I wish I could remember
the essence of each dream
And put them all to paper
in ink for you to read
Instead I weave you castles
and strive to make each seam
A strand of nightly treasure
adventure in each bead
And hope for you to follow
wherever it may lead
She made her heart a stronghold
and firmly locked the gate
Then hardened it with fire
in order to survive
But hearts are made for hurting
and though it was to late
She let her walls be crumbled
to bleed and feel alive
I had the honor of being asked to sing at my beautiful nephew Manfred’s baptism in Högbo Church, Sweden (2018-08-25).
The song is my own take on the track “Utan dina andetag” (“Without Your Breath”) by Swedish rock band Kent. Behind the piano is super talented musician Lotta Tonlycke.
The video was recorded by my dad on his phone.
Music: Original song “Whenever”
Audio story: In the Heart of a Star
Audio story: “Across the Void”
Audio story: “This is Ground Control”
Wow, have I been inactive here for a while? (The answer is: Yup. Yes. Yeah. Definitely.)
I’ll make up for that, I promise.
As some of you might already know, I decided to do NaNoWriMo this November, on a crazy whim. Some of the chapters produced during those 30 stressful (but of course also tremendously fun and fulfilling) days can be found on this site. Just go to the menu and expand the “Stories” section, and then look under the “Magic, Games and Shadow Names” sub.
Anyways, writing devoured most of my time in November, and when the month was over (and I did finish NaNo on time, by the way) I was totally spent. After that I’ve been rather busy with working (my new job’s still awesome), preparing for Christmas and going to some tedious medical examinations. So I hope I’ll be forgiven for not updating here as often as I would have liked.
There are some updates to be done, however. And that’s what this post is about, if you hadn’t guessed already. Some pretty exciting stuff is happening in my life right now, and I’d like to share those things with you. I’m a sucker for list lately, so I think I’ll just make it one of those. Here goes:
And that’s that, I suppose. At least for the time being. Phew.
Now I really have to stop, because I have some washing to do and some columns to write. Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it.
And if you don’t hear from me again during what remains of this year, I want to wish you a really merry Christmas and a happy new year!
All the best,
Chris Smedbakken
It feels like it’s high time for an update here. So many things have happened this past year that I’m not entirely sure I’ve had time to appropriately reflect upon them. This post will be my sincere attempt at covering the most important of them.
I think I should start off with some backstory.
At the end of 2015 I hit the proverbial wall after a fall term that definitely got the better of me – this following a period of less than four years of working as a teacher full time. Preceding this I had spent 5+ years studying to become an upper secondary school teacher in English (as a second language) and religious studies.
The collapse was the result of me being given way too many tasks to perform in a way too narrow frame of time. One of the reasons I became a teacher in the first place is that I care about people. Thus the realization that I did not have the time to be there for all my 100+ young students (and not for lack of trying my darnedest, mind you) was one of the things that broke me (coupled of course with the immense stress, sleepless nights, daily threats and insults that are also given parts of the teaching job). So I quit.
Spring term 2016 I worked part time at another school, but only in order to pay my bills. I knew that the situation was unsustainable, and that I would have to do something drastic in order to keep my head above the waves of anxiety that threatened to overwhelm me at every turn.
One of my greatest passions in life is and has always been writing and storytelling. When I was a kid I always told myself and the world that I was “going to be a writer” when I grew up. Growing older and hopefully more mature, I realized that one does not simply walk into Mordor, so to speak, and that I would have to get a “real job”. Thus the teacher thing. I had been freelancing as a pop culture reporter for the local newspaper since 2007, but the thought that I could actually honor my childhood dream by becoming a real journalist had never seriously struck my mind.
But then and there, at the beginning of 2016, when my mind was falling apart and the smallest and simplest things threatened to send me crying and falling into pieces, one of my closest friends reacted. She told me something that I will always remember:
“This is not you. This is what you do: Pick two of your most important dreams, and then spend this coming year fighting with everything you have to make those dreams come true.”
And so I did. I jumped.
I gave up teaching. I sold off all the things I did not need and rented out my apartment. I enrolled to a one-year journalism education (a follow-up to an Internet based class I had taken previously) and moved to Stockholm.
I spent the second half of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 studying journalism, and slowly realized that this is what I was always meant to be doing. I learned much and made important friends and contacts. I learned things about myself that I would never have learned if I had not risked everything and jumped.
I also managed to get an internship at Aftonbladet, Sweden’s biggest evening newspaper, where I was also later employed. There I met many new friends and grew even more as a journalist. It would be an understatement to say that I had, if not the, then at least one of, the greatest times of my life.
When my contract was about to end I was offered to stay on board as a researcher for their TV-station, and initially I happily accepted. But then things happened.
