3. It is you who are responsible for your quests
And there's one waiting for you at the end of this newsletter
In this edition: very good Swedish signs, sleep-talking, a birthday treasure hunt, and a mission
Small content warning before we begin: there’s brief mention of eating disorders in this first section. No details, but you can skip it if you need to. Be gentle with yourself.
Two nights ago, it snowed. It was the second proper, stick-to-the-ground snow this winter.
I was travelling home from Julian’s place after our weekly movie night, and was feeling restless despite the fact that it was 1am – or perhaps because it was 1am, I find it to be a restless hour these days – and the snow piling up on the train tracks and gathering in smooth layers on the platforms lured me outside, to skip the three subway stops home and walk instead. The snowflakes were very fine, and that beautiful snow-quiet had fallen over the streets where the only thing you can hear is the crunch-crunch-crunch of your own footsteps. I took photos, and kept stopping to just look at things, familiar things, the same things as always but just covered in snow. I miss the snow. I miss Sweden. I miss the late nights at the bus stop among the trees, dry air, streetlamps, and snow and snow and snow. Snow will always be Sweden, will always be that last semester in Uppsala – and the first one.
The first thing I noticed in when I moved into the student housing at Rackarbergsgatan, back in September of 2013, was the notice beside the door. It’s still my second-favourite* Swedish sign, a list of all the house rules for the little five-bedroom flat, which finished with these words:
There are precious seconds in our lives when, caught off-guard, we will believe in better and more beautiful realities before our inner fact-checker sets in and corrects the typos or other small mistakes we’ve encountered. I stood in front of this sign and re-read the words “It is also important to remember that it is you who are responsible for your quests” several times, soaking up that philosophy and feeling the thrill of it in my veins, and actively fought off the tiny proofreader voice saying “pretty sure that’s meant to be a ‘g’, pal” when it finally piped up. It is you… who are responsible… for your quests. Fuck yeah! Don’t wait for the Lady of the Lake to hand you a sword, you go out and forge your own Excalibur. Take the responsibility for your destiny into your own hands. Thank you for the daily reminder, Studentstaden!
So anyway, walking home in the snow two nights ago felt important for a couple of reasons. I’ve been thinking slightly too often this winter about how any snowfall from now on might be the last one thanks to the warming climate, and I’d better savour every single flake I can get. I don’t think that’s a super unreasonable thought to have in this day and age, but it’s also part of this scarcity mindset I built into my brain in my early twenties, moving cities and countries every four to six months, that shifted me from someone who spent way too long resisting impulse and weighing up the pros and cons of various opportunities to someone who just went and did the thing!! Because time is so short!! You won’t have this place or these people for very long!! And you’ll look back and regret it if you don’t!! It is you who are responsible for your quests!!!
We train our brains in such interesting ways to fit the needs and narratives of our lives. I’d trained myself to resist impulse in my late teens, to help myself save money for the year I was going to spend abroad (good! useful!) and also because I developed an eating disorder at 19 thanks to some catastrophically bad medical advice (extremely not useful! symptomatic of some distressing broader societal problems!). When I finally got to Göttingen two years later, I quickly realised I was going to have to change the way I thought about things if I was going to make friends and be included in the adventures everyone was having. Part of it was simply changing the direction of my anxieties (from “Self-discipline will give you control, and control is freedom!” to “Push your boundaries or you won’t get all the in-jokes and you will be very uncool and alone!”) and that’s, well, that’s a whole thing we don’t have time to unpack right now. But part of it was also discovering the liberating, luxurious feeling of holding the course of my life entirely in my own hands, away from the imagined preconceptions of anyone I’d known up to that point, and even away from my own past self.
In the days before I left Australia that year, in 2011, I was staying at my mother’s house while I packed up and stored all my belongings. I slept on a mattress on the floor of her room, which meant that we’d often fall asleep talking, which meant that one night Mum started sleep-talking in the middle of the night, apparently carrying on a dreamed conversation she’d been having with me for some time. She didn’t know about the eating disorder at the time – I’d kept it a secret, and we wouldn’t have that conversation until some eight months later, on the other side of the world, hungover and sitting in a train between Groningen and Berlin – but her subconscious had definitely internalised all the signs because I woke to her saying, very clearly but still fully asleep, “… and you’re going to be in Europe, honey, you know, and you should just, you should be able to eat whatever you want.”
