Hi, I’m Bear
Becoming a Professional Individual
The other day, I was doing some soul-searching, as I am wont to do on the regular, and I came to realize something.
There’s something I’ve known about myself for a long time, that has always been a core part of who I am. I have always, always, always, more than anything else, been an individual.
2015 Helsinki: who else takes pictures like this with Devin Townsend? Photo by Jana B
This started at a young age, when I liked to be defiant of norms. Whatever or whoever I liked, I wanted to be like, regardless of whether that was okay with everyone else. When I was really little, this meant my dad and brothers. I was (and still remain) very much a tomboy and I always got along better with boys.
People occasionally tried to bully me, but I didn’t really respond to bullies. None of them were ever threatening to hurt me, they were just making fun of me, ergo, who cares? There was nothing I could really do about being made fun of, so I ignored it, because that’s how I was told to deal with my older brothers. I was pretty acclimatized to being pushed around by said brothers, so no matter what kids at school did, it wasn’t worse than getting made fun of by my brothers at home, so it resulted in a bit of a “whatever” mindset if people made fun of me.
By the last two years of high school, I had actively clocked that 99% of the popular kids at school were complete and utter assholes, and wondered why on earth I would care about being popular with a bunch of people that I didn’t like or respect? So I decided to go full-form into myself. I started dressing weird (even started a few trends in my school), and even if people thought it was weird, I couldn’t care less. I hung out with other people who didn’t mind being publicly weird and we’d play loud card games in the hallways on breaks. We even managed to get some of the cool guys to like us, by being different from the basic bitches, so to speak.
2004, Red Deer: Those stickers read “touch me” and were stolen from bras at Walmart
My individuality and being myself began to be an asset to me. I liked heavy metal and I was one helluva geek, which made me a bit of a novelty—I was finally a “cool girl” and after high school, suddenly dates were lining up and the guys from high school called me “the girl I wished I had been into when I was in high school,” which I took as rather a big compliment. However, I was still very much finding who I was at that time.
In high school, I was an enigma in the sense that my best subjects were English and Biology and my worst subjects were Math and Social Studies (History), so I wasn’t even conforming to left-brain and right-brain standards. When I went to college, I did personality tests and I outright found them offensive, because the teachers would force me to pick from types that never quite seemed to fit me. If you meet me IRL for example, you’d probably be completely unsure as to whether I’m an introvert or an extrovert. Without trying, I seemed to be endlessly subverting the norm.
Eventually, after college, I was working in medical transcription (after quitting medical coding, which I hated for being too numbers-oriented) and found myself quite happy in the jobs I had that followed. I was honing my typing speed and editing skills on a daily basis, and was still pursuing my artistic endeavors in my spare time. It was a really solid system and it worked for me. But then boredom set in. Even though I found a rare, fun job that most people didn’t know existed (which worked well with my “be different” philosophy), staying put also felt boring and basic to me, so I wanted to get out and do something. I figured I’d go travel somewhere, maybe check out one of those countries that has all the metal bands I like for a while. In a moment of transcendent coincidence, someone I had been fighting with reached out to me and we made up after a fight we’d had, and she told me how she had found her way to Finland: as an Au Pair.
Fast forward 3 months later and I left my boyfriend and cozy job behind and headed over to Finland. I was still writing regularly, but I was also exploring everywhere and learning everything I could. I found myself really connected to the nature and quietness, and found it fun to go around being a bit different and provoking people (mainly by smiling at them) to see what kind of response I’d get. I was writing a whole new chapter of my opus that was completely based off the move here and I was still being very creative on the regular.
2012 Salonsaari: because I live for old ruins and Canada sure doesn’t have much like this
You see, it seems that as long as I was pursuing my own interests, I was finding my way. I managed to get a job cleaning apartments and eventually got a degree.
So, how in the hell did I end up so depressed and miserable?
Well, first of all, I took over Musicalypse.net in 2011 and started writing live reviews. This gave me an opportunity to see all of the live shows I wanted to see, which was a lot, on my crappy, nonexistent budget. By 2012, I had already taken over as Editor-in-Chief and had taken the mantle of the website onto myself. I ended up rebuilding the site, we moved to WordPress, started doing album reviews… the site began to regain its reputation as a quality English-language metal magazine and I was proud of what I was doing…
But it wasn’t me. I was trying to be professional. I was trying to be taken seriously and make good industry connections. In order to do that, my writing was professional and I had to cut out my own voice. That was normal, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t do that, that was just how professional journalism works. You write objectively and I learned how to do that.