A close family member fell ill and passed away while I was living in Stockholm. I managed to get back to my home town Gävle just in time to see her one last time, but the loss broke me once more. I realized the hard way what I had known all along: that friends and family is incredibly important to me, and that while I had landed my dream job 200 kilometers away in Stockholm, being so far from my close ones was driving me to a very dark and lonely place on the inside.
So I declined the job offer at Aftonbladet and moved home. I got my old apartment back, and retrieved my beloved cat-companion Sushi (image above) from my sister’s place where she had been living for this past year. Luckily, I managed to get a job at a newspaper staff in Falun, a neighboring town to Gävle. A full time, permanent employment as a digital/social media editor and reporter. Those of you who have insight into the journalistic job market in Sweden know how incredibly rare it is for Swedish journalists to have permanent employments. Thus I feel extremely lucky, and the fact that both my colleagues and my job assignments are great only adds to this.
So now I am back where I started, but with so many exceptions I can hardly count them. I have a job that I love, a salary that allows me to live and not just survive, a bunch of new realizations about myself and a second education to lean back on.
Apart from all this I have also fulfilled one of the two dreams that my wonderful friend inspired me to chase. The first one, namely, was becoming a journalist.
Getting back up again after this summer’s loss and grief has not been easy, and I am not sure I am entirely back on my feet yet even now. But I am glad that I made it back home in time to see her. I know that she is proud of me, wherever she is. She told me many times while she was alive how happy she was for me, that things were going my way in Stockholm and in life.
I have not been able to write much since the day it happened, and I quit my micro fiction writing on Twitter almost entirely that day. But even as I’m writing this I can feel inspiration and creativity slowly returning to me. Maybe I’m starting to heal, or maybe it’s just the season. I have a history since childhood of what I suspect is what they call seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and autumn is always the easiest time for me.
Anyway, things are looking up, and I’m feeling quite good today. So good, in fact, that I think I will open up Word and try to get some writing done.
This would be a really good thing, because you know what? The second dream I chose to fight for back then, when my friend intervened in my destructive spiral, was “Getting a book published”.
And I think it is high time to start fighting for that dream now.
Thank you for reading, it really means a lot to me.
All the best,
Chris Smedbakken
You know that wretched feeling. You’ve had it too, just admit it. Or at least I hope so, because otherwise I’ll have to feel doubly bad about having it myself. I’m talking about the terrible, despicable, malevolent malady that cuts your wings while at the same time it mocks you unendingly for your pathetic inability to fly. I’m talking about that voice that coaxes you to create, while simultaneously locking your hands behind your back and whispering discouraging degradations in your ear. I’m talking, of course, about writer’s block.
I know I’ve suffered from it before, and many times at that. It’s just that every time it passes I tend to forget it was ever there. It’s like my mind’s trying to block out the memory of that terrible state, in naïve hope that it won’t come back if I hide from it (and even the memory of it) well enough. And maybe this is actually a good way to tackle it, but in that case I’ve never managed to find a sufficiently good hiding spot. Because it always comes back.
The downside to this memory repressing approach is that every time writer’s block returns to once again grip me with its poisonous claws, I tend to panic. Why can’t I write? Why do I suddenly want to throw up at the mere thought of GM:ing? Where the fuck is my inspiration? I can’t remember just how bad it was last time, or the time before that, and thus I have no frame of reference to help me understand that this time around won’t be the end of the world either. That it will pass and that my inspiration (together with my incurable creative hubris) will return once again. Of course I know this, theoretically, but I can’t see it.
The current blockage has been a long one. I’m always at my most creative during autumn and early winter. That’s when magic happens. But this year not much writing happened even then. Well, of course writing happened — I’m a journalist after all. But now I’m talking about creative writing; that kind of writing that flows from your soul and builds worlds — not just documents them. I’ve managed to force some pages from my mind, but that’s all. I haven’t been able to fly for almost a year now, and it bothers me to the brink of madness.
I blame two culprits for this. The first one’s name is burnout, and the other one is called performance anxiety. I hit the proverbial wall in late 2015 and haven’t quite recovered yet (but that’s another story). My mind seems to have coped with this by locking off certain areas and gearing down. Together with a tendency of mine never to settle for anything less than perfect, this is a flawless recipe for creative shortage.
Now the mere thought of sitting down to write makes my mental safeguard put its hand on the emergency brake. Because I tell myself, deep down, that I can’t produce. That I won’t be able to live up to the stuff I’ve written in the past. That I might as well stare into a wall as try to create something, because it will amount to about the same result in the end. Writing has become so charged for me that I’m almost afraid of trying — because failing would kind of be the last drop. So I don’t write, I stare into walls instead.
