A photo that my teacher was in class in seventh grade. The shirt can be glimpsed one Malma school's logo.
It is 26 years since I moved from Kolsva, the summer after seventh grade. My parents divorced and I ended up in Skåne, in Sjöbo. Two months before the resort - with Sven-Olle Olsson at the head - began to disclose its position on the issue of refugees. For many, many years later I avoided actually saying to people that I lived or had lived in Sjöbo, it became ever so many questions and comments and insults. I had nothing with which public opinion to do. Just because "Sjöbo spirit" became a media terms, this meant not that it existed in my everyday life. Sjöbo which place I liked, anyway, and I liked it even kinder.
I thought it was pretty nice to start over in Sjöbo. Being able to apply to all the old baggage from the time of Kolsva. I had a little bit at a dead end in the small Västmanlandia ironworks community. Such dead ends, I also later in life come across and found it nice to every now and then start over. But now it's a long time since I felt so later.
In working with my standup show "The hunt for gold star" I have been trying to get back to Mattias from that time in the mid 80's and feel what I felt then. It has proved a bit tricky. I have for so many years painted an adult and unqualified view of how my mellanstadietid and early högstadietid was. I've had my hang ups in those days, especially the fact that I was bullied. That the picture is not the whole truth, I have begun to understand only now. And it was insanely nice to sort out much of the show. Believe not that the show is some kind of bullying story. Not at all. Rather, I loved middle school and I have on several previous occasions on this blog talked about how that time shaped me into who I am today. Like so much else in life it is all a bit complicated.
But whether I was subjected to bullying or not, gave birth to what I felt when a revenge on me. A driver who gradually became self-generating, it became a part of me and brought me forward. Then came the revenge which the desire to increasingly merge with my confirmation needs. And now I have no need for revenge.
Though it's not entirely true. Ever since moving from Kolsva I have wished that the children of that era - they're now around 40 all of them - would know the success I have since had in life. It's an incredibly silly and skämmig feeling. Such, I should not tell. But if there's anything I learned in the show, it's how good it is to undress the skämmiga. Just out with it, so I will not have to go and bear it in silence.
Probably had I not had these feelings if I had continued to live in Kolsva and seen the other kids at school growing up alongside me. Somehow I locked the memories and feelings at a particular time and place. I had almost no contact with Kolsva after the move, so it was easy to keep the memories remain unchanged and unaffected by subsequent events. If I had continued to grow up with my classmates so surely had the memory of the middle ages had faded and been replaced by other, later memories involving the same people.
It does not happen very often nowadays, but in at least two decades greeted classmates from middle school to me occasionally in my dreams. No unpleasant dreams, but just ordinary dreams that needed to be populated. And apparently there were childhood classmates remain close to hand in my subconscious. When I started growing up, they were classmates in dreams too. Some sort of overgrown versions of their children's faces. And this was long before Facebook, so I really had no more control over how they looked. It was my subconscious extrapolated guesses.
But it is with Facebook that this bag starts tied together. I have for so long been curious about what happened to those old classmates. And in the absence of revenge, so I feel today, just a frank joy to them, even against the few who could sometimes make life difficult for me at the time. They were just kids then - and I certainly was not easy to understand. I've begun to realize ...
So now when I rediscover classmates from that time on Facebook so it is with a strange feeling, a mixture of total input and a kind of joy just to see pictures of them. I have not started to add the re-discovered yet - maybe they just remember me - for them, maybe I'm just a vague person who moved away and was no longer a part of their lives. Or dreams.
But I would probably like to add some of them. Although we no longer have the slightest thing in common, they present to me a lost contact with my own childhood. And because we have not seen or talked, for so many years, it is where the contact is unspoiled.
Middle School formed me for better or worse for the person I am today. And I so want to keep and strengthen the memories of those years, in order to further understand who I am and why I became who I was.
Or is it just a 40-midlife crisis.
