Astrid Swan

My #2018bestnine on @astridswanland Instagram

I am writing this in a state that describes just how seriously I take transitions:
I feel sick, have a low grade fever and one of my eyes is weeping from infection.
Thank you, I won't be popping the bubbling at midnight, but cheering with a cup of turmeric tea.
And that's ok.

I am a self-declared change lover, but recently, I have had to admit that the thrill of the new makes me scared, sick to my stomach, truly frightened and nervous. I'm not sure is it ever since I discovered a lump in my breast on January 2nd, 2014 – five years ago – just after the fireworks and promises of a better year. Or is it since I became a mother in 2012, end of the same month and discovered that the world is a danger zone through the eyes of a woman post-partum? I suspect that I have carried this fear with me always, but have allowed it to surface – wash over me completely – now that I truly know how new beginnings are out of my control. They can be the wonderful surprises of new homes, new views and even awards and nominations. They can be about respect and honor but they can just as well be about recurrence of cancer, or something unimaginable. Something... well, new.

I dislike people's tendency to psychoanalyse common colds and other somatic illnesses for deeper meanings. Still, I cannot help but notice the funny timing of waking up with  flu on New Year's Eve after the year I've had.

It's been so good.
Yes, I have felt lucky.


A year and four months in a state of NEAD with metastatic breast cancer (Nead= No Evidence of Active Disease). The same amount of time without chemo and with a head of hair. I have lived in near-normal health. Yes, my life is punctuated with hospital visits for three-weekly treatments, several CT-scans a year and doctors visits as well as an uncountable amount of other tests, drawn blood samples and little health scares here and there. But all of that is so easy compared to life with chemo and advancing disease that I have taken to forgetting the nearly weekly hospital visits.




As a creative artist, I could not have imagined to ever live through a time like this. Especially because my latest album From the Bed and Beyond was in early 2018 already a year old. But 2018 became a time when I was institutionally recognized in Finland and in Scandinavia. In December 2017 I was nominated for an Emma Award in the Critic's choice category, then in January 2018 I was nominated for Nordic Music Price (see the amazing contestant list here) and then came the nomination for Teosto-palkinto. In April, I became the winner of the Teosto Award sharing the honor with Joona Toivanen trio. Having experienced a deep connection with my audiences at shows and online during the From the Bed and Beyond shows, these nominations and the Teosto Award appeared to constitute a moment in which the connection continued to exist. Thank you! What a supportive, restorative, energising, fragile and precious gift it has been.

While I have experienced this sparkling music life in 2018 on the visible part of a wave, there has been lots going on in the undercurrents: For one, I have taken time to see the world with its beauty. I have traveled alone, with friends and with family. I have noticed just how tired and broken I feel and my attempt has been to take a rest. At times I have succeeded, but to be honest, the undercurrent has swept me off my feet a few times, because a huge artistic effort has muffled my insides the whole year: my book.  The process of writing has offered a sobering antidote to feeling like I achieved something elsewhere. And because I am writing about my life and the lives of those who came before me and stand next to me, it has been like traveling with a silent thunderstorm where ever I have landed.

So with gratitude and more gratitude, but also with trepidation, I walk into you, time. The New Year.
2019. I make no promises, but I keep my standards. Just like you both do and don't.

Thank you,
Astrid

Gig cancellation

I found myself telling an interviewer some time ago that my blogging is like exercising: always the first thing to go. When life is full, I forget.

Right now, I am back from Rome, snuggle at home with a head cold and the grey of the outdoors waiting for November to really deliver its dark magic.

I'm really here to inform you that my show at Sofia Future Farm in Helsinki on November 10th has been cancelled. I am needed elsewhere, as my family will be burying a member that day.
If you have a ticket already, You will be able to get your money back.

I will be playing my last show of the year in December. Welcome to Ateneum-klubi, Helsinki on December 19th. Hopefully, see you there.

Social media shutdown

Today is the third day of my social media diet. I think that it may have played a huge role in being less active here... who knows, maybe I'll find myself blogging more and constructing some larger posts now that I don't have to compulsively produce content daily via Insta and FB. I haven't quit using those, but have taken them off my phone. I am noticing some heavy symptoms of addiction, as I am withdrawing. The urge to grab my phone "for a quick check" or a some smart update that suddenly occurred to me, is finding me constantly.

