I miss the lockdown. Technically, it’s still in place, although judging by the almost complete absence of social distancing being observed in shops and parks now, it’s as if the virus had gone away. Which it most certainly hasn’t.  Some call it lockdown fatigue, others say it all began to unravel after the prime minister’s chief adviser broke the lockdown rules by driving 30 miles to a beauty spot to test his eyesight on his wife’s birthday. Continue reading →

I was eleven years old when my teacher called me ‘disabled’ in front of the class, during what was intended as a lesson in tolerance and inclusion. I still remember how the teacher’s words burned as if she was branding me with a red-hot iron. The initial wave of shame soon gave way to anger and resentment. Disabled? Me? In what way was I disabled? Continue reading →

Part two? Well, yes, because I wrote a blog about white privilege a couple of years ago, but it turned out to be one of my least popular blog posts, so here I go again because this stuff is important.

Growing up in Sweden in the 70s and 80s, my surroundings were very white, something I thought little about because it seemed perfectly normal to me at the time. In primary school, I had a classmate who was adopted from South America, and in my brother’s year, there was a girl adopted from South Korea, but that was it as far as diversity went. When I started high school, I made friends with a girl from Eritrea and got a first glimpse of what it was like to be black in Sweden in the late ’80s. Continue reading →

Five years to this day, I wrote and published my first blog post. I still recall all too vividly how petrified I was to share my thoughts and words with the world; how I feared being met with rejection and ridicule. As afraid as I was to reveal myself to the world after years of hiding behind a carefully cultivated persona of the ‘intellectual academic,’ I had to take that risk. Continue reading →