Sometimes I feel like I’m living two lives. One in Brussels, where I moved almost five years ago with the thought that it would be only for a moment, just a step in a five-year plan before returning to Finland. And the other in my hometown, which feels both familiar and distant at the same time. I didn’t imagine that Brussels would hold me for this long, yet here I am, not ready to leave.
Whenever I go back to my hometown – twice a year at the height of summer and winter – I fall into a rhythm that feels both comforting and strange. My family and friends insist that everything has remained the same, but I see new buildings, new chapters in their lives, and new faces (in Grindr too). It always surprised me how they claim things are unchanged while life clearly moves on. And then I wonder what changes in my life go unnoticed, blurred by the constant movement between two places?
As a gay man, I am familiar with being in between, this liminal space where you’re never one thing or another, never fully fitting into the expectations people set for you. I’ve made peace with that, but its legacy has made me creative. Lately I realize more ways I hold myself back, traps that fool me repeatedly and new masks of my own making.
At my new workplace last year, I built a new identity for myself. A professional, credible man in the corporate world. It worked for a while since I had a sense of importance and stability, but I also feel like I forced myself to another mask, hiding behind it and giving way too much of myself to one direction. My ego wants to hold onto masks. But it’s also blinding me from what else could be possible if I would let down my cover and look around. I would like to be more abundant: not only the work persona, but a loved one and giver.
I’m trying now not only to live in between place, but myself and my many variations. To let go of the stubborn need for control over who I should be. To give room for other sides of myself to manifest in the moment, naturally. To redirect myself more of towards things that I hold dear like community and connection. It’s not easy but maybe there are more possibilities to do so than I dared to notice.
