I arrived in Sweden three years ago today.

I’ve come to realise that one of my persistent discursive tics—one that very much predates the pandemic—is to observe that a given stretch of time “seems like a lifetime, but at the same time like a blink of the eye”.

I say it because it feels true, and always has; I sometimes wonder whether it’s something to do with a very peripatetic childhood, followed by an early adulthood defined by precarious employment and accommodation. But as discursive tics go, few are so reliably met with affirmation from whoever hears them; perhaps, then, it’s just the one relatable observation of the human experience that I have internalised sufficiently to share?

Anyway, here I am—and here I hope to stay. Quite what I’ll need to do in order to achieve that goal remains unclear, though it seems increasingly obvious that academia—which has been a welcome shelter for a little more than a decade—is not willing or able to offer me the firm place to stand I had hoped it might. Well, selah; as noted above, my life has been restless and rootless, and while I’m ready for it to be neither of those things—or at least for it to be much less so—it’s probably good to remind myself that my experience is far from unique, and indeed less precarious in many ways than that of many others.

It’s perhaps also time to accept that, in the world as currently constituted, waiting for someone to offer you a place at the table is to keep playing a Kafkaesque game of musical chairs in which the music grows ever more discordant and frenetic.

Not that making your own table and chair is any easier, of course! But there’s only so many times you can be told that you just haven’t compromised enough before you decide that, if you’re just going to end up left standing anyway, you might as well dance to your own damned music.