The freedom to create
I’m in the mountains. I haven’t been at the mountain house for more than a year. Not since the first few weeks after moving back to Scandinavia last year. After tumultuous weeks and months of traveling, work, having to leave my home in Turkey and finding a new place to settle I found some peace here, for a few days.
I lived in Stockholm then. In a tiny little apartment. Now I live in the woods, in a house not so different from the mountain house. But still, it’s great to be here. Although nature is always at my doorstep life looks different from higher up.
I quickly thought I’d fail my new years resolutions this year, but really, for once I’ve been quite successful — I got to the 12th of January after all, and I’ve kept a lot of the promises I made myself.
The three key resolutions were:
1. Be more outdoors
2. Create and share more
3. Slow down the travel schedule
I was pretty frustrated by myself on day 4 of 2018. I thought I’d failed on a couple of my new years resolutions. Most importantly I had not been taking walks in the woods every day. I didn’t feel great about it. We were 4 days into 2018 for pete’s sake! That’s ages! I managed to not follow up right from the start. But hey, it’s not always easy to be the ideal self you wish you were, I understand (myself, sort of…).
My frustration with myself, and the fact that the temperature dropped from miserable, somewhat frozen-rainy 0 degrees Celsius to crispy and cold -4 with clear blue skies helped quite a bit. So did the fact that my friends Aron and Rebekka came by in the woods — we went for a couple of walks, and it was great, and so I continued. I’ve at least been outdoors a bit every day since then, for about a week, and now I’m in the mountains, where there’s snow and I can go skiing.
One of my grander plans for 2018 is to create and publish much more. That one I plan on following up on too. In 2017 I didn’t get a whole lot of writing and filmmaking done (despite starting, running and abandoning a media-platform). The entire year was just too much of a headache. I traveled too much for work that was mentally, economically and physically taxing. I slept too little and worked too much. This lead to a complete burnout and collapse by the end of the year, something I’m still trying to recover from.
The goal of creating and publishing more, much like everything else I seem to be doing these days lead to some sort of semi-existential crisis. Mostly because goals, and goals that require me to share parts of myself to the extent this one does brings up the question of who I am, how others see me, how I see myself and how I want to be seen both by myself and others. It’s a complicated mess that can be quite daunting.
For the last few years I’ve been working to rid the wold of violent extremism. I’ve had a lot of great opportunities to do great things. I’ve given TEDx talks, spoken to school-kids, met with wonderful people from all walks of life, from all over the planet. I’m grateful for that. I’ve traveled the world, but I never got the chance to stop and smell the roses. I was always in a rush onwards to the next big thing, the next great location, the next great meeting, the next great project. I rushed from airports to stations to conference hotels to stages. It was fantastic, and it was exhausting.
One of the most exhausting aspects of this, and something I’ve been struggling with for quite some time, is that most of my work in countering violent extremism to this day in the eyes of many is defined by me having a pretty shitty summer vacation in 2011. It’s been more than 6 years and I’ve learnt a lot — in the eyes of many I’ve become one of the leading experts in the field of countering violent extremism, yet to most I’m still known solely as one of the survivors of the terrorist attack in Norway in 2011. Known simply for not being dead. Whoptidoo, I didn’t get shot and killed, neither did you, so we’ve got that in common…I’ve got other stories to tell!
So this year I’m gonna shake things up and do things a bit differently.
I think 2017 with all its ups and downs was a prelude to this, but this year I want to create more, and I want work to be more rewarding.
Anyways I’m on a tangent, or on resolution three, I’m not entirely sure anymore.
So far this year all I’ve published this year is a few posts on Facebook, a couple of pictures on Instagram and a couple of tweets. Although I’m quite happy about some of the pictures this is my first longer piece. I have been spending a lot of time over the last few days writing, drawing and taking pictures — things I feel I didn’t have the chance to do in 2017. It’s been great. When it comes down to it I’m a creator. I want to write, I want to make things, to take pictures, to tell stories and to create. I want to share what I make.
Then I don’t.
I have to get over that.
It’s not a inspiration thing. I’ve got things I want to create, stories I want to tell, stories people were expecting me to tell years ago that remain yet unwritten. My writers-block is not for lack of inspiration — rather the opposite.
In essence I think my problem of creating and publishing boils down to a few factors. First of all there’s the question already mentioned of how I see myself, how others see me, how I want to be seen and how what I create will contribute to that. It’s about expectations, what I expect from myself, what I fear others expect from me. Sometimes I seem to overwhelm myself with the wish to create something so wonderful, so magnificent, so perfect, so grand that I end up not creating anything. This is also impacted on by my epic stage-fright, my fear of never being good enough, never creating anything good enough, of disappointing. 2018 is the year to get over that, to do the unexpected, to not care so much what I or others think, to create things that might be smaller, but that have meaning to me.
Another factor is focus. I think all the resolutions somehow ties into this. I’ve wanted to do too many things. I have too many ideas of what I want to do, what I want to create, stories I want to tell. So many in fact they start interfering with each other, both in terms of headspace and time. 2018 is the year to get organised, to build routines and to create.
I find that being outdoors helps bringing new perspectives to things. It inspires, but it also helps sort through whatever processes are running in my mind, figuring out what’s important, what to focus on. It clears the mind and gives a sense of freedom. So does clearing my schedule, traveling a bit less, spending more time to really explore and experience the places I do end up going. Slowing down.
So I guess this somehow sums up my resolutions; slow down, get organised and do the unexpected. But really it’s about more than that. It’s about finding, and creating for myself, the freedom to create…
But first I’ll hang out in these mountains some more.