I learned a lot from this, but in hindsight… I stopped creative writing. I didn’t work on any of my stories for years at a time. As I reflect on why this was, it’s because all of the energy that I put into writing went into the website. Even after the merge with Tuonela Magazine, I was still dedicating an enormous amount of time to something that was paying me jack shit nothing. I started to hate myself for not working on my books anymore, which created an endless cycle where nothing I do is ever good enough.
I even tried to pursue another passion, when I opened a CrossFit gym with a friend, an acquaintance, and two strangers. There, I ended up being the dumping ground for tasks no one else wanted to do, while my business partners were spending stupid amounts of money without consulting the rest of us on utterly stupid things. No one listened to my insights or ideas and the things I was doing or planning were constantly subverted by my business partners. I didn’t have a voice there at all, I was nothing. I sold my shares and shortly afterwards quit outright, and was far happier for it.
2019 Vantaa: CrossFit and yoga coaching. Photo by Mai, editing by me
In more recent years, I’ve been helping out at a local greenhouse—I love working with plants, I love doing physical work, and I love feeling validated for what a loyal and hard worker I am (even in a volunteer position), but even that is becoming really stressful for me because the work is all in Finnish and I am not able to confidently express myself when I feel like things are being done poorly or when I have an idea of how things could be done better. There was a while where I felt like, if I could have some say in how things are done, I’d like to stay working there, but I’m not sure that I even want to do that anymore, because I’m not able to express myself or take advantage of my creativity or cleverness when it comes to how things are done.
When I was 13, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was convinced that I was going to write fantasy, but after 13 Final Fantasy-like stories, I got bored of the idea of 6-8 teenagers going on an epic quest to save the world. Every fantasy story seemed to be about people saving the world from some great evil. I wondered… what if I just wrote a fantasy story about the people themselves? One where they’re just living their lives, but crazy shit still happens to them? I wanted to write something that was a bit different from what I was used to reading/playing in games.
Everything in my life has always encouraged me towards individuality. I wanted to break stereotypes around women when I was young. I went to Finland instead of all of the English-speaking or easier countries that all of my friends had traveled to. And instead of having my own children, I adopted a drugged-out and heavily abused young adult and took care of him as if he was my own. Even there, I wasn’t normal. I never did the things he expected me to do based off of how everyone else had treated him (judge, hurt, break trust), because I had figured out how to love and guide without judgment. I am proud of how well I handled him and his horrible life situation, despite my own crazies being really high at the time as well.
2022 me & my cub, RIP
Even today, I feel like everyone is desperately seeking validation for who they are by finding identity groups to suit them: are you straight or queer? Do you conform to your birth gender or do you want to exist beyond that? Are you a geek or a jock or a brain? We spend a lot of time trying to find new ways to lump ourselves together and I have always found that none of those things have ever quite suited me, because I have no interest in “fitting in.” I’m a big geek and a hippy, but I’m also a metalhead. I can be athletic when I get into a rhythm. I’m introverted most of the time, until that gets tiring and I need to go be an extrovert for a while. I’m a little bit queer, a little bit ace, and completely demi and utterly poly (in beliefs, if not practice). I don’t hard commit to any identity, because I find committing to identity groups to be limiting. No matter how much freedom identity groups pretend to offer, they always end up gate-keeping and there are always people who will tell you that you aren’t this or that enough to really count as one of them. So I responded to that by saying fuck’em and refusing to be included in their groups. It can be lonely, I won’t deny, but the people who appreciate me for being this way seem to really appreciate me, and I am grateful for those people.
I’ve always been a group-tourist, be it friend groups or identity groups. I don’t stay long for one reason or another. I believe life is all about having as many new and different experience as possible, in order to enrich my life and my art. Even the bad things that happen, that’s all just fuel for creative fire (we can’t enjoy the sun without a little rain once in a while, after all).
I don’t want to do things anyone else’s way than my own. I want to forge my own path, whatever that means and however it’s done. I will never stop pushing the envelope and encouraging people to do and try better. I believe that means starting with myself, reflecting both critically yet forgivingly on my actions and whether or not they are making the world a better or worse place. I want to live in a better world, where people are nonconformists and are free to follow their own truth, find their own beauty, and live without being in constant judgment for being “different.” I’ve been different my whole life, to the extent that even the weirdos thought I was too out there a lot of the time. But I never stop seeking those who appreciate me for who I am.
So this is my new introduction to myself. I have decided to invest in my individuality and focus on that, first and foremost! I am going to pursue that which most encourages me to be my weird ol’ self and see where that takes me.
So for everyone who doesn’t know me, and even for those who do…
Hi, I’m Bear. Thanks for being here!
2014 Stockholm: me and The Beards. Wear a beard. Be yourself. Photo by Jana B
