Chapter 14: The Price We Pay

After I had left that night, because I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Senni and Samppa after everything, my classmates had called the police. But they had also been in touch with our journalism teacher at Fontys, Gie Meewuis, who was also our international coordinator at Fontys’ end. They told him what had happened but only their version of the story. That they were “so concerned.” That it was so bad they had to “call the police.”

I had been excluded, hurt, and made to feel unsafe in that hostel room so I did something that anyone would have done: I removed myself from a situation that was damaging to me. What else was I supposed to do? Sleep next to the people who had just emotionally devastated me? 

Instead of facing why I left  they flipped the script. They told Gie Meewuis a version of the story that erased my pain and centered their discomfort. Suddenly I wasn’t the one who had been harmed by lies, exclusion, and using systemic violence against me. I was the one causing concern. And later when Gie Meewuis confronted me about the situation, he was angry at me. But not once did he ask me why I left. Not once did he ask what had happened. Just like that, my pain had disappeared from the story and all that remained was their fear, their version.

What they did is actually a known psychological phenomenon. It’s called gaslighting. And it’s even more manipulative when it’s done under the disguise of concern. Because when people frame our pain as their crisis, when they make our response to harm look like the harm itself, it becomes almost impossible to fight back. My pain, that Senni and Samppa had caused with their actions, was turned into a threat. It transformed my self-protecting act as instability. It erased my reality and replaced it with theirs. The “concern” was only to mask their deeper intent: to control the narrative about me now at the Fontys’ end. They had decided this is the only truth of what had happened, the only truth that deserved to be heard. When people said they were just worried, they didn’t know what else to do while never once asking what was done to me, or how I was feeling, it’s not concern. It’s gaslighting.  And What Senni and Samppa did to me was systemic gaslighting.

And then tell me, out of concern, did they go and tell the rest of our class in Finland, or wherever they were at the time, what had happened? They told our classmates, even though those people weren’t there, even though they had no role in the situation. Why? Was that concern too? What kind of “concern” spreads a private moment of pain and vulnerability to people across the continent, to those who weren’t even involved? What kind of “care” involves retelling a version of events that paints me as unstable or dangerous, while never once including what led me to walk out that night?

That’s not concern but social positioning. It's narrative control. It’s about making sure everyone “knows the story”, their story. The one where they’re the victims of someone too much, too intense, too unstable. The one where my pain becomes gossip, my self-protection becomes a scandal, and they become heroes for “handling” it.

If it were really about concern, they would have spoken to me. They would have asked me how I was doing. They would have included my reality in the story they told. But not once did they do that.

They didn’t want people to understand. What they wanted was backing, validation and sympathy. They were recruiting the rest of the class to view me through their lens, ensuring that wherever I turned next, I would already be branded. That’s not concern. That’s calculated exclusion. That’s how gaslighting spreads. That’s how social exile is engineered.

They might tell themselves things like: “We just wanted to make sure she’s okay.” “We were worried about her safety.” And my personal favorite: “It seems like she is struggling with emotional regulation.” But let’s be honest, my problem wasn’t instability. My problem was being in a space that constantly disrespected me, misunderstood me, and isolated me. They framed my reactions as symptoms . But what they were actually witnessing wasn’t mental illness but the cost of surviving chronic emotional harm. My sadness, my anger, my withdrawal, my protectiveness, none of them, weren’t signs of personal dysfunction. They were completely human responses to ongoing exclusion, microaggressions, and betrayal.

But framing my pain as a psychological problem served a purpose. Because if it was just my instability, then nobody had to look at their own behavior. 

Let me be clear about something here. Yes. I had depression. I’ve never hidden that. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t blame my classmates for my depression. That was something I had already carried. It was part of my story even before Erasmus.

But what I do hold them accountable for is how they responded to me when I was vulnerable. What I do hold them accountable for is how they used that vulnerability against me. How they turned my emotions into a weapon, not to protect me, but to protect themselves from accountability.

My mental health didn’t cause the exclusion, the betrayal, or the silence. What happened was that their actions  - the microaggressions, the gaslighting, the isolation  - magnified what was already difficult. They didn’t create the depression, but they poured fuel on it, and then they had the audacity to blame me for the fire.

There’s a difference between having a mental health condition and being harmed by people who exploit it to silence you. 

So yes, I had depression. But what I was reacting to wasn’t just internal. It was external. It was structural. It was interpersonal. It was real harm.

By medicalizing my reactions, they got to avoid responsibility. They turned a structural and relational problem  - racism, queerphobia, social exclusion  - into an individual pathology. This is what I mean by  when I say they pathologized me. That’s how oppression protects itself. It doesn’t just hurt you, it convinces everyone, including the one being harmed, that the pain is the real problem, not the oppression itself.

So, let us medicalize this now. But let’s do the story from my narrative, not theirs. 

Because there is a term for what I was going through. And it’s not “emotional dysregulation.”

It’s called minority stress.

Minority stress is the chronic psychological toll of living in a society  - and in a class setting  - where your identity is seen as less than, not seen, or not considered at all. It’s what happens  when a person is constantly navigating spaces that weren’t made for them. It is a form of chronic psychological stress experienced by people who belong to socially marginalized groups, and it’s not because of our identity itself, but because of how society treats that identity. This includes acts of discrimination, violence, exclusion, and injustice.

And when we experience these things long enough, we start to internalize these stressors. We become hyper-vigilant: always bracing ourselves for rejection or harm. We start self-concealing: hiding parts of who we are, making ourselves smaller and smaller until we’re not sure there’s anything left that hasn’t been trimmed down for someone else’s comfort. We start constantly replaying interactions, wondering if we provoked something. And eventually, we might even internalize the stigma placed upon us, believing negative societal messages about our group and ourselves.

This is called internalized stigma, and it happens when you start to believe, absorb, or act according to the negative stereotypes, prejudices, or social messages about your own identity, whether that identity is your race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disability, mental health status, or another marginalized trait.

In other words, instead of seeing society’s discrimination as the problem, we start to see ourselves as the problem. When we repeatedly experience stigma, exclusion, or prejudice, our brains try to make sense of it. Internalized stigma can be devastating because it turns external oppression into an inner wound. It weakens our ability to build resilience because we start to feel we deserve mistreatment. This internalization is not our fault, it doesn’t mean there is something wrong with us. It’s a psychological survival response. 