I had no idea just how addicted I was. I am already noticing that now I have time to talk to my partner and to listen to my kid, and to read and to write in a journal. Hey, maybe I'll even start to make phone calls... that would be radical.

Social media has enriched my life because I have been able to connect with people I would not normally meet or talk to. I have at times felt like there is a community.
But then there is the stress that comes with needing to be always present, alert and at work.
I am someone who has never been able to read the news daily, because I carry the bad news with me and become incapacitated by my inability to change the conditions of suffering at once. With social media, I have become emotionally involved every day in things, carrying others' lives and turning my experiences into publishable emotional tales. Some of that is fine and enriching, a lot of that has sucked me dry.

Now I'm signing out and resuming my duties: a new keyboard, mike and the need to mix Koistinen/Swan EP ASAP.

X
Astrid

It is kind of my second time around cautiously treading the thin ice of "life after breast cancer treatments". It's only partly true, because of course now I am a stage four girl and so this will always be life WITH breast cancer and treatments. But right now I'm living the best possible life (if quality of life can be deduced from scans and blood tests and the severity of side-effects). Today it was confirmed to me by my doctor that I get to continue my life as a NED stage IV breast cancer patient. NED is short for no evidence of disease.
This is a huge privilege and a victory against the odds.
This means that in all the places where there was a disastrous dangerous shady mass in May 2017, there's now just scarring and Nothing. the good kind of Nothing. The lovely kind of scarring.

For the last three months (time between scans) I have lived in various stages of certainty and despair. I have been devastatingly certain that the cancer is back. I have spent my days studiously running away from my fears while totally unable to run at all. I have lived a kind of theatre performance, where my physical being has performed normalcy while my emotions and ideas have given me a solo show of nerves, ticks and obsessions. Consecutive common colds, side effects of chemo and other treatments, tiredness from overworking, family life and illness extras have all turned in my mind to warning signals: the cancer is back – you are dying.

What do I turn to then, when I have been so hilariously wrong?
When in fact, I need to address my tiredness and my emotional and physical wellbeing from the point of view of continuing life rather than letting go? When I have to hold on to my messy attachments and my new and old projects and I have to live with a different kind of uncertainty. The kind that holds the uncertainties that accompany terminal illness and the ones that relate to living in general.

Like what if tomato sauce in a can was first informed that her expiry date is in six months but then she would be given an infinite future later on and put on a new shelf with a better view all together?
How would that tomato sauce feel? Or what would it taste like?

I guess I have time to ask myself that question now.
(Last time I got to that stage of asking, I began to write songs for From the Bed and Beyond)
Maybe, during the last six months I thought I better not go there.

So, just to remind myself: I'm not tomato sauce. Not even close. There's still work to be done with definitions. There's writing to be finished and songs to be sung.

And because there's no one else here telling me this right now, I have to tell it to myself:
It's ok to not be so ok, but in fact to be crumbling. Crumbling is a privilege that I can now afford.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be 36. A very good age to be alive, if you ask me.
This here blog has been a little silent in the past months. It's been the silence of recovery, return to an  insane (and self-tailored) work schedule and a pause from reflection.

Mostly it's been a silence out of the necessity of needing to extract every possible minute of the day elsewhere, in other creative expressive processes. You'll be hearing more on that stuff soon.

But this week is so full of wonderful things that I need to stop, write and celebrate. Bring on the champagne and the glass flutes!
I was nominated for an Emma Award in the Critic's Choice category!




Today the nominees for the Nordic Music Prize were announced. My album From the Bed and Beyond is nominated. You'll need to check out the other nominees (from the link above). They are insanely talented, brilliant and amazing – and famous. I am proud and surprised and happy and humbled to be in this company.

Up until this point, I have never ever been nominated for any award, so I'm going through the motions. It's weird. I suddenly realize that there is a difference in being an Oscar Gala fan (as annual TV entertainment) and to be a nominee for something and to entertain the idea of actually having to go to a gala. Or getting to go...

I'm also realizing that while I have always thought that I'm doing worthy and great things artistically, there's a kind of difference when others think so too 😂...



