me is difficult to say, I don’t think they did to begin with, luckily, but they certainly did later on when they got caught up in their own power struggle. When I met Martin, I was very worried and stressed, and I immediately jumped on my guns when he didn’t show up straight away because he had something else to do. But the reality with him is that he was kind and understanding about my past hurt right from the start, and really did come and see me just two weeks after we’d met online. When I had my moments of doubt and some hysterical outburst, he didn’t leave my side and helped me weather the storms. In the end when I felt secure, the fears died away.
But apparently, much as I hate to admit it, the problem still affects me. I remember having a similar issue with a local woman I was trying to befriend ten years ago because I found her quite charming. She decided to help me homeopathically for a while so she interviewed me a couple of times about whatever issues she thought I needed to discuss, and she was also supposed to secure me some w€€d to try for my insomnia. However, she took her time, and didn’t keep me updated about the process. I was suffering and felt very anxious about the whole thing. Like the couple I’m talking about in this post, she blamed poor comms on a poor mobile signal, and I’m sure that’s a real issue and one I can certainly take into account, but there was definitely more than that to her negligent manner. I had a melt down because she didn’t listen to my explanations either, presumably because she didn’t like the implied criticism. I later found that she was really not that interested in my friendship - she had a bestie and there was no room for me. Both of them came to prepare me some food on the day Martin died, but never returned and never asked how I was coping. I felt obliged to smile and show gratitude, knowing full well that they didn’t care one bit about me and were only performing their duty. Some women are just really flakey. Let it be known in this context that I do not believe in homeopathy, but at the time I was still open minded. Ironically, whatever hang up I have due to some unknown past trauma, it also cannot be treated ‘homeopathically’. In other words, irritation with small or almost insignificant doses of poison doesn’t cure it (I find the same is true for other disorders including hyperacusis, which doesn’t tend to respond well to ‘irritating’ sound therapy).
Perhaps my impatience with my handyman was really ill advised, but it happened and I can’t undo it now. I tried and it didn’t work. The common sense advice would be to keep my mouth shut and not cause a stir that ends in even greater devastation. But I think that anyone who sees all my posts about the sort of challenges I’ve had will see that I must be mentally exhausted. Since arriving in this country, I’ve been met with nothing but grievances, and I haven’t had a lot of good luck with other people. It’s been a mixed bag, for sure, but somehow friendships have largely escaped me. I’m 58 now and have lived here for fourteen years, and I hear from other people that making friends as an older person is never easy, let alone in a new place. The British are much like Nordic people but in general, they seem to have their own peculiar way of evading emotional connections. They appear terrified of having anyone depend on them so they withdraw even before the possibility enters the stage. They can appear a bit haughty and are often quite patronising for this reason, it’s a form of self protection. I’ve been ghosted and abandoned like never before. When my husband died, a lot of people helped me out with ONE thing, and then disappeared. Others unfriended me on Facebook. When I suffered from other challenges, more people dropped out, mostly people I had recently tried to make friends with, so whatever I thought I had gained while I was living by myself, I lost just as fast. Friends from other countries ghosted me as well, so it was not just the locals. The locals have been especially difficult because quite a few have befriended me on Facebook, but then failed to interact with me. I don’t like that, so I delete them. I feel guilty for doing this because I see them in town and they probably wonder about me, but I can’t handle having my private life noted online by people who never say a word to me there.
When I came to live here, Martin introduced me to the circles that play folk music, but for the most part, I didn’t gel with these people. I thought the hippies that had gathered here were quite charming in some way, but I made a mistake in thinking that I would fit in. They tend to be very cliquey, and I got a foot in sometimes, but nothing more. These individuals are mostly from England, so they are foreign too, and as it is a predominantly English speaking place, it’s difficult to tell if someone is Welsh. My impression is that the Welsh are more welcoming and easier to deal with than the English, and there are more similarities between Wales and Finland. Many of the people I have met, have visited Finland, or have some familial connection to the country. Amongst all the heart ache, I’ve generally had a good experience with the many various service men and delivery guys who come to my door.