“What?” I asked, groggily. Silence. “Mum?” She mumbled something, sighed, and turned over. I sat up, and looked at her. There is something so tender and powerful about the moment you realise someone has seen more of you than you’d thought.
So part of the re-training of the self was learning to listen to and to feed my hunger, not just for food but for experiences, for places, for days and nights and people and dancing and questionable choices, for something different. For night-time snow walks. For new quests.
The View from the Hill
I’ve been carrying on a conversation for some weeks now with my friend Dorian about friend-groups, the people that form the regular patterns of our lives: he, like me, is very interested in building those groups, and working out how to sustain them. But what I’ve also been grappling with recently is how they change and break apart and take different shapes, and what that means. I tend to throw myself into the task of group-building with great enthusiasm: forming group chats, documenting everything with my camera and uploading the photos to shared platforms, organising dinners and trips and picnics, shaping the shared narrative. But the amount of effort I invest in that side is proportional to the amount of distress I feel when things come to an end.
Sometimes you can see the end coming, a long way off. In Erasmus-world, the realm of international exchange students enjoying 90% hedonism and (at most) 10% academia, time is split into semesters that neatly section off the months you’ll have to spend with a certain group of people in a certain place. The semester ends, it’s very very sad and everyone cries a lot and makes promises they will half-keep; but it was always going to go this way, and there’s some comfort in that. It’s half the reason you all spent so much time together in the first place. Other times, things end because that is simply the way they must go, and there’s not a really good reason except that life keeps happening, and there’s not a clear end but lots of smaller endings and comings and goings, and the feeling that Something is coming up next, there will be a next thing, and you’ve got to move towards that.
The most recent Something in my life finally pulled me to Berlin four months ago, but it really started in early 2019. I remember standing up on the hill of Flensburg’s Volkspark in January with Sonja, and looking out over the harbour, and saying, “I think I need to be moving again. I need to do something new. I feel stuck.” I was going to Bolzano for a study trip in April and May.
“That’ll be good for you,” Sonja replied, “and then you’ll feel refreshed when you come back.” And her face said, you’d better come back. My life in Flensburg was filled with many wonderful people, but it revolved mainly around Sonja, Stani, and Aziz. We worked together, made plans together, spent so much time together that our conversations became so full of in-jokes and references that they were absolutely insufferable for anyone else to overhear.
In late March, the day before I left, Stani turned 28. He’d dropped some hints several months before that he really really loved treasure hunts, or things that involved following clues, so Sonja, Aziz and I spent weeks designing a quest to take him all over Flensburg. The clues were all different, some cryptic, some in verse; the first one was baked into his birthday cake. There was a message in a bottle, tethered to the old wharf. There were tiny stickers left on local graffiti. There were puzzle pieces hidden in the oven in my kitchen. It was great.
Aziz and I woke up early on the day of Stani’s birthday, to go and put the clues in place – everything made watertight, to protect them from Flensburg’s persistent Weather. We placed clues inside books in the library, hid them under benches up near the Danish school, and lifted paving stones under the water tower. On our way back down to town, we stopped on the hill in the same park – the Volkspark – and looked across the buildings.
It was 9am, and the day felt so full of good things ahead, and the morning was so peaceful, and it was just Aziz and me and the birds, and for one moment I was in three places:
there, standing on the hill;
in the next day, when I would leave for Italy;
and some distant point in the future, looking back at us there on the hill.
It didn’t make a lot of sense that this all felt so momentous, since I was only going away for two months. Why did it feel like such a big deal? I’d come back, and things would continue. I looked at Aziz, who must have seen some of that turbulence in my expression. He gestured at a nearby bench. “Hey. Look.”
The rain started at around the same time as the treasure hunt did, of course. We just packed up and left work at midday. Stani was almost vibrating with excitement from the moment he unfolded the note in the cake, even after we got stalled with a game of hangman which was supposed to reveal the name of a ship. “Girola?” he mused, tapping the pencil against his head. “Mirola? Dirola? … Dirola? Is it Dirola?”