The other lovely thing that I am happy about (and scared of in pretty equal measure) is that I am giving a talk this week. On Friday the 26th of January, I will be talking at Creative Mornings Helsinki. The venue is Design Museo in Helsinki, the time is morning (breakfast starts at 8:30Am)!  The language is English. The event is free, but you have to book your tickets through the website in advance. This month's theme is anxiety and my talk is titled "Confessions of an Anxious Memoirist".

All in all, today's January blizzard doesn't signify traffic jams, loneliness or distant coldness to me, but crystallisation, inspiration and hope.
I hope your 2018 has started with a positive feeling.
Here's me ending this post with a humble wish that you are doing ok!

Astrid

From the Bed and Beyond performance at WHS Teatteri. Photo by Juulia Niiniranta

Silences

I have allowed myself to go silent for some time.
It's the silence of breathing in... exhaling and pausing.
Looking at my head in the mirror and watching light gray feather turn to dark stubble. Stubble turn to very short, but undeniable hair.  It's the silence of looking at this image and not recognising it while also going: phew... that was a close call, my lady.
Also, it's what happens when I am immersed in every day life. Writing, working, cooking, caring, sitting on the sofa, reading, thinking, tending to kittens and children.
Silence is my friend.

I cannot deny the impact of being exposed in the media. I cannot diminish the meaning of 'aftermath'. Because really, doesn't the nearness of death just make us fragile? Do you really think that it is news?
I don't. I think it's a question of degree. How much are you in denial today?
The events of my personal life (and some of their public interpretations) have created an unwillingness to share (and unwillingness to follow my own rules or the expectations of others). The same events have also shown me how important using my voice is. And so I have been sharing, in different spaces. For example these three blog posts for the Finnish Breast Cancer Awareness campaign last month.

While I find it important that everyone is informed about breast cancer and metastatic breast cancer, I found it especially hard in October to exist when all this light was sort of being aimed at the illness I have. Yet, so much of the exposure didn't feel right or even necessary. I'm still not finding information on metastatic breast cancer readily available. Nuanced public discussions about living with illness and the nearness of death are scarce in the Finnish media (and cancer sites and campaigns too).
Pink washing just doesn't seem to scare the ghost. Mostly, it makes for unentertaining entertainment. Yes, we need research funding so that one day, metastatic breast cancer will be like polio – a nightmare from the past. But I still have to live through this and die because of it. And I have to go out and live and meet the confusion and fears of those around me. This I face up to every day with varying degrees of willingness.

Performance at G Live Lab, October 2017 Photo by J. Niiniranta

On Breasts

Today marks a year since my last reconstructive surgery. I wrote this on my Facebook profile just minutes after meeting with my surgeon:

"Remember my upbeat posts about breast reconstruction and moving on with life in 2016? Well, here I am November 2017 after a meeting with my surgeon. I must admit defeat and say that I am disappointed. My good intentions and wishful optimism did not solve it all...After two reconstructive operations in 2016 and treatments for metastatic breast cancer between May and September 2017 I am now a woman with an aching smaller breast and too small (and deformed) silicone blob on the mastectomy side. I am not at all the breezy haired two-breasted woman I hoped to be at this stage. Instead, I am a fragile skeleton lady rebooting my life philosophies and shopping for bouts of happiness. Tomorrow I'll at least have a proper silicone prosthesis to make up for the size difference. Nothing much to celebrate. EXCEPT:  I'M ALIVE!"

Isn't it wrong that after these operations I am not whole and better, but get diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer?  Isn't it more than annoying that now I am not eligible for further reconstructions (at least for now) because of my illness and its treatments (which will never end)?
My augmented smaller breasts were supposed to help me move forward, into living without fear. I was frightened by the operations, but I chose to have them because of my yearning to move on. I wanted to embrace the possibility of survival and happiness, living without plastic fake boobs and the daily material reminders of my fear of cancer returning.


It's all so angering and unfair that I am overwhelmed (while I know that things could be a lot worse). Here I am, facing up to the task of continuing life as a chronically ill person. Living on. This is as good news as I can get. I am a person with so much privilege, so much joy, so many opportunities for expression and space for listening. How can I make space for the grief, disappointment and loss I carry along? How can I let myself take some moments to be sad?

