I live alone, which means I don’t have the weight of worrying about anyone finding the evidence of my nightly endeavours the next morning on my shoulders. No one will sigh at the plate. No one will send a message to the roommate group chat asking to clean up after themselves.

This must be the life!!!

The next time I wake up in the middle of the night craving for some snack pickles, I do the same thing. I munch away, leaving the jar out and the plate once again on the table. I crawl happily back into bed feeling good. The next time this happens, I feel okay. The time after that, not so much.

Cleaning up the table would be inconvenient. I’m tired, my body hurts. There are droplets of pickle juice I spilled on the table. I would have to get a rag, wet it, wipe, rinse, the whole thing. And as I mentioned, it is 2 fucking am in the morning! How incredibly convenient it is to just leave it for the person I’ll be tomorrow, all rested and ready to take on this challenge.

Living alone has made me realize that convenience is a very easy thing to get used to.

But inconvenience is the price we pay for community.

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The inconvenience store

One of the quietest ways we stay on the hunt for community forever is by confusing love with convenience. My friends are coming over, so I do the dishes. I clear the table. I take out the the trash. I make sure there is somewhere for everyone to sit. Maybe I go to the store because I remember someone likes a specific drink. None of this is particularly difficult, but none of it is convenient either.

Today, a lot of self-care language seems to be used to get us out of any inconvenience. “I’m protecting my peace”, so I wont drop you off at the airport to say goodbye. “I’m setting a boundary”, so I wont come to your birthday party because I have work the next day. Don’t get me wrong. I cherish my boundaries. I have spent years learning how to set them, and I think knowing when to say no is one of the most important things you can learn.

But when does a boundary become a wall between you and all the potential platonic love on the other side of it?

It feels like we have built our adult lives around the idea that friendship should never be inconvenient. Friendship is supposed to be easy. Low-maintenance. Non-confrontational. These are the people you tell about the fights you have with your partner, but somehow never fight with yourself. Because bringing up a need might cause tension. Telling your friend they hurt you might make things feel uncomfortable. Admitting that you wanted them to show up for you means admitting that you wanted to inconvenience them in the first place.

I see the desire to be the chill friend. “Oh they’re so laid back!” my friend explains to their hometown friends after I told her that it’s no worries at all. When in fact, sometimes there are worries. I see the desire to be the easy friend. But how much love can there be between two people who are so determined never to impose on each other?

This makes me think of the art installation Global convenience, a fully stocked convenience store floating in Toronto harbor. You’ll find everything you could need inside. Comfort. Something to eat. “Oh you remembered these are my favorite”. But the convenience store is surrounded by water making the convenience extremely inconvenient. There is water between us and it. You have to make the trip. Accepting the fact that this will always be the case will make you one step closer to finding community.

Friendship is inherently an inconvenience store.

Are friendships a waiting room?

I was recently rewatching Friends with my best friend when we got to the episode where Rachel and Monica have to say goodbye to their shared everyday life. Monica and Chandler have decided to move in together, which means Rachel has to move out.

Before leaving Monica sobs to Rachel: “Now you have to leave. And I have to live with a boy!”

Their friendship isn’t ending. Rachel is not even leaving New York. But something is ending. Their life of sharing dinners after work, watching TV in the evenings, knowing all the boring every day details of each others live. And we understand this as a natural part of adult life.

There’s something very heteronormative about the assumed hierarchy. Friends become best friends and that is the end of it. Partners become fiances, spouses, someone you share your home with. The relationship escalator, stating that romantic love must move in one direction, is very much visible in how we see these kinds of relationships. No one asks a friend “where is this going?” Friendship is allowed to be deeply meaningful, but rarely life-structuring. We can call someone our soulmate, our chosen family, and still find it completely normal not to consider them when choosing where to live, how to spend our holidays or what your future should look like.

