Nem Rowan's Blog

Entering the new year was pretty mental. I got all my exams done somehow and finished off SVA and Matematik 1. I got a C grade in Svenska and a D grade in Matematik. Not ideally what I was hoping for, especially since I got a B grade in SVA 2, but to be honest, I was so fed up by the time I needed to the end of course assignment that I just shat out whatever I could that met the criteria enough to be a pass. My teacher, although she was pretty tough at times, I think was a good teacher and my command of Svenska vastly improved over my time on the courses. I think she helped me improve my grammar and vocabulary and made me feel more confident when it came to speaking. I can do presentations in front of groups of people now without feeling like I am going to panic.

Samhällskunskap is excruciatingly boring. A lot of it is stuff I already know about politics and society. It makes it easy, but at the same time there are a ton of boring stuff I need to learn about the structure of EU parliament and how the voting system works etc. etc. and I find it a struggle to motivate myself to keep learning. My teacher doesn't care much, he is close to retiring. When we were due to have our most recent test, the whole class showed up on time for the exam and he didn't come. The headteacher came by 45 minutes after the exam was supposed to start to tell us that he wasn't come and the exam was cancelled. Everyone was pretty cheesed off, myself included.

I am falling behind with Nybörjare Tyska because I am not motivated at all. I have no online classes or anything, it's just "read the book, answer the questions" and it is incredibly dull. I learn much better in a classroom setting with real human beings. So I am doing the bare minimum to scrape by, which makes it especially hilarious that I got A and B grades on my assignments lol! Maybe I am trying too hard even when I am trying my best not to try at all!

I made my application to the högskola and I am crossing my fingers and toes that I will get accepted onto the Bibliotekarie course. I have applied for a couple of back-up programs but the Bibliotekarie course is on campus and I really don't want to do anymore distance studies so this would be perfect for me. There's no reason why I should be rejected but I will believe I've been accepted when I see it lol. Can't count one's chickens until they've hatched and all that.

This summer I might be doing Italian language, which I think will be better than the German course because there will be actually online classes with a teacher. I'm in two minds about doing it, but we'll see on that front. Learning languages is easy for me, generally speaking, but I have to be motivated otherwise it just falls by the wayside. I could say the same about most things to be honest. If something feels pointless then I can't, no matter how hard I try, apply as much energy to it as required.

We are moving in a couple of weeks' time because my boyfriend bought a house! I am really looking forward to it. We will be able to have separate bedrooms again, which is essential since he snores like a fucking freight-train LOL. But it will be especially nice to have a garden. We will have a south-facing veranda as well, so we can enjoy sitting in the sun during the summer-time. It's in the countryside too, surrounded by fields and forest. I never thought in my whole life that I would ever live somewhere like that, not because I didn't want to, but because I never could have afforded it. My boyfriend is a bit of a 'sugar daddy' sometimes LOL!

Unfortunately I have removed my books from Draft2Digital because they are going to start charging fees and I make so little money from book sales that it would end up costing me a whole lot more just to keep them up there than it would to take them down. I guess I will look for an alternative. I can always offer them directly from my homepage here, but no one will ever find them. It's a shame, but that's the way things are.

I survived Christmas. It was nice visiting family, having family stay over, swapping gifts etc. but eating was a big problem again. I have a habit of gorging myself over the festive period, which I understand is pretty common for many people, but I don't want to do it anymore because I end up making myself sick. This time I was more moderated but I still feel like I ate too much. My sugar addiction is in full force. I started weight-lifting and doing regular yoga back in August 2025 after a lot time not exercising and managed to lose about 5kg in weight (go me!) but I put 2kg back on over Christmas. I don't feel like I have gotten rounder and my clothes fit the same, so I am just consoling myself but saying it is muscle not fat lol...

I am very close to finishing the Svenska and Matematik courses I have been studying. Two weeks to go now, and I have 6 exams squeezed into that time-frame, along with a few more lessons. I am so fucking tired of studying Swedish, I can't wait for it to be over so I can move on. The boredom and effort I have to put in just to motivate myself has been soul-destroying. Next I will continue with Nybörjare Tyska, Matematik 2b and Samhällskunskap, which I have heard should be kind of fun, but we'll see about that. So far, my education at Komvux has felt like a punishment. I am scared that högskola will be even worse.

I have hopes that this year will be better than the last one. The court process is over now so I won't have to sink so much money into paying for lawyers. The outcome wasn't what I hoped for, but I have to let go now, because holding onto it all last year was slowly killing me. Hopefully my boyfriend and I will buy a nice house in the country and I can move on with my life at last. It feels like I have been trapped in limbo for 6 years. I've been through so much hell, but I am the strongest I have ever been.