Because really, isn't it just a little bit wrong to go through two reconstructions and come out as a woman who still needs a prosthetic breast? Isn't it wrong that no one tells me that I am eligible and that there is a partial prosthesis too? So for a year I wear just some fluff inserted into a bra... 
Mixed with my disappointment about how my life is turning out, there's a genuine sense of surprise. What am I supposed to do with these consecutive disasters? Make more art while I wait to die? Is my life really now a waiting room for leaving? How can I convince you and myself that in that case we are all forever locked in those waiting rooms?

Once again, I'm thinking about David Bowie making his last album and his choice of not talking about his illness publicly –– yet, configuring dying into his work. Dealing with illness and death, making it into art, as some people have chosen to interpret Bowie's style of living and leaving. I'm thinking about Frida Kahlo and the value of her life's work. I'm breathing with Aurora Levins Morales and crying with Audre Lorde. And still, I always carry with me Sylvia Plath and her artistic legacy. I'm building a Library of Sorrow in my home. I'm hoping that no one will judge the value of my life for the amount of years it will span. I'm hoping to outlive you all.

Self-portrait in 2011: pregnant and in red

Then and Now

These images bring me back to another time. I was 29-years-old. Early pregnancy, not yet a mother, but beginning to construct an identity in transformation. Turning into something that nothing in my previous life had really prepared me for. Imagining, making space, fearing the loss of the possibility inside me, agonizing over the questions: who will I become? What am I now? Will I lose something?
Can my body really create a baby?

I was blissfully unaware of what was to come when I tiptoed into motherhood while writing advice books for children about farm animals, mini pigs and frogs (unglamorous, but I had to survive somehow). Yes, it is possible to remain unaware whilst overly preparing intellectually. Still, saying yes to this twist and change is the best thing I have done. How could I have known that becoming a mother would edge me closer to other events that were entirely out of my control? Other seismic life changes would follow. How was I to understand, that control was an illusion? That this illusion was offered to me through education and the ethos that hard work, social posturing, right eating, moving and thinking can keep me on some known track.

I had no idea. I was privileged, loss was strange to me, despite the fact that life had not been very easy until then either. I imagined all kinds of scenarios. I was empathic and fought for the right of being different, appreciated and free. But let me tell you, that beautiful young woman and this woman I am today – we are the same person, but each cell of this body has died and new ones have replaced them. Wrong cells have grown and taken over too. Things have gone horribly wrong and amazingly well almost simultaneously. So now I'm same but entirely different.

My 20s: pretty and lost

From here (in my bed with chemo side effects beginning to hit me) I think about my 20s with empathy, mixed with pity and acute jealousy: You dumb dumb woman, why did you waste all that time with insecurity? You had two breasts, a waist, two feet, two equally proportionate arms and a pretty head with a set of nice brains inside. You fitted into flea market vintage finds, spent large parts of your student loan on shoes and fast-track unethical clothing (as well as gasoline for a car you didn't need). You were smart, learning to articulate your ideas, you were creative and followed through. You ate carelessly, exercised marginally, enjoyed sex, had lovely friends, studied to become a Master's Degree holder at the age of 27, wrote and recorded three albums and made one cover album, toured around the world. You amassed experience and knowledge. You enjoyed privileges that a poor teenager from the suburbs of Helsinki and somewhat unstable home life could not have imagined. Meanwhile, you carried a heavy load. In addition to insecurity you had packed along sadness, anger, feelings of loss and denial. You had no language for your agony and no outlet most of the time (except for music). You struggled to get help and struggled to form strong enough symptoms.

Most of the time in my 20s I was high-functioning and appeared super prolific and successful holding down a musical career while being a diligent university student (and a long-term partner for my now husband and a part-time parent to his daughter). Being a young woman also submitted me to harassment, the sexual and verbal kind. I had no idea how to protect myself. I studied the history of feminism in the university, but in real life I was afraid to say when something or someone was hurting me. Often, I didn't know that it was. The daring to change things around and begin to listen to myself and my feelings came through a full stop: depression and its successful treatment in therapy.

My 20s was a careless wasteland and a soil for growth. Both a burial site and a tarmac for new flight. If the human teenage years are often looked down upon as the site of formation (and not fruition), I would add the 20s into that packet. I would also like to be kinder to my young-woman-self, – I would remind her to have more fun, own the fun she's having, enjoy it more and spend even less time with concerns.