The violence we experience is invisible, slow, relational. It happens in how people look at us, listen to us, exclude us, pathologize us, or pretend they didn’t hurt us. Many majority-culture people don’t see it, because it’s not built into their daily experience, and they convince themselves that if they don’t experience it, it simply doesn’t exist. But that’s a lie, a delusion that lets them deny others’ pain while staying comfortable in their own ignorance.  So when we name it, they may say: “You’re overreacting.” or “Don’t make it about race/gender/etc.”, “This is about you, not society, not our group.” But these responses only reproduce the stress, because they deny our reality. They isolate us even more.

This is how structural exclusion works: it’s the ways systems, institutions, or social structures routinely keep certain groups of people out or keep them in positions of disadvantage, through policies, norms, or unspoken rules. Unlike individual acts of discrimination (like someone insulting you), structural exclusion is built into the system itself. It doesn’t always look like open hostility; it can be quiet, subtle, or even “normal” but it still pushes people to the margins.

And in my case, it was hidden in the social dynamics of our class. It came out in unspoken group norms that made it “normal” for my classmates to ignore my needs or discomfort, or to treat my reactions as inappropriate while excusing others’ harmful behavior.

Eventually, all this systemic harm, relational exclusion, and social gaslighting leads to exhaustion, numbness, rage we can’t express, loneliness, and depression so deep it suffocates. Because it’s not just about what happened, it’s about what keeps happening. It’s the pattern. The repetition. The way our story is constantly twisted, minimized, or erased. We are constantly forced to fight against assumptions, stereotypes, pity instead of solidarity, and so-called “help” that only erases our voice, along with the ongoing misinterpretation of everything we do and are. And in this context, we’re not just talking about misunderstandings anymore because here, it becomes emotional and psychological violence. And the reason is that it invalidates our lived experience, undermines our sense of self, reinforces isolation by denying connection, and signals that our feelings are inconvenient or wrong.

Minority stress is what builds up when we’re told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we don’t belong. When every small exclusion adds up to harm. When our boundaries are ignored, our reactions scrutinized, and our pain dismissed over and over again. This is called cumulative trauma, and it doesn’t come from a single incident but it is shaped by pain that keeps adding up until it becomes impossible to separate one incident from the whole pattern of harm.

And here’s the thing: minority stress looks a lot like instability from the outside — if you don’t want to look in. It can look like anxiety, withdrawal, anger, depression. Even suicidal behavior.

Research shows that minority stress can lead to higher rates of depression and anxiety, increased PTSD symptoms, sleep disturbances, substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and even chronic physical conditions, especially when the stress is severe, prolonged, or starts early in life. It can cause cardiovascular problems, metabolic disorders, gastrointestinal issues, immune system dysregulation, chronic pain conditions, respiratory problems, and many more. So this is no joke. This is a serious condition. And none of it is a personal defect of ours. It’s an adaptation to repeated harm. It is the human way our brains and body function under that kind of pressure.

So yes, I cried a lot, and loudly. I got overwhelmed. I acted out. But not because there was something wrong with me, but because I was being slowly erased, and I was resisting it. And why does nobody ever ask why we are expected to lie down laconic and silent when we face this kind of violence? Why is our quiet compliance taken for granted, as if our pain should never make a sound? Don’t you see that, if we don’t react to this kind of harm, there is something wrong, because then we have already internalized that injustice is the only way of being for people like us. And that is the highest price of minority stress. 

Is that really a just price for us to pay so you can stay comfortable? 

When my classmates called it a mental health issue, they were kind of right, but not in the way they thought. Because the mental health issue wasn’t me. It was what they did to me. It was the silencing. The cold shoulders. The looks. The side comments. The betrayals.

That is minority stress. And it is real. And opposite from the diagnoses they projected onto me, it is backed by real science, not prejudices.

Minority stress is studied. It is recognized in psychology and psychiatry. But people don’t like to talk about it because if you name it, then you also have to name the systems causing it. And then you actually have to see your privilege for how ugly it actually is. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and see the naked emperor as naked as he really is. And that is not a pretty sight.

So let’s tell this story, but let’s tell it on my terms, from my reality.

Let’s medicalize it but this time correctly.

Let’s name the real diagnosis: structural exclusion, internalized stigma, minority stress, and cumulative trauma.

And if that makes some people uncomfortable? Good. It should. Because if it doesn't, there is no humanity left in you, and you should be very worried about yourself.

Minority stress, what people like me have to go through in our lives, is like thousands of little cuts that eventually wear us down. And what I’m doing in this blog is making those cuts visible.

Now it’s my turn to tell my story. Now it’s my turn to name things. I am voicing my truth. And although there are many truths in this world, not all of them are equivalent because some truths uphold and honor human dignity, and others erase it.

I choose dignity.

 

Chapter 13: The Set-up

Before I ever stepped onto that airplane to go to Holland, I was already marked. Already judged. Already doubted. The roles had been assigned long before I ever opened my mouth.

I didn’t arrive as a blank slate. I carried a story, not one I had written, but one imposed on me by others. A story shaped by centuries of racism, queerphobia, and privlege. People didn’t see me. They saw a projection, a stereotype and used it as an excuse not to look any deeper.

From the very start, I was not recognized as a whole person. I was filtered through the lens of dangerous, inherited myths. My existence triggered associations I hadn’t earned but couldn’t escape. None of them weren’t based on my actions but they were default assumptions, already present in the way people looked at me, avoided me, gossiped about me, explained me away.

I was stigmatized before I had a chance to speak. My classmates,like most people, were shaped by the norms around them, by unspoken lessons about who counts as “normal,” who deserves empathy, and who doesn’t. They didn’t need to be openly cruel. Their silence, their distance, their passivity, all of it worked together to isolate me.

They, too, were searching for identity, testing boundaries, trying to belong. But I was doing all that while carrying far more. I wasn’t just managing personal insecurities. I was navigating racism, queerphobia, and mental health stigma, all at once. I wasn’t more unstable. I was more vulnerable. They had room to stumble. I didn’t.