I see so much conversation online that touches the topic of the lack of community and how lonely adulthood has become. But instead of accepting community as a house that needs constant maintenance, effort, repetition, proximity and responsibility, we often view it as more of a waiting room. “I’ll wait here until it is finally my turn, and the love of my life opens the door and calls out my name.” So we wont decorate the room and the walls of the waiting room stay white. Nothing is hanging on them.

Because we are not building a home in it.

Queer relationships as a form of intimacy

A lot of what I know about love comes from loving my friends. In English the word relationship hides a question inside of it: “What are we in relation to each other?” Technically, the word can describe all kinds of human connection. But in everyday English, saying that two people are “in a relationship” almost always asks us to understand them through a romantic category. I’ve always loved the Finnish translation of the word, ihmissuhde. The direct translation of the word would be something along the lines of “humanship”. A bond between two humans, whatever that might look like.

The language we use manifests in which forms of intimacy we allow ourselves to experience. Todays society seems to be extremely touch deprived. And why wouldn’t it? We reserve physical touch almost solely to the people who fit the idea of a romantic relationship. This one being becomes the centre of our physical needs. The one we lean on on the bus, hold hands with on the street and cuddle up on the couch. And if you don’t have that person yet? The waiting room becomes an awfully lonely place.

Queerness has given me a different framework for looking at this. It gave me permission to ask why romantic love should have a monopoly on grand gestures, physical affection or building a life around another person. Take my best friend. Do I not miss her when she is gone? Does our language not consist of phrases like “our spot”, “our song”, and “our city”. So why would I not hold her hand as an act of love, boil her tea when she is feeling bad, cuddle up on the couch while watching a movie. Community is built through repetitive gestures. And suddenly the waiting room feels like a home. There is a picture of us on the wall now.

You might feel some resistance to this. We’ve been taught to reserve certain gestures for one particular kind of love. My partner felt that resistance too. For a long time, I tried to explain why platonic love was so important to me, and why I thought physical affection could be one of the simplest ways of making a friendship feel safer and closer. I kept hearing how “I would never cuddle a person who I was not romantically involved with.” Until one day, I recieved a picture of him and his friend asleep on the floor, completely cuddled up in each others arms.

The next morning I asked him how he felt about it. “I feel weirdly closer to him now”, he said. Is it really that simple?”

My answer was, “yes.”

Building community is by no means easy. But we do play a huge role in how likely we are to succeed in it. By accepting inconvenience, giving friendship permanence, and allowing platonic love to be intimate, we start treating community as we should. As something that requires constant effort, rather than something we hope to stumble into.

When I was a teenager, I had enormous dreams for my adult life. All the places I would go. All the wealth I’d have. All the things I would accomplish.

They all pale in comparison when I wake up in the morning and my friend curses me out for the pickle juice on the table.

Obviously, this did not happen. I’d like to think I’m kind of a nice person. But if you’d told a friend that the food they cooked for you, or the drawing they made was average, it is safe to assume that the they would not exactly be jumping up and down.

No one strives to be average. No one puts in effort to come out on the other side as average. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my life being so deathly afraid of the word. But what does average actually really mean? Because most things in our life are exactly that.

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This is the first time statistics will make you feel better about yourself

I’m gonna briefly take advantage of the fact that I have a bachelor’s in economics.

In probability theory and statistics, a normal distribution, also called a Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a random variable. For example, the grading of final exams in Finland follow the Gauss curve. Most people’s scores will fall somewhere in the middle thus forming the highest peak. The further away we get from the peak, the fewer people we find there. There are a few people who absolutely sucked. There are a few people who excelled. They exist in the spaces above and below average.

This means that the average serves an important function. It is the comparison point. If you’d have to guess how much a person scored, your safest guess would be the middle point. In statistics, this is called the expectation.

Your life follows a Gauss curve as well. In most areas of your life, we would find you right where expected, on the expectation. You’re doing an average job at seasoning your food, taking care of your plants and knitting a scarf for a friend.

These things exist, because their existence reveals the rest of your Gauss curve. The tiny tail on the left tells you that there are some things you are truly terrible at, and the other end reveals you your greatness.

