Camilla Hanve photographs women for her project on the theme ”SCARS and HEALING” which will be exhibited this spring. I was asked to join. Because I've written a blog before about having breast cancer and it's also written in my book The Destroyer, I thought ok, maybe it doesn't matter that I'm in it. It's not so private anymore. And apparently the photos have already had meaning for others who will be scarred, or have it. My scar is now decorated with a blossoming apple branch. Because if ”the world is ending tomorrow, plant an apple tree today.”
I am happy about the beautiful tattoo that Jens Bergström at Heavenly Ink has drawn and tattooed. It was important to me, I realize more and more. With this apple branch, I have said the last word, after a total of eight operations since 2006.
The day Camilla photographed me, there was a lot of giggles and play among lace and veils and shawls in the environment we had chosen. Besides, we had long said that we would toast in a glass of champagne for life, to despite adversity, sorrows , diseases and other challenges that are part of the human experience, one continues, with the flag waving as high as you can. And if you are lucky enough to be good at marveling at what is beautiful, which is poetry, which is joy and deeply recharges one's spark of life and strength almost every day. To have the ability to marvel at the greatness of life, which usually manifests itself in the so-called small, is now considered one of the prerequisites for a good life. Like exercise and good food. It is an art to cherish. If you don't know it, you can practice it. For my own part, I have always been able to. And through life it has been refined. It makes one very grateful, and quite cheerful.
That joy rests, of course, on the realization of impermanence and fragility. Ingenting är självklart. Of the years when the destroyer, the person Sam with psychopathic disorder, used all his typical psychopathic behaviors to get over what he wanted and try to crush me – I learned that freedom is a stretchable concept. And that the most important freedom, which is the basis of all freedom, was not something I had reflected on before. But as I now experienced. The freedom to meet others, and not least the ones you love, as himself. The freedom to have access to one's own thoughts. The freedom to trust one's perception. The freedom to still understand words correctly. The freedom to trust your logic. The freedom to move. The freedom to be able to look into another person's eyes for a long time without being forced to break contact, for fear of breaking. And if you fall short, you are subject to revenge.
But our psyche is remarkable , like our body : we have life, so we want to live. It has little to do with anything other than that we have the impersonal but eternal LIFE within us.
As long as we can have it.
But I cannot speak for everyone and all the indescribably brutal suffering people inflict on others. and in many situations in people's lives nothing of what can be called good exists, and to claim it would be idiotic. A long time ago I read Erich Fromm, which I loved to read, and in the book ” Is man evil or good?” he writes that everything we can imagine of evil has already happened. I found it so terribly terrifying. It's horrible. Then I was just over 20, and believed that humans wanted to evolve, always strive for the best for everyone, basically acted on my own high ideals. It's not like that. Indescribable evil exists in parallel, and comes out of others – with life.
That includes people with psychopathic personality disorders. We see them ruling the lives of millions of people – varje dag. And in a few days it will be a year since we were forced to realize the devastation of such power, close up. We don't know the outcome.
In addition to Camilla Hanve's photo project, I have put together a talk about the Destroyer ,i.e. the book that I wrote to spread knowledge about psychopathic behavior after I suffered from it, a psychological violence like most of us, including myself, never thought could happen to me.
But I have given up on that project – almost! Det går inte. Det är för mycket, too many layers, too many dimensions, and too many facts I want to convey, at the same time as I want to convey something of what the book describes, that is, how it slowly, bit by bit could happen. It is interesting and important to describe. I have had a few suggestions now and they do work well, and sometimes I get heartfelt thanks as if I've done something important, but I myself feel that it is … so there. I never wrote the book to put myself in the center. My experience was the tool to be able to describe an event like this from the inside. But during lectures, it becomes as if I were myself – as well as ME – shopping in a center I don't want to be in, as if I am speaking of this to arouse sympathy, or because I imagine it was so special. And then I feel that the purpose of everything ends up a bit skewed.
Maybe it was enough that I wrote the book. It was hell but it is very useful, just as i hoped. Until today, almost 2.000 people wrote to me and thanked me for it. It has helped many who have experienced similar psychological violence, and it has helped others to understand how it can be done. Something that is very difficult to understand. As I write in the book ” if you think you're going safe, you're already a promising and enticing prey” It is important that the silence around the psychological violence – and not least around the charged topic of psychopathic personality disorders – is lifted . Behind the silence and shaming, the ridicule of the victim ( som ” deceived by a clown” och ” idiot” and other toxic language ) There is a lot of room for violence. Knowledge about this must be spread. By shaming the victims, you go the perpetrators' business. In addition, you believe yourself to be someone who walks safely.
Now the premiere of the play ÖDELÄGGAREN is approaching, written by Lisa Lindén based on the book. Maria Kulle, one of our most amazing actors, is on stage and Karin Kickan Holmberg directs. The National Theater produces and the play will visit 33 locations in Sweden during the spring.
By pure coincidence, the play premiered exactly nine years ago when my ex-husband and I went to the police station on Wolmar Yxkullsgatan in Södermalm with our 24 pages thick notification.
Nine years later; premiere at Årsta Folkets Hus on 24 februari.
As life weaves things together. No dramatist surpasses life.
Jag läser boken och kan knappt lägga den ifrån mig. Känner igen väldigt mycket.. Beskriver så bra in i minsta detalj .
En stor hjälp….Tack
Tack, heartily, jag är glad att den är til stor hjälp, det var precis därför jag tvingade mig att skriva boken. Jag tror att den har hjälpt många nu och det är jag innerligt tacksam för. Att den har nått fram. Tack.