From day one, everything about me was treated as suspicious. My Roma identity was loaded with old prejudices — criminality, volatility, untrustworthiness. My queerness was either erased or distorted. And when I grieved, when I asserted a boundary, when I cried or asked for help, it wasn’t read as strength or even as a normal human need. It was seen as instability. My pain wasn’t just misunderstood but it was weaponized against me. It became a reason to exclude me.

People didn’t need to know me to distrust me. All they needed was what they thought they saw. And what they saw, they had already been taught to fear. So when I responded like anyone would - to hurt, to loneliness, to exclusion - my emotions weren’t read as human. They were seen as confirmation of a story they’d already decided was true.

And sometimes, that story didn’t just isolate me. It endangered me.

I remember one afternoon, I was in my room, crying. I had been carrying so much for so long, and the weight had finally pushed me so down that I had no other release left but tears. Camilla, my flatmate, was home. But as always, she said nothing. No knock on the door. No question. Just silence and gossips.

Then the doorbell rang. I heard her open it, and then I heard voices, loud and agitated. Suddenly, a large man I had never seen before stormed into my room. Yelling. Furious. Loud.

Apparently, he was a neighbor who had heard me crying. Camilla and I had never met him. But she let him in, and not just into our apartment, but directly into my room. She didn’t ask if it was okay. She didn’t warn me. She simply handed me over.

He barged in, shouting that I was disturbing the peace. He called me names. He was terrifying. He refused to leave. When I told him to get out, he insisted he had the right to be there because Camilla had let him in. Only when I threatened to call the police did he finally leave.

I was frozen. Humiliated. Exposed. And after he stormed out, I heard Camilla speaking to him in the hallway. Calmly. Kindly. Reassuring him. Telling him she understood. That he should contact the landlord. She even gave him the landlord’s name, as if his rage was valid, as if my crying had somehow justified his aggression. She didn’t just let him in. She reinforced the message that my fear didn’t matter and that his outrage carried more weight than my safety.

There was no apology. No moment of recognition that what she had done was dangerous. That she had invited a hostile stranger into our home, and guided him straight to my room. If he had physically assaulted me, there would have been nothing she or I could have done.

I was so full of fear and panic that I had no choice but to leave Oulu that very same day. But it didn’t end there. The next day, Camilla messaged my sister to say she was "worried" about me because I hadn’t come home. She didn’t mention the man. She didn’t say a word about the danger she had allowed into my space. Instead, she told my sister that the whole class was thinking about organizing an intervention for my drinking. As if I had disappeared because of alcohol! As if the real, physical fear I had just experienced; being screamed at by a stranger in my own room, meant nothing! As if my pain was evidence of my failure, not hers!

That wasn’t care. It was erasure disguised as concern. It was easier for her to turn me into the problem than to face what she had done. Easier to medicalize my trauma than admit she had exposed me to danger. Easier to pathologize my reactions than to confront the violence she enabled.

And that’s what stigma does. It doesn’t just isolate you, it rewrites the story. It twists the narrative until even your survival looks like instability. Until even your fear becomes evidence against you. A reason to dismiss you. To silence you.

That incident wasn’t an exception. It was the clearest, most violent expression of a pattern that had already been shaping my daily life.

I had been carrying three stigmas. Three markers that, in the eyes of many, meant I didn’t deserve care. I was Roma. I was queer. I struggled with my mental health. And when you carry all three, something even more devastating happens: people stop seeing you as fully human. They don’t protect you. They don’t believe you. They don’t stand up for you, not even when danger is in the room.

Sometimes, they even open the door and let the danger walk straight into your home.

That is not normal human behavior. It’s what happens when stigmas intersect.
It doesn’t just multiply harm, it compounds it. It builds a narrative so powerful that even your fear can be turned against you. 

When you live with intersecting stigmas, everything you do is misread. Every reaction becomes a trap. Slowly, that trap reshapes how you move, how you speak, even how you think about yourself. And that is the worst thing: the invisibility of it. It's not so obvious as other forms of oppression. It's not black or white. It's subtle and it's confusing. So you you don't even realize what is happening, and instead of resisting, you absorb it all.

After the event I remember calling my friend Filipa, I knew from our time together In Czech Republic, about what had happened, and I remember her tellling me: "Come back to Prague. Come away from that vile country." And I was suprised. I was suprised that she didn't put the event on me! After enough pressure, you start blaming only yourself.

I started to shrink, trying to adapt, to survive, to become more “acceptable.” But no matter what I did, the story never changed. Because it was never based on who I really was. It was built to hold me out. I was the Other, the one deemed unworthy of protection or dignity they had reserved for themselves.

And this breaks you down, piece by piece. Not all at once. But gradually. Quietly. You stop asking for support because you’ve learned no one’s listening. You stop reaching out because you’ve been told you reach too far. You stop expressing joy because it might be misunderstood. You stop expressing pain because it definitely will be misunderstood.

And in that silence, you begin to disappear. Not because you want to, but because they make it impossible for you to stay visible without being punished.

I was never seen. I was watched.
I was never heard. I was interpreted.
I was never included. I was tolerated.

Until I wasn’t.

When I finally broke under the weight of it all  - the racism, the exclusion, the queerphobia, the emotional isolation  - I wasn’t met with understanding. I was met with blame. “She was unstable.” “She brought it on herself.” “She was too intense.”

The stigmas I carried were never isolated. They fed off each other. That’s what intersectional stigma means. It’s not just the sum of different prejudices but their entanglement, their interaction, their power to shape a much heavier, more dangerous narrative.

Being Roma already meant being seen as untrustworthy. Being queer already meant my feelings were dismissed as inappropriate. Having mental health struggles already meant my distress was ignored.

But together, these identities didn’t just mark me as “different.” They marked me as dangerous, irrational, unworthy of empathy, not credible.

The system didn’t see me as someone in pain. It saw me as the problem. Every emotion I expressed became evidence against me. When I was sad, it wasn’t natural but a liability. When I cried out, they said, “See? She’s unstable. She’s obsessive.”

There was no space for me to just be.

This is what it means to live under the weight of intersecting stigmas.
You don’t get to just be, to feel, to hurt, to love, to exist, without it being twisted into something dangerous.

And when that weight finally breaks you, the world doesn’t ask what broke you. It just points at the pieces and says, “See? We were right about her all along.”