Aziz put his hands over his face. “God, Stanislav, if you keep saying Dirola I’m going to throw you in the fjord.”
The four of us wound our way through town; past Ben’s Fischhütte, with the best Fischbrötchen in Flensburg; through Nordertor, the edge of the old city fortifications; and finally, the clue at the water tower (“We really thought it was going to take you longer to find the right paving stone”) led us down to Mariencafé, a local treasure with excellent cake and teapot-themed décor. There Stani had to decode the number-letter combinations he’d collected along the way, to find out where we were going for dinner.
With all the clues solved, Sonja had one last surprise for the others. I knew what was coming: “I’m pregnant.”
As I watched them all exclaiming with excitement, Stani and Aziz piling hugs on Sonja and toasting with their teacups, I felt it again – the feeling I’d had on the hill. Of seeing the full magnificence of the ties that bind us, the intricate, unfathomable threads of love. Of knowing that things will and must change. Of feeling that beginnings and endings are the same thing.
All of the goodbyes and returns we’ve had since then pale in comparison with the day that followed: I cried in the team-building workshop we had at work that day, alarming our colleagues, I cried on the trip home, I cried in the carpark outside my house, clutching them to me. It’s been almost two years since that day. As of tomorrow, the first of February, I don’t work in Flensburg anymore; my contract is ended, the next chapter has started, and I don’t really know what it’s going to bring.
____
All of this was running through my head last weekend when I said, “The thing about friendship groups is that they never stay the same, they just can’t. You can’t control it even if you want to.”
Dorian, washing dishes at the sink, turned to me. “That sounds pretty fatalistic when you say it like that.”
I paused, surprised. “I don’t mean to be discouraging. I still wouldn’t do it differently, I’d still put all my energy into the same goal – it’s more than worth it.”
Sonja’s sending photos to our group chat of her daughter wandering around their home out near the woods. Aziz and I trade links featuring dogs and music and capybaras with our friend Anita. Stani sends me recipes and updates on his family. Our quest-paths diverge for a while. They’ll come back together before too long, in one form or another.
A Treasure
With this idea half-written in my head already, it was a nice surprise that my very wise and wonderful friend McKinley Valentine also had some thoughts to share on the topic of communities and the way they change and end in the latest edition of her newsletter The Whippet. Listen – for most of you this isn’t first time I’ve recommended The Whippet, and it sure won’t be the last – go subscribe. It’s the best thing in my inbox.
She also then sent me this link, passed on to her by one of her readers, which is about a beautiful concept called ichi-go ichi-e.
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It
If your daily lockdown walks (or normal walks, or normal life, did you hear they have that in Australia and New Zealand now? Wild.) need a bit more of a purposeful feel to them, if the main narrative of your life could use a little variety, I have great news: I, like this ILLUMINATED DEER I saw last year, have a pleasant side-quest for you.
I’m going to give you some Quest Items to collect, by way of taking a photograph of them. Please do not actually collect (“steal”) public or private property in order to send it to me. Here they are:
A small masterpiece
Work in progress; a transformation
An important message
A secret garden
Lyrics from a song that was never written
A really really nice window
A collection; a hoard; a treasure trove
Something delicious
You can send your photos (along with which item they represent, and any accompanying explanation or story you’d like to give) to me by replying to this email, or – if you’re reading this in the browser – by emailing me at figsforbreakfast@substack.com and using the subject line “Quest Items”.
REWARDS AWAIT: If you send me five Items or more, I’ll paint you a little postcard and send it back to you as a thank you. I really, really love receiving other people’s stories and things, your comments and replies always make me so happy, so there’s no time limit on this for the moment.
*By the Way
My favourite Swedish sign is this one, at Arlanda Airport:
It’s also reflective of my relationship with snow as soon as it’s the next day, and it’s melted and hardened again and turned every non-gravelled pathway into a death trap, and me into a collection of unwieldy limbs. I’ve already slipped over twice in the space of 24 hours. Classic stuff, love to attract the attention of passers-by to my total ineptitude, it’s the same literally every winter. But I still love you, snow! Please come back next year too!!
Thanks for accompanying me on this little quest. Let me know if there’s something you’d like to read more of in future issues, or tell me about your own quests (and responsibility for them!) in the comments:
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