14/15

Happy New Year!!!

To celebrate the past year I picked some of my favourite outfits I've posted. Fashion has always been a way to express myself in ways words never could and it is part of who I am. I don't think what I wear defines me but rather reveals my mood, inspiration and state at the moment. Looking back at what I wore reminds me of what was going on that day/week because I really do wear my heart on my sleeve.

New Year is always associated with everything new. People are eager to start new ways of living, making New Years resolutions on how they're going to change, grow and do things they always dreamed of. I think it's great to plan the year, set goals and start working towards them. Unfortunately, a lot of those resolutions don't seem to really make it past January (been there, done that). Instead of focusing on only creating a whole new me this year, I've decided to focus on what there has been since the beginning. I've been reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography (which I wholeheartedly recommend for everyone who's in any way interested in pursuing dreams of any kind, which I hope is everyone) and one day I came to a point where my frustration hit the roof. I was reading how this man, so effectively, ran after each and every dream and goal of his, and simply made them happen. What generated the frustration was that his way of living seemed to shamelessly unveil the reality of my own procrastination. Before I fell into that bottomless whole of self-pity, I was able to hear a quite, small voice reminding me of some personality tests we did in school a few years back. One of them was called the strengths finder 2.0. After answering a vast number of questions, this test reveals your five highest strengths so that instead of always focusing and pouring your energy into your weaknesses, you can actually harness your strengths and become great in those areas instead of staying mediocre in many. I had already completely forgotten my results, but was luckily able to retrieve them from my account on their website. After I began to study my strengths and read the descriptions attached to them, I was startled. My strengths were actually exactly those traits that I thought I was lacking. If that test was right and those really were the right attributes to define me, then why had I not noticed their existence?

Quite a few years back I went through what I would call the most difficult year of my life. Multiple major changes happened, all at once, and a lot of them weighed on the negative side. Looking back now, I can see how I thought I had it all together despite the chaos around me, when in reality I was in way too deep waters. Thank God I had people around me who were there to pull me out of that swamp, but only now I've been able to realise that I was actually depressed during that time. Even though my heart has healed and I can sincerely say that those event's don't have power over me anymore, I made a surprising discovery after finding those test results. Because that season of depression happened at a time where I was just beginning to develop my identity, I had identified myself with depression. For the past years I've identified myself with being lazy, unenterprising and always procrastinating when those were only symptoms of an unwell heart. That test basically uncovered this big fat lie that I had believed for way too many years.

So this year I'm digging up the real Suvi-Tuulia, that's been buried under all the junk of hurts and disappointments. I'm going after the woman I was originally created, before anything or anyone tried to mess me up. I was created nothing less of wonderful and exceptional so instead of trying to be something I thought I'm not, I'll mine the treasures that have been hidden inside of me all along. I would like to challenge you to do the same. We're all on the same line, it's just the matter of whether we understand to use the strength in our legs instead of finding every fault in them and focus on that finish line instead of only looking at the other contestants. Which will you choose?

xxx

Photos by Adriana Dobrin and Eino Manner