At your camp i didn't just meet 'likeminded' - I also met myself

A student-a-torture

My week with you has been more than a bunch of cozy times, more than a social community and also more than just the sum of the classes I participated in (with Danae). Some maybe got the outer impression that I was in a classic relaxed vacation mood when I stood by the table tennis table and beat every single participant with slush-ice on my brow, when I sat by the campfire smoke and stared satisfied into the fire or laughed myself to tears on the lawn with the others. Don’t doubt the smile- I was truthfully very happy. But it is also important for me to express here that I under my sun-stroked and happy layer of skin was also in a constant energy-intensive and self-reflective process. The process happened due to me meeting the others, meeting an entirely new group of concepts (overexcitabilities, which I had read up on in the weeks beforehand) and due to the essential nuances of Danae’s exercises that stuck to us all after the lessons and went with us into the tents at night where we re-rationalized them. I was incredibly aware of every thought-spark in me, that shined light into the darkness of my mental recesses, and I have been battling with a sword and shield against the imposter syndrome from day one. I won. I feel like a heavy and derelict elevator that has been stuck on the ground floor of an otherwise beautiful and unique house, but who is now suddenly being repaired with a new power source on the horizon.

Abstract and philosophical thoughts that didn’t match the ball game in the schoolyard, otherness, loneliness, intense emotions, misunderstood curiosity, and an enormous sense of justice have always defined my inner life. Despite me performing well and almost always feeling separate from ‘others’ in everything I have done, I have always managed to convince myself that it was just “luck” or “coincidence” (see imposter-syndrome) whenever I performed well. But now because of what I have learned about myself at the camp I feel like my cables have been electrified and air has been put under my wings - the elevator is rising to the ceiling and suddenly I feel like I have something to work with. There are some doors I can open and an overview of the floors. So, it has actually been an amazing week as a “student of a kind of positive torture” - maybe what you call “positive disintegration” or what I with the title above call elevator-torture … In other words, it is a good thing I went - and now I will explain why (I’ll try to make it short).

Re-rebirth & west-coast sand

The camp has in some ways rebirthed me - again (a re-rebirth) - now in a positive way. My psychologist asked me not long ago if I was gifted, and that took me aback - because how could I be that when all of my success is just “luck”? But then I started learning about what “giftedness” means, and took several tests where I had a high score in the IQ-part (top 1,5%), and has thus half-blindly pushed myself towards Gifted Children also through different conversations with people - and lastly, I have ended up at and completed the aforementioned “camp”. It has been some intense and exciting weeks leading up to it because I of course had to read up on what it means to be ‘g’, what all the different concepts entail, and how it all relates to myself. I have been able to feel that I slowly have been pulled into an entirely new worldview, self-understanding, and life joy, which feels homey and ‘long awaited’ in a way. Everything is unified - it all makes sense - as a mess of pieces that have now gotten names and therefore meaning so they can be laid as a puzzle (an analogy I used frequently at the camp to explain how I was feeling). Danae has ensured that I have discovered and understood my overexcitabilities, Grith has ensured that I trust in what I have learned and given me insight into what characterizes me (art- and leadership potential), and me meeting the others have made it so that I don’t feel alone, that I have been able to see myself reflected in others and have likeminded that I can be around day and night without getting tired. I have always believed that I had to fight my way through life, that I was always supposed to doubt myself and my place in this world and that I was half-mad - but now everything makes sense, and I can start to scrape away the dirt and polish the pure, strong, and cheerful Emil, who in some ways has always been inside me. I am reborn. Again.

My latest (re)’birth’ before this one was when my twin brother took his own life in a brutal way in his apartment in 2018 a month before our 23rd birthday. It was a hard hit, and ‘the optimistic and perfect Emil’ also died right there on the living room floor when I realized that he suddenly was out of reach - permanently. I had just moved away from home (to Birkerød) where I in addition to that was also in a very unhealthy relationship that I first broke away from at the end of 2019 where my best friend from gymnasium also ‘just’ had to take his own life. A lot has happened, I think, which has been unfair. I have not really been able to feel the intensity of those things before “after”, and then I unfortunately chose to ‘convey’ it by prioritizing other things, for example via refugee-activism at Venligboerne which I spent a few years on. And even in relation to grief I had unhealthy priorities by starting a grief support group for students at KU (Sorg Godt KU). The grief was a cosmic punch to the gut, which flipped me 180 degrees and made it so I had to learn how to handstand walk; and to perform, be a perfectionist and your own biggest critic is hard when you have feelings of grief and being a shadow child and insecurities chained to your feet while you fight through your existence - like running through wet west-coast sand in a headwind. And (damn it all) first in 2020 during covid have I gotten my priorities straight. I work with myself at the steering wheel and have finally started to live (again). It all sounds so overwhelming when I describe it like this, and it is of course not the only thing defining me; I grew up in Aarhus with an amazing childhood full of elderflower picking, tadpoles, living room theater, Saab-blues, and liver-paté sandwiches in DSB when travelling to yearly Christmases in Ringsted. It is just the last about 9 years of my life, that generally speaking have been more difficult than easy, you can say. Since 2019 when I started studying ethnology, smiling genuinely, and getting back my energy, I have learned a lot about myself. I have learned - and why things have ’happened to me’ - that feelings are something that you don’t just think and talk about - but also feel, balance, and nurture.

Finally

My life feels like a rollercoaster wagon, that has been fighting and climbing its way up an exponentially rising hill. I had not been able to see the top or any rest points - and first at the top when my brother died, I started with therapy and a lot of self-realizations to be able to feel gravity rebalancing me. And now, with the wagon level, I can see that the future is a downwards slope that makes me want to put my hands in the air (again). It is that rediscovered joy of life, an acceptance of the death that I carry in my backpack and a desire to keep moving on that I can feel. And here is the point of it all: at your camps I didn’t just meet my new ‘like-minded’ - I also met myself. Thank you for that ❤️