I really like how chatty people are, you can quite literally turn around and speak to anyone who happens to be there. For the most part, they treat you as an equal, and it’s almost strange how easy it is to find things to share. The men usually seem quite gentle and seldom talk down on you as a woman. The ability amongst the Welsh to do pleasant small talk and have a bit of a laugh is the one thing that makes this place so much better than my ‘real’ home. They acknowledge your presence and you get friendly smiles from strangers just walking up and down a street. And so they may be short and superficial, but the chats I get to have with random people can be very uplifting, and it certainly staves off a lot of the screeching loneliness that comes with living a disabled widow’s life. My social anxiety has diminished thanks to the ease with which people interact with each other here, and despite my brain fog, hyperacusis, tinnitus and the ear plugs I have in my ears, I’m still more talkative than I ever was in Finland. For the record, I found the bilingual situation in Finland extremely stressful, but here I don’t have to worry about knowing Welsh. I carry on learning English, but in all honesty, I’m deeply frustrated with my brain fog and hearing disorder and subsequent lack of progress. How many challenges does a person need?
Sometimes I feel as if this place is shunning me, and perhaps now I’m shunning it, too. I feel a little paranoid about being a foreigner. With Brexit making the air chiller, you can’t help but worry that a lot of people could be xenophobic on some deeper level that doesn’t show in day-to-day encounters. I come from a culture where people are typically curious minded about foreigners, but of course, in this country, they are rather jaded, and perhaps that’s the issue. No one seems interested in who I really am, and so I’m constantly struggling with the feeling of not being seen. But in contrast with my early attempts at living abroad, this time around, I have nowhere to escape. It’s a weird feeling because I just can’t seem to put my roots down properly. I’m stuck in a place that’s quiet and pretty peaceful, yet it doesn’t always feel like an entirely comforting place to be. It’s like living through a weird apocalypse, the ground is moving and nothing feels safe. It’s a liminal space. I have a decent home and that has been my focus for many years: I needed to get it in order and I needed help with so many things. Now I don’t have that familiar help anymore, I’m starting to feel completely deflated and ready to just give up.
The handyman, who was a rent-a-husband type rather than a tradesperson, was very much connected to my sense of security in this home. In fact, back in the days when he ran a man-with-van business, he was the one who helped me move from my husband’s house nine years ago, and so he’s followed my life story for quite a long time. He admitted this summer that he doesn’t help anyone else, and I felt privileged at the time, but it also made me nervous that he really wanted out of the obligation. I think that’s the real reason they stonewalled me. Now that I don’t have that person whom I can trust with all sorts of small and sometimes rather intimate issues, I feel completely destabilised. I’ve been really anxious at night and I feel like I’m going to burst out of my skin. I feel raw and vulnerable. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I trusted this person almost like family. I shared my intimate, personal space and my health issues with them, and now it horrifies me. It’s clear that there’s something deeply symbolic about the fact that he was able to help me improve my home environment, which I’m grateful to say, is more or less sorted now.
Childishly, I just want to go home to my parents, but they are gone. I want my mum, but I’m an orphan. Like most people, I need to be liked and seen, and not very many people have offered the loyalty and the love that my mother offered me when she was sober. Of course, when she was drunk she withdrew, so this could be the root trauma that I’m stuck with. I don’t like talking about trauma much because I don’t think there’s necessarily anything we can go back to and fix. Like wise, trauma survival sounds a bit weirdly indulgent and rather meaningless to me.
I was on my way from the dentist a week ago when I decided to get out of the car in spite of the heavy rain and snap a picture of some windswept moors. I know it looks great, but it’s actually a small area. Most of the country is filled up with farmland. I’m stuck at home anyway, trying to enjoy my home, but it’s starting to feel like a prison. It’s a bit of gilded cage, in fact, that doesn’t feel entirely my own either, since it’s a rental, and therefore a compromise. What makes a home a home? The ability to make it match your dream home is of course helpful. But all houses are only ours for a short while. Perhaps there is no such thing as a real home, only a vague longing for the safety that most of us experienced in early childhood, and of course, that includes the environment we grew up in. The mother tongue and the nuanced cultural expressions that emerge from this specific linguistic context are also potent reinforcements of one’s sense of identity. Early childhood is no doubt where the heart will always for most of us independent of our experiences later in life. In other words, mother, mother tongue and the physical context are perhaps “home”.
I have a Swedish speaking friend who writes novels rooted in our joint culture, and she describes the flip side of life very well. Though I don’t normally read novels due to poor attention, I love reading hers because of a bittersweet feeling of familiarity. There’s something very specific about the setting and general context of her narrative that resonates in a deep way - there’s a sense of a paradise lost, which I think is the hallmark of a lot of art that really touches the heart. This is perhaps highlighted by the ways in which it parts ways with the greater context of Finnish culture. The Moomin stories are another example of a kind of story telling that speaks to a lot of people, but probably differently to those of us who share the author’s cultural background. I have always felt indifferent to the culture that’s tied to the Finnish language, and my attempts to befriend it never worked. It’s sad that I never found my place within the small Swedish population, the so-called duck pond, either, and looked for a way out of the dichotomy. Ironically, I’m more at home in the British setting than in the Finnish one, yet I still feel somewhat out of place as if I was just travelling through.