Stop comparing yourself to others (in a cool, non-cliche way)

Where most people get it wrong, is that they forget that life is not a final exam. Everyone does not get placed on the same curve. Everyone has their own curve, and the things they care about and practice gets placed on that unique curve. Your curve reveals your strengths, joys, weaknesses, interests and talents.

Other peoples curves may overlap yours in a different cutting point, and their average, their mean, their expectation is not aligned with yours. You feel below average not because you are, but because you’re getting measured on a curve that is not yours.

Other people’s curves are centered around a completely different set of unique values, experiences and skills. That is why it can only be compared to itself. Comparing it to another curve makes it lose it’s meaning and function. Ask anyone who knows anything about statistics (me).

Our curves bend according to our lives. They bend according to our interests, the practices we choose, the time we give things, and the risks we are willing to take. Someone else’s average does not make your average any less meaningful.

You’ve heard “stop comparing yourself to others” a hundred times before. But let me put this into a cool, hot, nerdy, not-boring, statistics way, that will actually change your brain.

It it is highly likely that you’re comparing your average to someone else’s outlier. Today, we are constantly getting exposed to an ocean of outliers. Someone is a really good photographer, graphic designer, stylist, painter, cook, dancer. But what we usually see are the absolute tail points of these people’s lives, and then we compare ourselves to those.

In statistics, this would be absurd. You would never judge a dataset by its most extreme value and call it representative. Yet this is exactly what we do with people. We compress their effort, luck, time, and repetition into a single image or moment, and hold it up against the average of our own lives.

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Average is the expectation

I am average at a lot of things. That is a fact I’ve spent way too much time coming to terms with. But that is literally how the Gauss curve works. My average belongs to no one else but me. And because I am average in a lot of things, I can notice how I’m good at diving deep in conversations, hyping people up, styling an outfit, experimenting with makeup, expressing myself through writing and having an eye for aesthetics.

Sometimes these things will produce an outlier among them that is exceptional work. I know it to be so because I know myself and I know my Gauss curve.

So I urge you to draw your own Gauss curve and place the things that matter to you on it. You will see that most things will fall somewhere in the middle. And I repeat: the middle is the expectation meaning the curve expects nothing more of you and neither should you. Having every single point in the tiny little tail would make such a meaningless curve. Your curve is supposed to look like yours. It is supposed to show you where you are, what you love enough to practice, what you can peacefully suck at, and where your own little tail of greatness might be hiding.

I am way above average at saying cliche things so I’ll end this by saying:

By being average, I am are literally at the top. I can see myself so clearly from up here.

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Not in a super dramatic, the final minutes of Call me by Your Name type of way, but in a “when is the next bus, where are my shoes, how fast can I get home?” way.

I love to leave. I have always been one of the first to leave the club. It’s still a running joke (pun intended) between my hometown friends and me how I used to quite literally run home from the club during my teenage years. “It’s a faster way to get home!!!” I used to yell, while everyone I loved stood there watching the back of a little dot with wild hair and knee-high boots get smaller and smaller in the distance.

I drop my friends off at the bus stop. I wont wait with them, I have a there to be. I flash them a big smile while reversing out of my parking spot, and from the back mirror I see a piece of my heart standing there, waiting, with luggage at their feet. I turn the volume up on the radio and drive off. Maybe I’m supposed to feel sad, but I’m not. Leaving is part of the natural cycle of life.

Arrive. Experience. Leave. Repeat.

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For years, I have been living with the mindset “The sooner I leave, the faster I get there.” But where exactly is there? I’ve always been so ready for the cycle to repeat itself, I have not even tried what would happen if I attempted to stretch out the experience part.

Since I am a professional leaver, I can let you in on three things about leaving I’ve found out during my human experience.

1. Life happens here

It really took me some time to grasp why people enjoy going out for walks. I understand walking from point A to point B or going for a run, but just aimlessly walking around without a destination never really felt something I would ever willingly choose to do. I really needed a there to get to, to see it worthwhile.