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Hello Mattias,
Very well written. I've done a bit of the same thing, looking but not added. In that case, I feel even after a few reunions that from my side is so much interest.
The film with Björn Kjellman about class reunion is very apt in this context.
Fine.
(And since I've seen the show will be extra emphasis in the text.)
Henry: The difference is perhaps that you and classmates grew apart. It is quite natural, it has been for me on both middle school and high school. But the school friends I grew never get away from - I stayed in the plant. My relationship with them is still on the same level as when I left school at Malma summer closure 1985th Of course I am a wiser person now and safer in many ways, so it is of course not with a child's thoughts I look at them now. Yet, 26 years is missing. 26 years, not replaced with another image of the same people. I've never been to a class reunion with them, because I never went out ninth grade with you. And I have honestly never been to a class reunion at all. For many years I felt no attraction back to my high school class in Sjöbo, which, however, I felt more and more lately. High school class from Ystad, I have always wanted to meet again, but there has been no reunion. I would maybe look at Bjorn Kjellman movie at some point, if it is so aptly being said. Just to understand. And of course to my friend Trampe is included in it.
Sandra: Thank you! Yes, this was the thoughts that I had originally intended to address in the show, but I found no way to do it as briefly as needed on stage.
Exciting to read about your thoughts. To some extent I recognize myself in how you feel about your early classmates even though I graduated from ninth grade with most that I also went to school with nine years earlier. The other day I thought, indeed, that it would be fun with a reunion to see what really happened to people and yes, perhaps it is a 40 mid-life crisis or just plain curiosity.
I belonged not exactly a social outcast in school and it was therefore an incredible relief to start in high school with a whole new class. I was suddenly no longer misunderstood and I could be appreciated for who I was. The interesting thing was that some of my old classmates who were more of a social outcast in elementary school also went to the same high school and even they seemed to suddenly change their mind about me. But it shows really need to sometimes have to start over in a new context in order to come into its own. I too have felt the need to switch contexts in recent years and I simply think it is because I feel appreciated for who I am, although some occasionally certainly think that is a remarkable figure, but we offer strange shapes like on the right? :-)
http://anderssparring.blogspot.com/2007/07/jag-har-aldrig-varit-ngon-som-det-r-ltt.html
Andrew: Thanks for the link! There is something extremely interesting to look back on childhood. Although you and I had so very different upbringing as I recognize myself in the adult person's readiness to deal with himself as a child. Trying to understand itself. And to accept that it was actually the way it was. You just have to throw away their blinders.
Fredrik: I started on the Sjöbo. It was quite a short time, but in some ways was the high school out. I started of in Ystad in high school. It kept it longer, before my own weaknesses caught up with me. I started on the army. It was not at all. I started on the Economics of Lund. It went on for some great new fronts. I have in life started over and started over - at chess camp in middle school, on a language course in England and with project after project. Nowadays I do not because my weaknesses are evident, but because I can not extract more confirmation of that particular area. But, sometimes when I'm feeling extra weak or wrong, then it lies there dangerous temptation and gnaws at me: "Start over, start over! So everything will work out! "It always goes over. But that is my safety valve on the day as needed.
Bullies are good at focusing on individuals with integrity, glad it went well for you in life and that you can reflect on what happened to you. I was also bullied at school in different ways, but it strengthened me and gave me a fighting spirit. Today feels like that period in life, school life, as waking dreams, but everything went well for me, something I have taken the opportunity to tell former classmates who remain in their local community with their prejudices and boring life.
Hello! As nice as you write about something so important. Which affects so many!
Walter: past, I have not talked much about bullying. The bullying I ran into was nothing compared to what many other bullying victims suffered. It had probably more to do with that I was a bit special as a child and did not fit into the usual form, and I liked to pamper myself. I suffered in part of it, while it constantly ran by me and did not affect me that much. I'm not crazy about it.
Susanne: Thank you! You go and think that things like this just for oneself, when there really are many who recognize themselves.