Getting Me Back to Sweden would NOT be a Good Idea

Sweden is *not* utopia – (my thoughts on growing up in Scandinavia)
Jenny Mustard | 11 Nov. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBXI6yayyxE

In 1980, at 11 years and a half, I returned from Austria, where I had been born and also spent parts of my very early life, to Sweden.

It was a loss of freedoms, since my mother had homeschooled me.

But, hey, after being the mid-low performer in an Austrian class, and the butt of most teachers' mockery, it was kind of nice to be one of the better performers and have teachers who were nice.

From 1980 to 2004, Sweden hit me very hard in the face, several times over. Probably because I expressed a preference for some things I'd been taught in Austria. Tell me a place in Malmö (not Jönköping or Malmberget) where you can say "abortion is murder" without attracting first disbelief and at a second glance, when they see you are serious, something like hatred?

I recall watching Sound of Music myself, but also being subjected to follow an analysis of it in Swedish school. Feminists told me it was bad because it romanticised a many children family. These were my teachers. By contrast, my mother was very seriously an admirer of the main character, not just as portrayed by Julie Andrews, but the real Maria Kutschera von Trapp. "Always remember, a man is a man, and a woman is a woman" ... cited several times over by my mother.

I recall Swedish doctors ruining my mother's life very slowly. But also very thoroughly. 1980, we lived with grandma in Höja. 2004, my mother was forced to give up an apartment in Rosengård. Because she had a room in a caring home. Up to early 1986, she had on and off worked as subordinate hospital doctor, perhaps they say "intern" in English as well as in French, (underläkare) that year she got a diagnosis which was later replaced, but only after her life was ruined anyway. She had been emotional to a very high degree after the death of a patient she had loved. And whom she had given a few extra months by detecting a pneumonia. When I came from SSHL for Summer holidays, or maybe even Easter, she had sought refuge in a very proletarian immigrant, whose life had also been destroyed by Swedish psychiatry. Same applies for their daughter, who was born in 1988.

You know what? I am very thankful for showing people who read my comment under a link to your video that I'm very much not an economic refugee. But also, thank you for mentioning that another attitude to work and studies than highly efficiency directed, totally hard working, giving up everything else, is in fact part of my education. It's not going away, even if I moved from France to Texas. And, by the way, I'm not mad at you, but if I returned to Sweden, I would not be around you or people like you. At university, I would be looked down on for the years I spent on the street, as if that were a moral failure on my part, and I would not be accessing the life you describe.