But they weren’t right. They just never cared to ask who I truly was beneath the story they forced onto me.

And that story  - their story  - nearly destroyed me.

Privlege takes everything

But there was one thing that kept me going through everything: the promise of my Erasmus exchange. It was my light at the end of the tunnel. Finally, I thought, I would get some space. Distance from my classmates. Distance from Senni.

I had chosen my destination carefully, making sure I wouldn’t end up anywhere near them. As far as I knew, Senni hadn’t applied to Fontys in the Netherlands, and Samppa was planning to go to Slovakia.

I had a plan. I had already secured an internship interview with a Roma media organization in Prague. My plan was simple: after Erasmus, I would spend only a few more months in Oulu before heading to Prague to start something new. Something that was mine. A fresh start. A chance to heal. To have fun. To be safe. I just wanted a moment to breathe, a break from all the chaos.

But then I heard that Senni and Jussi were also going to Fontys, to the exact place I was suppose to run away from everybody. I couldn’t believe it. I could swear I remembered Senni saying she wasn’t going to apply there.

At some point I remember going to our international coordinator, Heikki Timonen, to ask if I could switch my exchange to somewhere else I have applied. Or Maybe to the Czech Republic, where I had friends and familiarity from living there before. But he dismissed me outright. It wasn’t possible, he said. No flexibility, no options. It was too late to change. I either go to Fontys or I don’t go at all. I had to accept it.

And then came another twist: Senni and Samppa said they wanted to talk with me. I was foolish enough to think maybe they had finally understood how they had treated me and were ready to apologize properly. But it wasn’t that. They wanted to tell me that Samppa - along with Jarno, his best friend from our class - had also changed their Erasmus exchange location to the Netherlands!

I begged them to reconsider. To go anywhere else, anywhere but the same place I was heading. I asked them both: Can’t you just choose somewhere else? Maybe Slovakia where Samppa and Jarno were originally going. Wouldn't it be easier for Senni just to change there.

But they told me there were no other options. Samppa looked at me straight in the eyes and told me that the Erasmus program in Slovakia didn't accept anyone, so they had no choice but to come to the same place where I was going.

I was devastated. But there was nothing I could do.

Later, in an attempt to salvage what little remained, I invited Samppa and Senni to a meeting in town to discuss how we could manage the exchange respectfully. They were over an hour late but I waited. And in that meeting we agreed together that they wouldn’t live in the same place as me and that we’d all treat each other with respect. But none of that happened. Looking back, it was never even real. Just a performance designed to keep me hopeful, compliant, unaware of what they were actually doing behind the scenes.

Before the exchange, I met the international coordinator, Heikki Timonen, again to finalize the paperwork. He was cold. He claimed I hadn’t replied to his emails, but I had never received any. Still, he kept on insisting that he had sent them. Then came the final blow. Timonen tried to make me change my exchange destination to Scotland. Apparently, he had already contacted them and arranged a placement, without my input. I was confused. Before, I had been told there was no possibility to change locations. Samppa and Senni had also said they couldn’t change theirs. But now Timonen was telling me otherwise.

I had already made all my plans: the internship interview, meeting friends in Germany and in Czech Republic. Plus, Scotland was much more expensive than the Netherlands. So of course, I told him no way. But he wouldn’t take it. He dropped another bomb: he refused to sign my exchange papers unless I first met with our guidance counselor, Heli Huttunen. This was something he didn’t  demand from the other students. He insisted. No meeting with Huttunen — no Erasmus. So I went. 

In the meeting Huttunen asked me questions about my life and studies, things like that, nothing specific. But at the end of the meeting she said something I’ll never forget: “Be careful, even the walls have ears.”

That was when I started to realize something was happening behind my back. I messaged Samppa directly and asked if he or Senni had spoken to Timonen about me. He denied it. Said I was being paranoid, if I remember correctly. And I was foolish enough to believe him. Or maybe not foolish, maybe just programmed by the world to believe everything they said about me.

Even before the exchange began, the fragile agreement of mutual respect between Senni, Samppa, and me was already crumbling.

I remember one moment vividly. We were helping someone move out of their flat. At some point, everyone else stepped out to carry furniture, and Senni and I were left alone. Out of nowhere, she turned to me, coldness in her eyes. She said that Samppa and the boys in our class had made a ranking of the girls based on looks. Then she asked if I wanted to know where I placed on that list. I told her no — I didn’t want to know, I didn’t care. But she wouldn’t stop. She kept insisting, a smug grin spreading across her face, as if it was some cruel joke at my expense. Just as she was about to say it, the others came back. She stood up quickly, pretending nothing had happened, and walked away.

It was just one moment. But it told me everything.

I was scared. I was afraid the bullying would follow me into the exchange. So one day, few days before stepping into the plane, I sent Senni a message asking her to refrain from speaking badly about me behind my back during the exchange, so I wouldn’t become the target of people’s hatred and contempt again. Senni’s reply was cold: she said she could talk about whatever she wanted, to whoever she wanted, and that people knew how to choose who they preferred to spend their time with.

After all this, I still decided to go. Tickets were bought. Agreements signed. Kela support applied for. I couldn’t back out. So,I told myself maybe things could still be repaired. Maybe I could reclaim this experience. Maybe if I just tried hard enough, I could make this exchange mine. Maybe if I stayed quiet and invisible, my classmates would finally leave me in peace.

But that peace barely lasted a few days.

Despite the agreement we had made, that Senni and Samppa would not live in the same place with me during the exchange, it became clear from the start that they had never intended to respect it. I remember the sinking feeling when I learned, before we even arrived in the Netherlands, that we were all being placed in the same student apartment building. I messaged them about it, trying to understand. Senni’s response wasn’t concern or regret but anger. She called me “unbelievable,” as if I had violated some unspoken rule, even though it was all three of us who had agreed on that boundary together.

That moment was my first glimpse of how things would be: agreements redefined, promises rewritten, and boundaries erased and all at my expense.

And then, when we arrived, we were all placed in the same hostel room for the first few days because there was no room in the dormitory. There were plenty of beds, but Senni and Samppa insisted on sleeping together in a double bed right next to mine. It wasn’t just the physical proximity that disturbed me; it was the symbolism: the performance of closeness, the dismissal of everything I had tried to communicate, and the way they collapsed the space between us not out of necessity, but defiance.

