Well, this is pretty much my whole life story starting from 2000.
I was pretty lonely and got depressed, although I was probably already depressed in the end of the 90s. I've been trying to find my place. Summer of 2000 was the confirmation camp, before that was a questionnaire about what we expected from the camp and I was the only one who checked the box "expecting to find faith" or something like that. Well I didn't quite find it. I was disappointed, I was hoping for some sort of a religious relevation and it never came. During the camp the youth instructors went to pray together after evenning mass and said anybody is welcome to join them, but when the others went straight to our cabin to play cards, I went with them, I didn't want to stand out as a weirdo because I was already different enough. My best friend was sleeping in the same cabin as me, as well as two other girls. Originally the two worst bullies from my class were going to the same camp but they switched to another camp. I'm glad they did. I think there were only 6 girls on the whole camp and all the rest were guys. Someone asked for my autograph in a sort of a yearbook on the last day when we were going home.
2001 we were supposed to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives. I wanted to work in a library, so originally I should've gone to commercial college but my best friend was going to upper secondary school so I applied there because I didn't want to be alone. We ended up on different classes and she made new friends. My class didn't have very good team spirit, there were some weirdos and mostly people who didn't stand out as having a particular personality. I think I can only remember the name of one of my classmates at the moment. One of the best things in upper secondary school was French class, even though I wasn't good at it but it was a very small group. My English teacher was weird but funny. She tried to teach me to look people in the eyes. The only difficult part about English class was that I was better than all the other students so when we had to practice things as pairs, I always ended up with someone who didn't know most of the words.
I was talking to a psychiatric nurse weekly during the three years of upper secondary school. I had ten years worth of bullying to process so it took a long time. I hadn't had a proper mental puberty because it didn't feel safe to rebel against my parents when home was more of a safe place than school, so I only became a teenager when I was already 18. I found my first love online, was too clingy and blew it, got obsessed with getting him back and ended up in a mental hospital for 6 weeks. That was actually a good experience. I could do things like puzzles, knitting and crocheting, talking to people, painting, watching a lot of TV and helping with arranging the evening snack. It gave me a chance to notice I can survive without my parents. The most difficult part was limited online time. I used to play a CHARP and had my own FARP but had to take a break from both of them, when I think I was only allowed to go online an hour a week and that was only enough to reply to emails and delete hundreds of spam messages.
I graduated at the same time with the rest of the class even though my nurse at the hospital didn't think I'd be up to it. My English teacher recommended that I should apply for translator training. The test was pretty challenging and I didn't do too well although I did get invited to an interview. That didn't go too well either. When the final results came, I think I was on place 30-something on the waiting list, which meant that in order to get in, everybody who got selected and a whole class full of second options would've had to decline before I'd gotten in. I applied for two folk high schools, the first one didn't receive enough applications that year to start a class but I got into the second one, to study art. I had fun there but I was mostly working alone in the afternoon after the others had gone home or to the dorm, I stayed up all night in the computer class and slept past noon. I could've done better but still, it was the best year of my life. The class was roughly divided into the smokers and the non-smokers, I was in the smokers and managed to chat with people even though I didn't make close friends with anyone. Also there was this one guy who sometimes showed up at the computer class, I think he was studying either Finnish or English and he was a total nerd. He introduced me to stuff like wikipedia, Flash cartoons and the dance pad. (Btw I just got a dance pad for Christmas, after 4-5 years of waiting
) Then there was this other guy who sometimes asked me for company when he went smoking if he couldn't find anyone else, and he talked about his own stuff while I mainly listened, but I liked having some company. At the end of the semester was a trip to London, which was my first time abroad, and it was quite an experience. There's a topic about it somewhere here on the forums. As some might remember, most of the time I spent in the downstairs of a Burger King, playing Cantr XD The last night I hooked up with a stranger for sex and that was a bit of a shocking experience but at least I didn't get an STD or end up pregnant. I haven't had real sex ever since.
I got interested in the job of a bio analyst although it would generally involve taking blood tests, so it's probably good that I didn't get selected. I still remember some of the stuff from the book I was required to study for the exams. I took an exam in two different towns and applied for three different schools but didn't have enough of a score to get into any of them. According to the psychological test, my stress handling skill wasn't developed enough, which was probably true. I remember the test asking to write down if something not related to the test was troubling me that day and I wrote about how my character's boyfriend had just gotten kidnapped by pirates. The fourth program I applied for was software engineering and I think I got the fourth highest score in the entrance exam, so I got in easily (although everybody who was qualified got in, they had so little applicants). In the beginning I did well but I was staying up too late, mostly playing Cantr and chatting with people so I couldn't get out of bed in the mornings. I was skipping a lot of class, dropping courses and finally when others were doing their final year projects, I didn't even have half the necessary credits and some of the courses I'd dropped weren't arranged anymore. Eventually I dropped out. I was lead to believe I could get unemployment benefit easily, but since I was under 25 and not ill enough to explain failing at my studies, I had to go to social services for money. Fortunately that worked out.
Since I had been working as a dishwasher for a couple of summers, I felt like I could do more on the restaurant field, so first I applied for adult education, but didn't get selected to continue after the two weeks evaluation period, so then I applied for college with my high school papers and got in. Later it turned out that I wouldn't have been actually qualified since I had a certificate from upper secondary school, but since I had already been studying for months and no one had challenged my enrollment, the school is not going to kick me out. I think I was doing pretty good although 3/4 of the grades I got this semester were bad, but I don't think I was all that bad. Maybe it's because I didn't mark down all the tasks I finished and because I was absent several times.
