The Storm

 

Tablo reader up chevron

Chapter 1

In April 18 2005 on a rainy monday a woman came in a fast moving vehicle and pulled up to the driveway of BB Danderyd hospital. Out of the car came a tall man that looked like he was going to faint but he was trying to stay calm so he could gently help the woman out of the car. That woman is my mom and that man is my dad but they didn't know that yet. After 6 hours a little girl came into the world and took her first breath and screamed, that girl was me but she had no idea what life was waiting for her. Only a few months after I was born a huge storm called Katrina came and impacted thousands of lives but that was just the beginning of me taking the world by storm. Storm is not the only thing I will take on with life but it is like a metaphor or more like a summary of everything that is going to happen. Have you ever thought about how a storm’s behavior is pretty similar to challenges you face in your own life. Everything can be and feel cathotic until you find it, until you find that key to the eye of the storm, the peace, the solution. You won't always find that key which can make things seem impossible so you will just have to wait out the storm. Grief is a good example of that because there is nothing you can do to bring a person back and your feelings will always be there so then you just have to wait until you have found a way to deal with it so you can go on with your life but it will take a while.   

When I was a little girl I would quite often hangout with my grandma and she was like a best friend to me. She would often go and get me in kindergarten and she would always come with a bouquet of flowers that she had picked herself then we would go home and put them in a special vase that had beautiful inscribed flower that I still use today, we made that a tradition. By doing that I learned how to appreciate the small things in life, it’s not about what it is, it’s more about the thought and the feelings behind it and I love her for that. When we were home we would always, always play a game called find the key. It went like this, grandma would go and hide the key and then I asked,”Is it a bird, fish or medium?”, to find out about what height the key was hidden on and then I started searching and she would say hotter and hotter if I was closer and colder and colder if I was further away. I loved that key but we had to switch the key to a toy because grandma would sometimes forget where she put them, but it was still such a blast. 


On the summer vacations we would always go to a place in Västmanland called Hörken. There we stayed at my mother's uncle Henry and his wife Gunnel in a beautiful house in the middle of the woods. What I liked about the house was that it was not the biggest or the most modern but it had such a welcoming feeling and I can still today just feel that beautiful wooden smell when I walk through the mosquito net into the house. In the daytime we would go out for chanterelles or berries like blueberries or lingonberries or even cloudberries that we called, the forest’s gold. There were plenty of them so we would always eat chanterelles for dinner and the adults would always drink bloody mary and play a card game called Bridge. For lunch we would eat homemade jam to Henry’s leaf thin pancakes that he used a secret recipe for and they were delicious. Besides that me and Henry had a yearly tradition of a competition we called,”Big throw with little toe”, and we had so much fun and I will always remember that, it’s unforgettable! 

To be in a place like that felt like your soul was healing from all the stress in the real world. It was just a magical place because it was really calming and you were there day in and day out and just did fun things and hanging out with your relatives. I remember this one time were we were on our way to the house with our car and from out of nowhere my sister said, “Stop the car, stop it!”, my dad that was driving got a bit surprised but stopped the car and my sister said, “Look!”, and was  pointing to the side of the road. When we looked we saw a huge clear-cut filled with wild raspberry bushes, we all got out of the car, and we got each a bowl to put the raspberries in. We picked the wild raspberries for about a half an hour and there were no caterpillars or any other bug in the raspberries and raspberries were so big, red and just perfect. After half an hour of picking we got 12 liters of fresh wild raspberries! We just went straight home and started making our own jams, we had jam for the whole summer, that’s such a memorable moment of my life because I remember how we talked about it for days and we were so happy, so happy! Happy is a thing that I strive after because if you’re happy for all the things in life that are positive then that positivity will overcome all the negativity and you will be able to spread positivity to others which I think is such an important thing as a human to do.


    When I was 6 years old, my school life started. From six years to third grade I went at a school called Saltängen, my school was right down the hill from my house and it took about two minutes to go. When I started school my parents really wanted me to have a good feeling about school and they also wanted me to be a kid. Saltängen was not the most educating school but it was really educating for a kid’s mindset and friend relationships. In saltängen I got to be a little kid, I played in the woods, had a little boyfriend, climb trees, play sports, hang out with my friend and so much more. I thought school was fun, I even thought that every single subject was fun and interesting and I had just such a good feeling from school. During the breaks both the girls and the boys in the class would play together in the woods and build our own treehouses. It was really fun and we got to be really creative, we would build our own restaurant, bakery, hotel, farm and just so much more. We would build all of our tree houses from scratch which really improved my mindset because if something didn't work or if we didn't have a certain material we would always find a way. I even remember this one time when we were making stick swords and we didn’t have a rope to tie it together so we used actual roots and it worked!

In August of 2015 it was time to leave all my friends and walk right out of my comfort zone, it was time to start at a new school. That school was called IESN and it was the greatest decision of my life, but I didn’t know that yet. I remembered that day when I was about to walk into the school with my mother and I was so nervous that it felt like my stomach had turned inside out a million times. I was nervous of not getting any friends, not understanding anything, not being on the same level as everybody else and that I would lose contact with my old friends. When they called out the classes I had a couple of people from my old class but I didn’t get in the same class as any of them! I thought it was over, that it was my death sentence but however I actually started to change. I was not changing in a bad way, I was changing for the better, already the first days I had my first friends and even though I did not understand a single word after a couple of months that started to change as well. That had taught me that you sometimes have to get into uncomfortable situations to be able to succeed with what I want. If you always stay inside your comfy zone then you can’t experience anything new so that’s why I always strive to test different things and not taking everything so serious. By being here in IESN I have not only learned a lot of things I have also got a lot of new wonderful friends that I didn’t even know existed before. IESN has got me a really big opportunity to choose what I want to be later on. They have not given me the easy ticket to success because that is no other than me that can do that, but they have given me the opportunity. By being here I have also grown as a person which has made me to fight for things that I want, they have taught me to not give up. When I started here my sister has had perfect grades which made me very stressed out. I started to push myself to make everything perfect so I could be at the same level as her because I didn’t want to be the bad sister, the bad daughter. In everything I did I would compare myself to her and my parents told me not to, that I should just focus on me but that was really hard to do since she was so successful. I started to really stress but I tried to hide it from my family but in seventh grade, something wonderful happened. I realized that I could do all my hard work just for me and just be the best version of myself and really do my best. This was such a relief, I could work just because I wanted to be better for myself and not for anyone else. It can still be hard to not compare myself but most of the time I will do it for me.

    Three main things I’ve learned in my life so far is the most minor things that has made the biggest impact. I would say that it is to find solutions, not the errors, always try to find a source of happiness instead of thinking on the negatives, do things for yourself, not anybody else because it wont give you luck in the long term.

For the future there are plenty of things that I want to do but the main thing that I will strive after is to keep growing as a human being.


Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...
~

You might like Lova Walter's other books...