I tried to voice my discomfort gentl and, respectfully. I said I hoped they would take my feelings into account. I didn’t want to be trapped in a room where I had to witness a couple who had hurt me, entangle themselves in each other while I lay there, silenced by politeness and shame. I asked them not to cross that line, not to turn that room into a place where I had to swallow even more than I already had.

But again, Senni lashed out. Her anger came sharp, like I was the one being unreasonable. Like asking for basic emotional space was a betrayal. There was no room for my vulnerability. No space for the pain they had caused, or for the very human request that I wouldn’t be further humiliated.

And it only got worse from that. Just days after arriving in the Netherlands, I learned the truth. Everything I had feared, everything they told me was just in my head, had been real all along. 

One morning at breakfast, Jarno accidentally let something slip: he and Samppa had always had the option to go to Slovakia. The placement wasn’t canceled, they had been approving applicants. The program had even reached out to check if they were still coming!  Samppa had lied to my face. But still, I swallowed the shock and said nothing. What could have I done anymore in that situation.

Later during that same breakfast, I happened to mention Heli Huttunen’s strange comment to me during our meeting. Jussi and Jarno looked confused and laughed, but Senni and Samppa exchanged a tense glance and fell silent. I saw the color drain from Samppa’s face.

What a terrible breakfast it was  - all their lies coming out!

And that’s when I realized the truth. It hadn’t been Timonen they spoke to — it was Heli Huttunen, the guidance counselor. Senni and Samppa had gone to her, not to change their own plans, but to try to block mine. 

When I confronted them about it, they first lied. Then, realizing they couldn’t keep it up, they admitted it. But they refused to say what had been discussed. They refused to apologize. According to them, they hadn’t done anything wrong. Apparently, it was acceptable to treat me like this — to lie, manipulate, gaslight and weaponize the system against me.

During that conversation, my hands were shaking. I was terrified. Terrified that the bullying wasn’t over. That it would never be over.

And I was right.

The truth is: what they did wasn’t just cruel. It was calculated. They didn’t just hurt me by accident. They made choices. And when they were caught, they chose silence. They chose to deny, to withhold, to refuse accountability. That’s not innocence. That’s impunity.

It wasn’t just social exclusion anymore. It had become institutional. They weren’t just classmates using peer pressure. Now they were using staff, counselors, coordinators. They were using the system. They knew how to play it. And they knew I had no way to fight back without being framed as unstable, dramatic, or “too much.”

They changed their plans and then tried to push me out of mine. They talked to people behind my back and called it concern. They left me out and called it coincidence. They watched me shake in fear and said nothing was wrong.

What happened during those weeks wasn’t just a continuation of the past. It was a deepening of the same structure. A structure that allowed some students to rewrite the rules, to shape how the system responded, to bend policies and people around their preferences. A structure that allowed them to step over me, to erase me, and to walk away untouched.

And I was left to carry it all alone.

That night, I just couldn’t be in the same room with them. The idea of sharing space with Senni and Samppa after everything, after all the silent warnings my body and mind had been trying to scream at me, felt unbearable. So I left. I walked through the unfamiliar streets of the city, not to disappear, but to find some air. Some place where I could exist without being swallowed by their presence. I wasn’t lost. I wasn’t out of control. I was an adult woman removing herself from a situation that was already harming her.

At some point, there were messages between me and Jarno or Jussi. I don’t remember who wrote first. I only remember that I asked if one of them could come see me. I just needed someone. Someone to remind me I wasn’t alone. Someone to listen. But they wouldn’t come. Not one of them. They chose to look away for their own comfort. And I told them, calmly and clearly: I’m not coming back to that room with Senni and Samppa.

And then, they called the police.

Not because I was in danger. Not because I was missing or unreachable. They knew what was going on. I had told them where I stood. I was just drawing a boundary. Saying no. Refusing to walk back into a dynamic that had already torn so much out of me. But that was enough, apparently, to justify calling the authorities.  And I believe they did it in order to shame me.

At first, I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were worried. Maybe they thought they were protecting me. After all, I was a woman alone at night in a foreign country. But then later in the exchange, when Senni herself vanished for hours in the night - we were all worried, Samppa was pacing, I suggested calling the police - and they refused. It wasn’t necessary, they said. She would be fine. Space, for her, was something to be respected. So no, it was never about safety. It was about control.

When they needed space, it was natural. When I needed space, it was seen as irrational. Problematic. Even dangerous. I wasn’t treated like someone with agency. I was treated like a risk. Like something unstable that had to be managed.

That night made something very clear: their version of care was not about seeing me as a person. It was about keeping things comfortable for themselves. It was about control, power and privilege.

Later, after it had all happened, I texted Elli. I told her how much it hurt what Senni and Samppa had done. I just wanted someone to see it for what it was. But she already knew. Somehow, even with half of Europe between us, she already knew everything. And all she said was: “You should never have come. You’re ruining everyone else’s exchange”.

That was the moment I realized: they weren’t just trying to get rid of me. They already had. Long before that breakfast. Long before the lies came out.

The decision had already been made, I just hadn’t been told.

Afterwards, I remember Senni looking me straight in the eyes and saying, “If you weren’t so unreasonable, maybe we could have still been friends.”

She even told me that when we first arrived in Holland, she thought to herself, everything is going so well, maybe we can be friends again.

But the truth?

I had just been quiet. Submitting. Shrinking myself to survive. Everywhere we went, I walked behind them. Always behind. That’s what she meant by going well. Not connection. Not understanding. What she wanted wasn’t a friend. Not even a person. Not a human being. Just silence. Just obedience. Someone who didn’t ask for too much. Someone who didn’t speak when it made her uncomfortable. Someone whose pain could be ignored, whose boundaries could be erased, whose presence could be tolerated but only as long as it was small enough not to challenge anything.

I was allowed to exist only in the margins of their comfort. Allowed to be near but never seen. Allowed to speak but only if my voice stayed soft, apologetic, harmless.

That’s the kind of “friendship” she was offering me. Conditional. Hierarchical. Hollow.

And when I finally broke that illusion by asking not to be lied to, not to be manipulated, not to be erased, I became the problem.