Being an adult is exhausting, and it’s so much worse when your health just keeps deteriorating and you know what the end is like for a lot of lonely senior citizens. Every effort to accomplish some adult task is immense. It’s now wonder that in our minds, we tend to embark on nostalgic trips into the past, the lost world, the Shambala of our deepest dreams.
Hiraeth is the Welsh word for unspeakable longing for that mythical home that may or may never have existed. In my case, the feeling of having a home in Finland relied on other people, and now my family is gone, there is nothing to go back to other than the family grave I own in the big cemetery in Helsinki It’s the only land I own… There is little over and beyond family that would attract me to that country, but even if there was, relocations are a huge deal and there is no way I could manage one by myself. It’s awful, because this is my home, yet I’m not sure what it means in emotional terms as I still feel as if I’m in a temporary situation. This could well be due to the fact that I always moved around a lot, from rental to rental. While many of the natives have been kind and welcoming, no one has really contributed to making it into a real home. Being disabled and homebound, integration into the local community is also an ongoing but very difficult process. In this sense, I’m homeless.
The thoughts about war remind me of my film “I Got Life” from 2014:
Update. This is what I posted on Facebook for my friends there:
I’ve had another really insane experience following the kitchen leak saga from 2022… when will it ever end?
I had a very sad fall out with my handyman, I’m not at all sure what happened there but I know he was stressed and didn’t really want to do these jobs anymore. The worst was the stonewalling. I felt as if the rug was pulled from underneath, it was a really difficult thing to deal with after 9 years of friendship and months (years) waiting to get my floors done at last. I then went online and found some local guy who does flooring. He messaged back and said no he doesn’t do laminate but recommended someone called [insert Polish name NN]. So NN agreed to come yesterday. I would have to pay for his petrol as he came from pretty far away, and every appliance he had to move also had a set price. I wasn’t too happy but just needed the jobs done at last, and a price was agreed on.
I had to move things out of the way and all that, it was bloody hard work. Then get up really early to let him in, so I was still pretty dopey. NN arrived late with this really intimidating and nervous energy about him. He starts running around moving my appliances around and even took the door off the hinges and took it outside because it will catch on the floor and really needs filing down. Meanwhile, he was complaining that the job was too difficult, that he wasn’t happy me paying via bank transfer anyway because he couldn’t wait for it and it may or may not arrive in his opinion, the space was really too small to work in, the job different than he imagined etc etc. TOO MUCH TO DO. In the meantime I was trying to scrape together the cash I had in various places for him. One moment he was saying he’s not sure he can take the job, then he said he’ll do it anyway, then he changed his mind again - I don’t know how many times until I was almost in tears, asking what the problem REALLY was? He then stared at me wide eyed and said it was HIM. He had a BAD DAY. I was in shock. He said IT DEPENDS ON THE DAY!! And then he stomped off. No money exchanged hands of course. I can laugh at the utterly bizarre spectacle now but I sure wasn’t laughing then!
It was still early in the day so I went on Facebook and posted a query on the local community page, for someone CALM and easy to work with (I’m shy sticking my head out but I just had to do it). Two guys showed up in my house later that day. One was a young local guy who’s starting a flooring business, and he would do ALL floors (laminate and vinyl and carpet). The other was the guy who had recommended the unhinged pole and he only does carpeting and vinyl. Both of them knew NN and the first guy said he always has ‘a bad day’. The second one didn’t remember recommending NN (??) but was surprised to hear about my negative experience with him.
The first guy (who’s a native and lives very close by) was a fantastic communicator on messenger and VERY swiftly produced a nice quotation for me with various ideas about how we can get the price down. After a few hours I gave up waiting for the second guy’s quotation and told the first guy ‘he had won first prize’, which he also thought was funny. In the process, I also discovered a few people who could potentially help me with some other awkward garden related jobs that my handyman left behind, but it will have to wait till spring.
I slept for twelve hours. Don’t know how I’ll get through next week because it promises to be really busy, but at least the kitchen floor will be sorted AT LAST.
Update 2:
Surprisingly, my handyman just wrote me a short message that he hasn’t had time to read my messages. So I guess he will, and then we’ll see how it goes. Whether it goes well or not, at least he’s acknowledged them now, and that’s a relief.