Now I’m also well aware that this, too, will pass. Everything passes. But maybe it’s high time for me to work out some kind of strategy for coping with the malady of writer’s block, so that I’ll be able to handle it better next time it happens — whatever the reason it does. I’ll need to de-dramatize writing in my own mind as well, of course. I have to learn to settle for less-than-perfect, since that is perhaps one of my greatest problems. But that, too, is another story.
I think my next step will be to make a list of things that I can do to find an outlet for my creative urges, that don’t require me to write fabulous epics or game-mastering intricate RPG:s. Yeah, that’s what I will do. I guess I’ll post the list as a blog post once it’s done, so that you’ll be able to see what I came up with.
And finally, writing this post was in itself a part of my coping strategy. Without thinking about it I have actually been able to write more than 700 words without those stupid claws poking at me. Yay! And also: now I have clear as day documentation about this round of writer’s block actually having happened. Now I won’t be able to pretend that it has never befallen me before the next time around. Score.
Now that you have bravely trudged yourself through this my helplessly self centered wall of text, what do you think? Have you ever felt those restricting claws poking at you, and how did you tackle it? If you have any great, good or perfectly average coping techniques for dealing with writer’s block — please let me know. They’d make a wonderful contribution to my upcoming list. 🙂
And until next time: write safely.
Dreams is a dangerous place, after all.
“The art of traveling from one place to another in a crossroads world where the journey is the destination”
A photo compilation from public transport at night. Feel free to comment but please don’t use the images without my permission.
The entire Flickr album can be found here.
“Meetings”
“Driveby”
“Night rush”
“Wait”
“Uphold/holdup”
“Vitals”
“Timespace”
“Sign up”
“Draft”
“On line”
“Outpost”
“Left”
“Direction”
“Regime”
The title of this post says more about what I want to articulate here than the post itself probably will. Sorry for that. Also, sorry for the sorry state of my dusty keyboard in the featured image. Cleaning is yet another of those things I should probably engage in more often and dedicatedly (<-is that even a word?).
Anyhow, I feel like I have too many thoughts and contemplations swimming around inside my head not to find a vent for them somewhere. I guess this post will have to serve as said vent, for now.
I am in the middle of so many things. From the outside it might not show, but on the inside I am almost bursting. I think I can best convey my feelings through a gaming analogy, being the hopeless gamer that I am.
Many games are linear. You walk from left to right as in good old SMB or, as is often the case in this new 3D-era, at least you have a quest marker to follow.
In the games I like the most, however, you repeatedly face choices that will impact the continuation – and often even the ending – of the game. That’s a thrilling touch to the gameplay, don’t you think? Well, I would agree that it is. But for me, it is also excruciating mental torture. Because I absolutely can’t stand leaving any rocks unturned. Most often, those fictional crossroads result in me creating a multitude of save files in order to explore every single possibility in the game before settling for the “best” one. (Watching spoilers on Youtube really never was my thing). I have to try all the roads, or else I will probably be unable to let go of the thought that I have missed something. And trust me, that thought can destroy an entire game for me.
Thing is, however, that it’s not just in games that I have this mindset. It’s ever present in my IRL-gameplay as well. I literally feel that I have to finish life with 100% completion, or else I will have failed. Suffice to say, this mindset is doing nothing in favor of my nerves or my well being.
As I have written here previously, my goals are to succeed within the journalistic field, and to get at least one book published. The problem is, I also want to succeed within music and acting. I want to join the police force and the military. I want to travel the whole world, I want to move to a big city. I want to sell everything I own and go on a street musician road trip with my violin. I want to become a professional drummer and a famous guitarist. I want to hang my photographs in a gallery and I want to work with politics. I want to be a computer ace and hack NASA, I want to rob a bank. I want to become rich and drive a fancy car. I want to save the world. And I am probably the worst kind of narcissist, but somehow I actually feel that all these roads are possible options, in one way or another.
But I also want to be completely content with what I already have, and this is probably the one field that I genuinely feel that I cannot succeed in.
So now I sit here with a thousand plans and dreams, totally stressed out and with no faith whatsoever in any of these things ever coming to pass. I know some of them probably will – at least the first two (possibly the only ones that really matter). But I don’t know how to get there. Life has no save files or reset-buttons, I cannot press reload every time I’m not entirely content with how things turned out.
And there certainly are no spoilers on Youtube to help me get where I want, or to check out all those options that I never explored.
I often find myself wishing that life was more like a Super Mario Bros game, where there is only one path to take – and if you still happen upon an alternative route, it’s probably just a shortcut to the same goal. Or at least that life had a mini map and a quest marker.
Well, I guess I just have to wait and see how this open world sandbox game will progress. Perhaps the quest marker option will come in a future DLC.
Over and out.
...these grains of sand 