By Tamar Tros

My ears are ringing from the clashing conversations in unknown languages around me. I adjust the red backpack that cuts into my shoulders, seemingly containing something much heavier than a handful of clothes and memorabilia. With no one around to console my anxieties, my heart and thoughts compete in a race while I queue to check in at Schiphol Airport. Before the true implications of the decision that I’m about to make can hit me, it’s my turn. The flight attendant beckons me and breaks out in a radiant smile as I approach her.

‘Wow!’ she says, pointing at the pink pixie cut I’ve been rocking for a mere twenty-four hours. As it turned out, not even the best intentions nor copious amounts of conditioner could fix my bleached ends. She catches on to my discomfort and reassures me: ‘You look so cool!’

Her kindness revives my original excitement, and we discuss the benefits of thrift shopping whilst she checks me in. Not much later, I’m two boarding passes richer and one bag lighter on my way to customs. Today, I am changing something much more drastic than my hair. Today, I’m moving to a foreign country I have never so much as visited before, where I don’t speak the language or even have a job. What could possibly go wrong?

Before I left, everyone kept asking me why I was relocating to Norway. Now that I have, everyone keeps asking me why I’m here. I am yet to find an answer. Besides haircuts and tattoos, I have never been one for impulsivity. I need to feel in control, all the time, and so I would carefully plan out every lecture, work shift and social activity weeks in advance. It made me overly anxious and uptight. This caused me to spiral throughout my years in university. When timed crying breaks in the library bathroom became part of my weekly schedule, I realised it was time to reconsider my strategy. In my head, the suffering was worth the results, yet the high marks never truly satisfied me.

Only after I graduated was I ready to take a step back and see myself for what I was: miserable. Although I have always had ambitions and still wanted to pursue the next step in my education, I knew I wasn’t in the position to do so without breaking down entirely. I could never create a healthy life for myself in academia as long as my sense of self-worth depended on it. So, I decided to take a break from studying, which meant that I would have to welcome spontaneity, newness and disorder. I started out tame with a loosely scheduled train-journey through my favourite parts of Europe and followed it up with a jump into the deep end by moving abroad to an unknown Nordic country.

As an avid reader and lover of fiction, my whole plan – or rather, lack thereof – sounded just like the adventurous stories I had spent my life absorbing. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a major factor in my decision-making. I have always had a tendency to pursue things purely for the anecdote it will become. I could already envision myself at some old friend’s dinner table, years from now, playfully sipping a glass of red wine whilst I spin yarns about the time I moved to a magical Nordic country on nothing but a whim. What I fail to consider is that my memories are soaked in nostalgia and rarely true to what happened in reality. Like Rumpelstiltskin weaving straw into gold, I sensationalise my everyday life into fantastical stories, carefully omitting the rotten straw of the less-entertaining elements to make sure the final product is nothing but golden.

Yet there was no need for the expensive flight, stress of higher living costs, and frantic job hunt for me to romanticise my life without putting everything on the line. I’d spent four years making a wonderful city my home already. However, that place had grown tainted to me with every step I had taken on its cobblestones, every first date I went on in its cosy bars, and every person I befriended in its picturesque buildings. Like an artist with a crisp, white canvas, I had sketched, shaded and stippled to my heart’s content with every moment I experienced there. Then, the paint dried. I look back fondly on the composition I created and I will always treasure the completed work, but it is undeniably finished. The key to being a good artist, I’ve been told, is to know when to stop. So, it was time to pack up my brushes and paints and find a fresh canvas to leave my mark on.

Norway has felt like a near literal manifestation of this as I look out over a city covered in snow and ice. I still can’t offer anyone a singular definitive reason for why I moved here instead of any other place. So far, from the limited experiences I have had at twenty-three all I know is what I don’t want. And when that’s all I can base my actions on, it’s fated to be chaotic. I have been fighting the turmoil that comes with being in my early twenties, but I have been pointlessly exhausting myself with that for far too long. Surrounded by an abundance of options and blessed with the privilege to fail, why pressure myself to understand everything about life and know exactly what I seek from it?

I now look forward to the many trials and errors that will eventually, by process of elimination, lead me to discover what it is that I want. In the meantime, all I can do is dive in, head-first, with all my heart. In possession of nothing but a rocky Duolingo streak, I moved to Norway and somehow made it work. With every passing moment, positive or negative, I learn more about myself and the world. It could all still fall apart, of course, but that doesn’t scare me anymore. No matter how many times I have to, I will shake chaos’s hand and take another leap.

I am no longer searching for the story, the story is searching for me. Chaos is a ladder and I’m going to keep on climbing.

Tamar (they/them) writes on topics of love and identity in order to redefine what lies at the heart of the human experience. They studied global and comparative philosophy at Leiden University where they wrote an award-winning dissertation on sex and gender in medieval Arabic philosophy. Online they go by @tamargabrielle.