The idea of the flâneur, the person who walks around a city just to observe it, has for sure been extremely intriguing and romantic to me but I’ve found it deeply inefficient and dull in practice.

However, something about turning 25, and my frontal lobe being finally fully developed has changed things in me. So, among other crazy new things I did with my new brain, I took a walk. I let my intuition guide my route. Every few minutes, I had to consciously remind myself to slow my pace whenever my instincts took over. Slowing down caused a tingling sensation in my chest: “What the fuck is that???”

I felt…alive?

It felt so overwhelmingly human that I broke down in tears in the middle of the street. I kept going, laughing through the tears, thinking how scared I was of the feeling. I was here. I was alive. How would I have the stomach for staying here?? Here felt so big!!!

A man was pacing back and forth on the street, talking on the phone, cupping his hand over his mouth. The sky was about to turn into dusk. It was still blue, the way faded jeans were, but it was letting you know it would not stay that way for much longer.

2. Slowing down is not the same as stopping

I have had the absolute privilege living just a 20-minute bus ride away from my best friend. However, this girl, who is quite literally half of my heart, is now moving away, and there came a day when I was walking her to the bus stop. The bus was scheduled in eight minutes. My friend, knowing my “see you later” and “I just wanna get cozy in bed asap” type of brain said: “It’s okay, you can go.”

I CAN GO??? I’ve been put out of my misery! I can get home faster!

But this warm May evening, something switched in me, and I went: “In a month, I would be so grateful to have eight minutes with you.”

And let me tell you, waiting together, staying in the in between together, slowing down together is usually where most of the most fulfilling things happen.

“Teenagers know something kids do not yet know, and that adults have forgotten.” But maximizing my time in the in between have made me remember. The eight minutes made me remember. Had it not been for those minutes, I would not know her as intimately as I do now. Not to go too Anthony Bourdain on you, but go as much as you can. Stretch the there as far away as you can. Make getting there as slow as you can. The more you’re here, the more you’ll remember. His whole thing was not “travel to arrive somewhere,” but “go so you can be changed by the regular moments.”

3. Going home is ruining your life

If there is a thing as “too comfortable”, I have been definitely exactly that. I love my bed, I love my home, I love the feeling of slipping into fresh sheets after a long day.

Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls said “I don’t wanna go home right now” and I could have not disagreed more.

On April 21st 2026, I wrote in my journal: “I’ve been happier, because I’ve been sadder.” What I meant was, that in a very cliche way, the more I let life reach me, the more there was to feel. And I think this can be applied to anything. The more I step outside the tiny little circle I have created to feel safe, the more I receive. The more I let my people inconvenience me, the more love there will be. What love inherently is, is getting inconvenienced by people over and over and over again. Going home was actually depriving me from a huge chunk of the human experience.

Comfort can be a tiny prison. Almost anything can.

As for me, here I am, trapped at the bus stop with my person for ten more minutes.

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My morning starts like any other. I open my eyes, take a second to remember who I am, what is going on, the usual. I sit up on my bed, ready to reach my phone.

But this morning, my brain keeps repeating back to me: “Nothing changes, if nothing changes”, fighting against it’s own urge to grab it.

So I become an observer in this internal fight.

There is the active side of my brain sending signals to my body, making the muscles in my arm tense up and stretch towards the phone on my bedside table. I see this side of my brain as The Jock. He is the popular guy in an early 2000’s rom-com, wearing the letterman jacket and walking into every room like he owns them. He does not necessarily think much, but he sure knows how to take action. How to score the touchdown, how to get the girl, how to doomscroll the hell out of my phone.

Then there is the more reflective side of my brain, noticing the damage. This side is The Poet. He is the one to notice that the girl is not truly happy with The Jock, but The Jock’s presence is so overpowering that The Poet usually just blends into the crowd. But this morning, The Poet has had enough.

We enter the last 20 minutes of the movie, where he finally steps out from the crowd and speaks up. “ENOUGH!!!!”, he says, with a voice that is trying very hard not to shake. The Jock turns around. The Girl turns around. Everyone is suddenly paying attention.