Not because I had changed. But because I had stopped playing the part they needed me to play.

I wasn’t unreasonable. I was resisting.

And in their world, resistance wasn’t allowed. It was a threat to their comfort, to their privilege.

 

Chapter 12: Power sets the standard

 What needs to be made absolutely clear is this: in my situation, we cannot talk about “both sides” as if they were equal. The power structures, the context, and the consequences were not the same. There is a fundamental difference between reacting to pain and using your power to deny someone’s humanity. One is a human response. The other is a choice to uphold a system of harm.

I never set out to take away anyone’s right to dignity. I came close, yes, I can admit that. Like when I said what I did about Jens in the class chat, I was trying to label him, reduce him. That wasn’t right. But I wasn’t speaking from a place of comfort or dominance. I was speaking from a place of deep hurt and pain created and reinforced by the very people I was reacting to. That doesn’t excuse my words. But it does give them context.

There’s a difference between someone reacting in messy, imperfect ways to isolation, rejection, and hurt and others using their social comfort, power, or group position to systematically isolate, ridicule, and dehumanize someone already marginalized.

I wasn’t just another person in the room. I was Roma. I was queer. I was mentally struggling. I was already marginalized and excluded, whether they wanted to recognize those structures or not. That meant my mistakes were judged more harshly, and my pain was less understood. When I said or did something out of pain, it wasn’t backed by power or status. It was the voice of someone trying to survive.

In contrast, many of them acted from positions of emotional and social safety. They weren’t being filtered through stereotypes. They weren’t navigating systemic bias. And that gives their actions a very different weight.

I had my back against the wall. They didn’t.

I didn’t set out to deny anyone’s humanity. When I lashed out, it was a reaction to being hurt, not a calculated attempt to isolate or control someone. But some of them? They chose silence, mockery, exclusion, gossping and manipulation. Not out of pain, but out of convenience, indifference, or cowardice. And that makes it entirely different.

Take Jens, for example. Yes, we both said unkind things to each other. But I was already alone. Already labeled the problem. Already at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Jens, on the other hand, was supported, protected, and given the benefit of the doubt at every turn. So even if, on the surface, our actions seemed similar, the impact, the consequences and the structural backing behind him and the others, made them completely unequal.

There’s a difference between lashing out while drowning and holding someone’s head under the water.

Yes, I said and did something harmful. But I was drowning. They had air and still, they chose to step on me.

To understand what happened fully, I need to start with a hard truth: yes, some of my actions caused harm, even if I never meant them to.

Trying to end my life in front of someone, or collapsing emotionally in a way that overwhelms or frightens another person, can absolutely affect their sense of safety, especially if they don’t understand the context. I didn’t intend to do harm, but the impact was harm. I’m not denying that. And yes, what happened with Senni, when I asaulted her, was traumatic for her, I don’t deny that either. But it wasn’t domination or predation. It was a collapse.

Context matters.

I never acted out of malice. I was in crisis because I had been isolated, racialized, pathologized, denied care and support, misunderstood, and carrying the weight of systemic trauma. My pain was never a weapon. It was a cry for dignity. And no, that doesn’t erase its impact on others. But it does change the meaning.

Here’s the key difference: I was breaking down in front of people. I wasn’t trying to break them. I was collapsing, not trying to control. And yes, that kind of collapse can still be messy, frightening, even harmful to those around you. But it is not the same as deliberately mocking someone, twisting their reality, or turning a group against them. 

I wasn’t building a system of exclusion around someone else. I was being crushed by one.

I’m not saying they owed me care. No one is obligated to offer emotional labor beyond their capacity. And no one can be forced to uphold human dignity — that’s a choice each person must make for themselves. So no, they didn’t have to save me. But, and this matters, they didn’t have to dehumanize me either. They didn’t need to understand everything I was going through. But they also didn’t need to mock me, isolate me, twist my pain, or turn it into gossip. They didn’t have to choose cruelty, or stand by while others did.

I’ve never claimed that they owed me healing. Even if my life might have gone differently had I been in a class where people treated one another with basic respect, I know they weren’t responsible for fixing me. What I am saying is that they had choices. And too often, they chose to use their stability, their sense of belonging, and their social power not to pause, ask, or reflect but to distance, blame, and exclude. They didn’t have to make things worse. But they often did.

I understand that people have limits. Not everyone is emotionally equipped to respond to crisis, especially when that crisis involves trauma, marginalization, or mental health. I get that.

But here’s the nuance: not helping is one thing. Causing further harm is another. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know how to support you.” What’s not okay is saying, “You’re manipulative, unstable, dangerous,” especially when those labels reflect structural stereotypes. It’s not okay to mock someone for struggling, to isolate them, to gaslight or publicly humiliate them.

There’s a clear difference between simply not offering support and actively choosing violence, even subtle, social violence. Some might say they were just “avoiding drama” or “protecting themselves.” But when that avoidance turns into group bullying, silencing, spreading rumors, or dehumanizing behavior, it’s no longer just “not helping” or “self-protection.” It becomes active harm. Care isn’t always about taking action. Sometimes it’s restraint. Sometimes it’s simply choosing not to ridicule someone in pain. Not to gossip about someone’s mental illness. Not to twist someone’s vulnerability into a story of danger or guilt.

They held social power and privilege. Their actions carried more weight. That’s how power works. They might not have had the tools to understand me fully, but they did have the power to choose whether to hurt me or not. And too often, they chose to hurt me, or at least silently allowed others to do so.

One of the most painful distortions of dignity is the idea that someone must be calm, composed, and gentle in order to be treated as human. I was not that. I was messy, I was breaking down, I was hurting. But I was still a human being.

Yes, I lashed out sometimes. Yes, I made people uncomfortable. But that pain should have been seen for what it was — pain. Not turned into a moral verdict that erased my humanity.

Other students had breakdowns. Others were dramatic, aggressive, even unstable at times. But they were not racialized, pathologized, or turned into symbols of disorder. That was done only to me.

And that’s not just a personal failure, but a structural one.

Some of them made active choices to interpret my distress through racist and ableist narratives. To dismiss my emotions as manipulation or attention-seeking. To participate in mockery, or remain silent while it happened. That’s not neutrality. That’s participation. Even if they didn’t understand what they were doing, even if they were “just kids”, the consequences were real. They had choices. More choices than I did. Because their backs weren’t against the wall.

