POV: You submit your thesis, pack your bags and move to Helsinki (via the arctic)
Helsinki Haze, the central train station at dusk.
It’s been 2 weeks since I left Edinburgh and 11 days since I arrived in Helsinki. I spent the best part of my 20s in Edinburgh, immersed in the world of medical anthropology. I learnt to dance, weathered the pandemic, fell in love, was heartbroken, fell in love again, found god, found friends (same thing), made art, wrote a thesis, built a home, built a life. I moved into my flat in Shandon in November 2020, deciding to live alone for the first time as yet another lockdown loomed. It was terrifying, it was liberating.
5/1 Shandon place was the first true home that I made for myself and I went to bed every night feeling incredible gratitude for it. Being an academic with precarious funding (a PhD program is 4 years, my funding was for 3) meant that although I was extremely privileged to be funded at all, I still worked several jobs alongside my PhD in order to make sure I could afford to finish. Living alone and taking sole responsibility for shouldering those costs was scary, especially given the economic climate and ongoing effects of the covid-19 pandemic. Despite crunching the numbers and finding them just about doable, I doubted the financial salience of my decision. I also knew that wealth cannot be measured in numbers alone. Wealth was found in the peace of my own company, in the joy of seeing myself reflected in a space, in creating a home that would nourish not only me, but plants, friends, family. Wealth is having a kitchen with a window and a table big enough to host the people I love. Wealth is the morning sunlight streaming in the living room window and a desk that supports my work.
Home
Something I have been learning recently is that I will never be ready to leave the people and places I love. It will never be enough. We will never have enough time together. It’s why the moments we do have are so precious. Since I left home, I hadn’t lived anywhere as long as I lived there. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to leave Edinburgh. But if I wait till there is an ‘enoughness’, if I resist change, I don’t think that is really living either. It doesn’t make space for anything or anyone new.
So I took a leap of faith.
I have been given a fantastic opportunity to join the University of Helsinki as a postdoctoral research at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes and the Finnish Multidisciplinary Center of Excellence in Antimicrobial Resistance Research. The first order of business? Attend the Nordic AMR Conference in Tromsø.
The northern lights above Tromsø.
Tromsø harbour.
Descending into Tromsø at sunset is indescribably beautiful. Stress and heartache cannot stand for long in the face of such breathtaking splendour as the dusky mountains provide. And suddenly, I am in a new world. One that is slippery underfoot and demands to be felt even through layers of woolen protection. I spent days watching presentations and talking with scientists dedicated to figuring out how to tackle the problem of antimicrobial resistance. There are so many ways to know the world, genomics, bioinformatics, organic chemistry, microbiology, mathematics, ethnography. Even after submitting my thesis and being a part of these discussions for the last 6 years, I am still trying to find my place and contribution amidst it all.
Inside the Tromsø Museum of the Arctic.
Iona by the museum
I visited the museum of the Artic on my last day in Tromsø after the conference had wrapped up. It was an unsettling place, documenting how humans had explored, hunted and lived in this region of the Artic. It was a heavy reminder of how many species and ecosystems depend on human action (or in-action). The responsibilities we hold. Mostly, it seems, humans have killed and disrupted non-human life and almost killed themselves in the process. I am left with questions that feel more urgent after attending both the conference and visiting the museum.
My new academic home in Helsinki!
How do we make homes for ourselves in inhospitable places? Can we reevaluate wealth so that it costs our planet less? Who are our kin? How will we know them when we meet them?
And now I am here in Helsinki. In this new place. It is mostly grey, mostly cold. I feel mostly alone. The clouds have descended and they have not yet lifted. But yesterday, the gently falling snow smelt like spring.