But instead of talking to The Jock, The Poet turns to The Girl. “Is this really what you want?”, The Poet asks. The Girl looks at The Poet, then to the Jock and from her body language we can see that she’s made her decision.

She starts walking towards The Poet and at the same time, I notice my arm tense up one last time. The Jock is getting ready to fight, but his friends grab his chest: “It’s no use.” The Girl has made up her mind. My arm relaxes. I get out of bed leaving the phone on the table.

So the Poet gets The Girl. My brain is free. The phone has been defeated. Roll the credits. Except we never really see what happens after the movie ends. The Poet thought the hard part was already done, but now he finds himself in a completely new situation. He has absolutely no idea what to do next.

“What the hell do I do now????"

Which is honestly a very fair question. Because once I do not grab my phone, I am suddenly faced with the strange and slightly embarrassing task of being alone with myself. The Poet sits down. The answer MUST be somewhere in him. He just needs to get close enough to hear it.

Then, finally, a thought arrives.

Ask the girl what she likes.

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And that becomes my guide for the day. What do I like? What would I be doing if I did all the things I liked? It seems ridiculously simple. But at the same time, I seem to have all these wants and dreams and yet, in a way that almost feels stupid, I do not actually even try to make room for them in my daily life. So instead of asking what I should do today, getting anxious about it, and beating that anxiety with a little scroll, I asked myself, “what would you like to do today?”

The answer ended up being weird computer art, learning how to do nose contour, planning a garden party with my flatmate (she promised to wear fairy ears) and listening to Baby by Justin Bieber on my partners old mp3-player. I’m literally still that same 13-year-old girl.

Will I completely abandon The Jock? Hell no, I mean, have you seen the guy?? Austin Ames leaning against a locker? My 13-year-old self will fold eventually. But I will try to give her more space to do her thing. She’s good to have around.

She’s way cooler than me.

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I look myself in the bathroom mirror at my university pub.

My way too long pant legs have been chewed up by the pavement. My ponytails are braided into tiny braids. I look like me. I look cool.

When I open the bathroom door back to the pub, I’m on top of the world.

My friends turn their heads to look at me, I sit back down and make everyone laugh. “FUCK I’M THE COOLEST GIRL IN THE WORLD!!!!” I think to myself.

Except when I’m not.

According to research (Pezzuti, Warren & Chen, 2025 ) coolness is described surprisingly similarly across the world. We know something is cool when we see it. To put it more precisely, researchers have found six personality traits that stood out as distinctly cool: extraversion, hedonism, power, adventurousness, openness to experience, and autonomy.

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1. Extraversion & Power

I’m not extraverted. Well, sometimes I am. Once in a blue moon I’ll be the life of the party, and the next day I’ll go back to being the one laughing from the sidelines. But since I’ve been both, I know both are equally important.

Cracking a joke and hearing everyone burst out laughing feels like getting holy water sprinkled on you. Tonight I’m sitting at the pub, being interested in people in the right ways that are not too intrusive, and I have just the perfect amount of curiosity. I ask the right questions. I’m unstoppable. I’m cool. They feel it too.

But to be the one who laughs. How grateful I am for those people letting me experience this short moment of bliss. The ones who tell me about their hobbies when I ask. The ones with the follow-up questions. Sometimes coolness is the ability to make someone else feel funny, interesting, included. No one is cool alone.

2. Hedonism & Adventurousness

The night continues into the local club. I’m enjoying myself. I close my eyes and see the flashing lights through my eyelids and I dance and I dance and I dance. My friends are somewhere beside me, laughing, shouting lyrics, pulling me back into the circle every time the crowd pushes us apart. I am the coolest girl in the world.

At last, my body informs me, it has had enough for tonight. “One more drink!” my friend shouts over the music. I want to be the person who says yes. God how I want to be the person who has the funniest story of what happened at the afterparty. But my feet hurt. My mascara has started to gather under my eyes. The music that felt like it was carrying me an hour ago now feels like it is pressing on my chest. I want my bed. I think of the article on how wellness culture is killing college life, and how I’m only given this young body once. I should make the most out of it. I am adventurous after all. Except when I’m not.