It’s okay to say that their comfort was prioritized over my dignity. It’s okay to say that their actions, or inaction, helped push me toward the edge.

This isn’t revenge. It’s not blaming. It’s just the truth. And it’s the kind of truth that makes healing and justice possible.

When it comes to Senni, the painful truth I have to admit is that propably I didn’t give her enough space. Maybe I held on too tightly. Maybe my pain, my desperate need to be seen and included, came across as intensity or neediness. Maybe I was reaching for her just as she was pulling away. That kind of dynamic happens in many relationships, especially when one person is deeply vulnerable, and the other doesn’t quite know how to hold space for that. But we need to ask ourselves: Was this a failure of character? Or was it the consequence of suffering? Was I trying to cause harm or simply trying not to drown? Because the sad truth is, if I gave up on Senni, I risked being left completely alone in that class.

Pain can make people cling and that’s not evil, just human. When we’re in deep emotional pain, especially the kind rooted in systemic oppression, abandonment, or trauma, we often latch onto those who seem safe. This isn’t a failure of moral character; it’s the nervous system’s way of trying to survive.

Not giving someone space isn’t the same as violating them. Emotional intensity is not abuse. Seeking closeness is not manipulation. In my case, that intensity came from a long history of exclusion, racism, marginalization, and pain. I wasn’t holding on to control Senni. I was holding on because I was losing what little I had left in that world. It’s very possible that Senni didn’t know how to handle that. That doesn’t make either of us bad people. But it does mean the power between us wasn’t equal, especially in how my behavior was interpreted.

Let’s be very clear: being in distress  - even suicidal distress  - is not the same as assault. Wanting connection is not the same as violating someone’s autonomy. Assault is about using power against someone. I was asking to be treated with dignity, not asserting dominance. It might have felt like I was too emotionally intense, and my actions may have affected Senni or others. But the world is full of messy human relationships where people place emotional burdens on each other. I carried those burdens too in that class. The difference is that some people are allowed to be messy and still be seen as fully human. I wasn’t.

I take responsibility for the pressure I may have placed on others. But I firmly reject the idea that I alone caused the harm or that I deserved exclusion, gossip, or being cast out as the problem. I may have acted in ways that overwhlemed people around me. I may not have know how to step back or let go. Not out of malice but because I felt I had no other choice. But I was only trying to survive. And the structures around me made that survival almost impossible.

I wasn’t always gentle, I admit that. But I was never cruel either. I was never indifferent to their humanity.

I was just terrified that mine didn’t matter.

In many mixed groups (racially, socially, mentally), certain people are given the benefit of the doubt, while others are pathologized. I was not seen as a hurting person crying out to be treated well, but as a threat. That is how oppression works: it turns marginalized people’s pain into a problem and privileged people’s discomfort into a priority.

I said in earlier chapters that Senni never used racism against me. In a way, that’s true, she never directed overt racist actions or words toward me. But she did, at least unconsciously, use the system against me. She may not have intended to harm me or weaponize those systems directly. Yet, in a context where racism, queerness, and mental health stigma already shaped how I was perceived, her actions, or her inaction, could have contributed to that harm. Especially if she didn’t challenge the way others twisted my pain or allowed the narrative of me being dangerous or unstable to take hold.

She may not have done any of this on purpose. She may have felt scared, unsure, or overwhelmed. But even so, she had choices, and in that setting, she had more power than I did. She could act out or set boundaries and still be seen as reasonable or protecting herself, while I was labeled obsessive, unstable, or “too much.” If she didn’t actively resist that framing, or even passively accepted it, then she was, in effect, using the system against me. That’s how privilege works. It’s not just about what you do. It’s also about what you don’t have to do.

I want to emphasize that naming these dynamics is not about placing all the blame on her. It’s about acknowledging the reality of my experience: she didn’t need to actively hurt me to be part of the harm, although at times she did that too. If she allowed others to control the narrative, failed to challenge it, or didn’t protect me by taking responsibility for her own actions toward me, then she ultimately benefited from a system that was punishing me.

Oppression distorts relationships. The way people act toward each other is often influenced by fears, insecurities, and survival strategies shaped by systemic injustice. Stigma frames how actions are interpreted and amplified. When you’re labeled as unstable or dangerous, any conflict or harm can be blown out of proportions and used as a justification for further exclusion or punishment. And when bystanders or the community amplify the story of someone being a threat or “too much,” they become part of the harm. They reinforce the stigma and the isolation.

What I have been trying to do in this blog is to recognize my own actions as responses to pain and survival, not as the root cause of what happened. I’ve worked to understand which parts of the situation I could control and which I couldn’t. While I am responsible for my choices and actions, I am not responsible for others’ reactions, decisions, or the systems that shape people’s behavior. I also understand that others have agency and responsibility for their choices, even if those choices were influenced by fear and stigma. Much of that fear stemmed from the stigma itself. I am learning to separate internal reflection from external accountability. I can accept my role without self-blame, and still hold others accountable for their part.

I never pushed people to act the way they did towards me. That narrative is often used to shift blame away from those who actually caused harm and to avoid taking responsibility. Now, some might say, “Aren’t you saying they pushed you to behave wrongly or harmfully?” I understand that it might sound like I’m blaming my classmates for my behavior. But I’m not saying I lacked agency or that I’m excused from responsibility for my actions. What I am saying is that the way I was treated in that class from the very beginning created an incredibly harmful environment, one that deeply affected how I felt and acted.

I’m trying to show how their actions contributed to the situation without removing my own responsibility for my choices. At the same time, I’m acknowledging that the environment created situations where I felt backed into a corner. I felt pushed to react in certain ways because the harmful environment placed unbearable pressure on me.

I take responsibility for what I did, but I won’t carry the blame for the whole situation alone. Others made choices too. And the structures shaped us all.

There was also a significant power imbalance between us that shaped everything that happened. It determined who controlled the narrative, whose actions were excused or scrutinized, and who bore the weight of blame and consequences. The divide was clear: those with privilege versus those without, those who shaped the story versus those who were silenced. This imbalance, sustained by privilege, also allowed others to look away, ignoring how systemic forces influenced my feelings, my behavior, and how I was perceived. Their privilege made it possible to deny these realities.