In my 30s I was supposed to be happy

My 30s was supposed to be the happiest time of my life. This was an expectation I developed as a young girl after a good friend of mine introduced me to the idea. We imagined our futures through literature and the 1990s Hollywood movies, old musicals as well as some opera and some ballet. It was both a wish and an intuition.Who knows, maybe my friend forgot the dream of "our good 30s", but I carried it around like a promise.

Self-portrait: resting chemo week 5/6

In my 30s I was going to have arrived at a place where I would have what I need. I would be an adult. I would be doing professionally what I want, sexually what I want, I would define my relationships with others. I would own beautiful things. I would enjoy what brings me pleasure and I would know what I need in my life and what I don't. I would express myself without fear. I would own my dream wardrobe, expensive shoes and soft silks with funny detailed jackets. I'd look good and confident and I'd feel it too. In that dream state I'd look at my struggles during previous decades from some distance, having learned and moved on. I'd be communicating, yet protective in equal measure. I would be a parent too. I guess in my mind's eye I saw a black and white photo of myself in Vogue: a fag dangling from my lips, collarbones piercing through skin, wearing a half unbuttoned blouse, a disheveled bob of hair, effortless denim, wine glasses, a bunch of seasonal flowers on the table, a city home and a summer house near the sea. That's some supermodel obviously.

Now, in the middle of my year as a 35-year-old, I think of this young woman's dream of happiness located in this age and I see both dreams that came true and the underlining meanings and events that I had no way of predicting. The reality of my life now would have scared the little woman to her
bones. Still, she wasn't all wrong about this decade in life.

Self-portrait with a chemo scarf I made while suffering the side-effects of treatment in summer 2017

35: Where am I right now

Four days after my 30th birthday I released a human child from between my legs. I struggled through the first years making cocktails of blissful baby love, the loss of my previous self-image and sleep deprivation. I married my long-term partner (in a secret ceremony) after he proposed to me in the hospital where I lay feverish after an 18-hour delivery. I alternated between happiness and discontent. I also became a hell of a lot more confident and went for my needs and wants. My breasts could make milk and sustain a hungry child. My songs could pierce through to their meaning. My wardrobe became bold and luxurious. I committed to my life, dreamed of returning to the university to become a researcher while songs kept appearing through the ceiling and the floorboards. In 2014 these dreams were manifesting fast.

Then at 32, very close to my birthday, I became a breast cancer patient. I entered into a tunnel of extreme treatments and hospital life. By 33 I was a survivor learning to live without any normal hormone cycle of women my age. I was exhausted, living with symptoms that would have been normal for women 20 years older than me. I was going through acute and sudden menopause caused by hormone blocking medication that was supposedly keeping me alive. The doctors told me it was my way for more time on this planet. My body that I had just become familiar with as a source of pleasure and pride after childbirth, was now sad – like a complete stranger attached to me somehow. Everything reeked of death, hospitals and uncertainty. I didn't want to get to know this new me. I imagined that the old me would return if only I waited patiently.

So I got busy with life: realizing dreams, professional and otherwise. I traveled with my family, wrote songs allowing myself to focus fully and with complete intention. I applied for grants and got them for art, while not getting them for research. Letter by letter, note by note I gathered a belief in my self, in my truths and experiences, in my right to exist and express myself. From the edges of death I returned full of force and fragility. I was sailing full-tilt with black sales and glamorous shoes. I knew in my body that there are no promises of tomorrow. So I held onto the moments, the people and the places where I resided. I began to feel comfortable and curious at the same time.

By the time I turned 35 I was sick. My 36th year began with intense struggling towards the realization of my dream shows for my new album and the struggle to stay afloat while strange symptoms were gnawing on me each day a little more forcefully. I have remained in between a state of professional bliss and physical agony. At 35 and a half I am a chronic cancer patient with stage IV breast cancer.

Instead of a summer of cooling in the breeze with my long hair blowing and my spaghetti-shoulder dresses flowing, I have been a bold woman struggling with chemo side-effects and the mental adjustments that one makes with this re-diagnosis.
Yet, against my own expectations, I'm enjoying my life right now. Most of the time I am happy about where I am (I know, it doesn't make much sense). I don't feel like I've been dealt a raw deal and an unfair amount. I feel privileged and look forward to so much.

Oh, and I've began to plan my 40th birthday!