3. Openness & Autonomy

I hit the bottom of my bed. I stare at the ceiling, eyes half open. I’d like to think I’m an open person too. I let the world change me. Sometimes I have the autonomy to decide which of those changes get to stay. If I cling too tightly on the label of being cool, confident, funny, social, I turn my back on all the versions of me that are not. I am shy, uncool, and sometimes my voice shakes. I’m open to experience all that is me. Well, except when I’m not. But trying to hold on to an identity based solely on these fixed labels will never work.

Because when I wake up devastatingly uncool and hungover tomorrow morning, how would I recognize myself?

I really am the coolest girl in the world. Except when I’m not.

I’m lying down on the grass under a fig tree. For a moment I find myself easing into the ground, relaxing. Then: a dull thud. A rotten fig drops beside me. I look up and I see the plump, heavy, figs. Author, ballerina, painter, art historian. Each one more delicious than the last. I get so overwhelmed by which one to pick that I pick none. And now the author fig lies rotten at my feet. I freeze.

This is for the creatives who want to be everything and by wanting everything you end up doing nothing.

Sylvia Plath described this feeling perfectly with the fig tree analogy. The idea that every possible future hangs in front of you, and the longer you wait, the more of them rots away sheds light on the paradox so many of us find ourselves living in. Getting easily inspired, excited and having such hunger for life would indicate a rich creative life where skills get stacked upon skills. However, the truth is often the extreme opposite: the things we consume and get inspired by, consume us right back.

But what if Plath’s tree is not only about choosing one fig before the others rot? What if some figs are not careers or titles, but experiences we can taste in smaller ways? The problem in many cases seems to be the thought that everything has to be done on such a grand scale. If I want to be a ballerina, I should be performing at the Opera House. If I grab the art historian fig, I need to have a PhD in art history. No wonder we find ourselves famished under the tree. Three years ago I found myself at a psychiatrist and while I was talking he kept nodding, taking notes, facing his computer. He then lifted up his face, turned to face me and asked, “How would you describe your daily life in a sentence?” “I’m just rotting away”, I said. “I’m afraid that’s all I’ll ever do.”

That was not all I ended up doing. I’ve now started my third year in therapy and my therapist sometimes says: “We cannot lengthen our lives but we sure can broaden them.” And during these years I’ve found some really good ways to broaden my life without getting overwhelmed by the doors that I have to close by choosing something else. Because I realized I don’t have to close any doors.

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Coming back to the fig tree, I one day sat down and drew my own. I urge you all to do the same. Each fig represented something I want to become. Not every fig was as big and delicious looking as the others, but they were all something I surely would like to have a bite of. Looking at the final fig tree left me inspired but also filled me with horror: How could I ever be all of this? I felt the exhaustion of choosing creeping back trying to paralyze me and make me rot away along with the figs.

That was until at one of my university lectures, our professor took us to a museum, made us pick a few pieces that spoke to us, learn their history, and write their story from the artworks’ point of view. I got so immersed in it, analyzing, walking around a statue, taking in all its angles, that it almost slipped away from me: I’m an art historian.

I went home and took another look at my fig tree. Ballerina. I went ahead and joined the local dance club for a few beginner adult lessons. I was a ballerina. Author. I opened my laptop, opened my old Word document with my poems, and added a few more. I’ve been an author. The more I allowed myself to really get immersed in the world, the more satisfaction I felt. The life that felt so out of reach was now mine. Even if only for a day. Not professionally. Not permanently. But for those hours, I entered the life I thought was locked away from me.

So grab a piece of paper. Draw your own fig tree. Write down every life you wish to taste.

The branches do not grow as high up as you think. You don’t have to be published to experience being an author. You can reach the figs. A fig can be an afternoon, a class, a notebook, a conversation, a room you enter for a while.

Many small bites make a full stomach.

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