I saw on my book sales report that I sold 2 copies over the Christmas period, which makes me super happy! I hope that whoever bought them enjoys the stories, even though I feel that my later work is much better. I am currently working on a project that I intend to release at some point and I think my structure, language and plotting is much more efficient than my first book. It feels cringey to go back and read ones own work from many years ago so I am trying to avoid doing that, but I am tempted to translate my old books to Swedish. I also thought about rehashing the old stories, rewriting them a bit and improving on them a lot, but I don't know if that's okay. Once it's published, it's published, I guess?

I haven't had much time to work on my website lately, but I will come back to it soon enough.

I started weight-lifting again. About 3 years ago, after I broke up with my exes, I threw myself wholeheartedly into lifting weights and I got very fit. I dropped two clothing sizes and actually started to like my own body. I was by no means thin, but that wasn't important. I felt energised and started to find joy in exercise, which is something I have never felt in pretty much my entire life. Right now felt like a good time to start again, so I have. At the moment I am using two 5kg dumbbells and that's enough for me.

Things are tough right now. I'm going to a final court hearing next week, which I won't talk about in detail here, but it is emotionally exhausting and I just want it to be over. It WILL be over, soon. I have reached a level of acceptance with it and I have started to feel a release from the anxiety and stress that has weighed on me all year. And oh boy this year hasn't been a fun one for a lot of reasons, but the court thing is the biggest reason for me. It has consumed a lot of time, energy, money and tolerance from me. I have felt like a shadow, a scrunched up piece of paper, a towel that has been wrung out too harshly. I have spent the majority of this year feeling exhausted, too exhausted to think. Now I am trying to reserve some space in my life for the things I enjoy.

I bought myself some new glasses a couple of weeks ago, they are identical to the ones I have been wearing for a few years now, just with a stronger prescription because my eyesight has gotten worse. Within days of wearing them, the hinge one side became so bent that the arm was too loose for me to wear them. So now I have to return them and I am pretty disappointed. The old pair have been through hell, grabbed by toddlers, sat on several times and bent out of shape, but they are still pretty good. I would continue wearing them if it weren't for me needing stronger lenses. The quality of the new glasses was pretty poor. I hope they will refund me so I can pick another pair with a different hinge.

I have started selling stuff on vinted and so far it is going pretty well. It feels a bit chaotic on there, but things are selling. I like that they don't take a huge slice out of the profits the way Tradera does. I used to like Tradera but now they represent only corporate greed in my mind so it feels crappy to sell on there. But there are a few things that I can't sell on vinted so I will have to sell them there. I am trying to scrape together some extra money because the court fees have left me so poor, I can barely pay for anything on my student income.

This winter is going by so quickly that I become alarmed when it gets dark early now because I am still not expecting it to happen. It has gotten cold as well so I have brought out my winter coat and wool hats. It snowed a little bit a couple of weeks ago, and I am hoping that it will not snow again over Christmas but maybe it will. The weather has been a little bit strange this year. The summer was too short.

I have been adding a bunch of things to my website. I have added a shrine to my dogs and my grandparents, and another page full of my personal interests. I want to add more things. No idea what to add. Maybe I will start adding pages with more of my writing.

Over the last week I have been thinking a lot about a project I have. I actually finished the project a couple of years ago, so the novel itself is complete, but I am so unhappy with how it turned out that I decided to go back to it. Because I was so unhappy with it, I never published it even though I completed it back when Gurt Dog Press was still running.

I've done a lot of tweaking to the characters and completely changed the plan for the beginning of the story. It felt like I wasted several chapters on stuff that contributed nothing to the plot, so it was better to completely remove that stuff. Instead I have opted for something a lot more exciting: a plane crash! What's not exciting about that? I also changed the back story of a few characters and I'm working on changing the history of the village where it takes place. It seems like a lot, but it's actually not. I just need to edit the manuscript and add things in, a bit like dumping ketchup on a plate of chips really.

School has been riding me quite a bit. I am very tired of how much brain power I am having to put towards my schoolwork, especially since I am struggling to motivate myself with it. We're reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, translated to Swedish and I am hating every minute of it. I can't stand Hanna, I think she's just an overall shitty person and I struggled with her behaviour at the beginning of the story. I explained my issue to my teacher and she literally defended Hanna! That had me totally confused. Imo Hanna is irredeemable... but I guess that's just my opinion. I need to re-watch the movie but I don't feel like it. We will be writing a comparison essay on the movie and book later in the course and I am already dreading it.

I am thinking about other things to add to my website. I have seen some people make shrines for stuff they are into and I think I might do the same. There are a lot of random stuff that I love to bits but no way of expressing how I feel about it in daily life. Maybe a shrine page would be a lot of fun.

So I actually wrote a really long blog post the other week, but then bearblog didn't load because of some Cloudflare problem that made half the internet shit the bed, so I lost the entire post. I was so pissed off, I didn't come back until today. It really made me think twice about using online services to maintain any kind of journal. If it's that easy for a single service to cause so much disruption to the web, maybe we shouldn't use it? Maybe we should break it up into smaller services?

I am rethinking hosting my blog directly on my website instead and just copying over what I have written here to a html page. At least if it goes down, it goes down with my whole website.