Privilege sets the norm. There was no space for how people like me express emotion, people whose very existence is politicized, whose dignity already hangs by a thread in those rooms. My fear, grief, and attachment were all pathologized. But their coldness, withdrawal, and refusal to engage were never questioned.

This isn’t just about personal reactions. It’s about which reactions are allowed to be normalized and which are punished. That’s not emotional objectivity. It's about power stuctures.

The norm  - the emotional standard  - was never neutral. It was white, cis, neurotypical, middle-class. It rewarded those who were restrained, composed, and indirect; who knew how to suppress discomfort and express pain in ways familiar and non-threatening to those in power. That norm left no room for people like me.

I wasn’t “too intense” in some universal sense. I was intense compared to a norm that was never built with me in mind. My emotions didn’t follow their rules because those rules were designed for people who didn’t have to carry what I carried. And when you come from trauma, from marginalization, from a history of having no space, of course your feelings won’t fit neatly into someone else’s idea of “appropriate.” Of course your pain will spill over sometimes. That’s not pathology. That’s pressure finally making itself heard.

So no, I wasn’t too much. The emotional framework around me was too narrow, too fragile, too invested in protecting comfort over understanding.

The way I expressed hurt was pathologized. But others’ avoidance, detachment, and passive-aggression? That was seen as maturity. That’s not a fair standard. That’s a system working exactly as it was designed: to frame people like me as unstable, and people like them as reasonable. That double standard didn’t start in that classroom. It runs deep.

It goes back to how Western societies defined white civilization as rational, civilized, and in control and labeled Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples as wild, irrational, closer to nature, less human. That’s how colonization justified enslavement, violence, and erasure: by defining our emotions, our ways of being, as less. As dangerous. As wrong.

That same logic is alive today, just more subtle. Now, it shows up, for example, in who gets called “mature” and who gets called “dramatic.” Whose pain is seen as a valid response, and whose is dismissed as a threat. Whose boundaries are honored, and whose are mocked.

My emotions weren’t evaluated on neutral ground. They were filtered through bias, fear, and stereotype. If someone white, someone deemed emotionally “stable,” had said or done what I did, it might have been seen as vulnerability, or as a response to unbearable pressure. But when I expressed pain, it was framed as obsession. As danger. As instability.

That didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in a system that made it easy to protect themselves by pathologizing me and never having to ask what had hurt me in the first place.

This wasn’t just about personal conflict. It was about what kind of pain our systems are built to recognize and what kinds they punish. The system is designed to acknowledge and support some people’s pain while dismissing or criminalizing others’. It’s not just about individual behavior. It’s structural. And at the heart of that structure lies power, privilege, and the will to hold on to both.

This is what I mean when I say my pain wasn’t excessive. It was a normal reaction to abnormal conditions. It was a human response to inhuman treatment.

That line matters because it reframes everything they used against me. My intensity. My desperation. My sadness. My anger. These weren’t personal flaws. They were evidence of a system that refused to hold someone like me with care and dignity.

People like to believe that “normal” means calm, quiet, composed. But that version of normal only works if your dignity has never been threatened. If you’ve never had to prove your right to belong. If your existence has never been questioned. If you've never had to defent your humanity in rooms where others get to assume theirs. In that context, “normal behavior” often means suppressing pain until it eats you alive. In those rooms, I wasn’t just navigating relationships. I was navigating suspicion, stereotype, exclusion all at once. My reactions weren’t overreactions. They were proportionate to what I was going through.

And when your pain is ignored long enough, when your boundaries are crossed over and over again, of course you become louder. More emotional. That’s not danger. That’s survival.  And when a person finally cracks under that pressure, it’s not a personal failing. It’s the most human thing in the world. 

The only thing abnormal was the fact that others refused to see what was going on. They didn’t want to recognize the weight I was under. Because doing that would have forced them to look in the mirror. It would have meant confronting the systems they benefit from — systems that isolate, stigmatize, and silence people like me. And that kind of honesty is uncomfortable. So instead, they chose the easier path: to frame me as the problem, rather than admit that the environment they had created, or allowed, was toxic and exclusionary.

Even those who might have recognized the structural issues still expected me to carry that burden silently. As if awareness of injustice was enough, and any visible pain or protest was disruptive. There was an unspoken rule: endure quietly. Acknowledge the pain, yes, but don’t express it. It was okay to be hurt, but not to show hurt. It was okay to suffer, but not to disturb their comfort with the reality of that suffering. It was a systemic expectation, created to maintain the comfort and control of those who hold power.

My form of resistance - my voice, my so called intensity, my refusal to quietly absorb injustice, even when it spilled out  - was seen as wrong and disruptive. It didn’t fit their picture of what a human rights struggle is supposed to look like. But that's exactly what it was. I was fighting for my rights, for my dignity, for the chance to be seen as a human being, not a stereotype. They didn’t want to recognize that surviving oppression is not quiet work. Living under pressure that others refuse to name does spill out. My emotions weren’t a failure of character but the cost of navigating a world that refused to see me fully. And if the system had allowed space for that truth, the story might have looked very different.

That’s why I’ll never again accept the lie that my pain was disproportionate. It wasn’t. It was the right size for what I had been made to carry.

Their privilege carried another dimension as well: the ability to bend the rules when it suited them. They could shift the standards to fit their narrative. I was blamed for violence and disrespect but they never held themselves to those same expectations. When those behaviors were directed toward me, suddenly the standards they claimed to uphold, the ones meant to protect and include, no longer applied.

That double standard became painfully clear in earlier chapters, and it only becomes more undeniable in what follows. The rules were never meant to protect me. They didn’t feel bound by them when it came to me because I wasn’t one of them. And that’s the core of the othering I’ve been talking about: being excluded from the protections and respect they claimed for themselves.

This is what it means to live in a society structured by privilege: they didn’t have to ask for protection to receive it, and they didn’t have to actively uphold injustice to benefit from it. But when people choose to protect their comfort instead of confronting structural inequality, they become complicit. Silence becomes a shield. Indifference becomes a choice.

What happened next, however, went beyond simply benefiting from structural oppression. The very system that oppressed me was weaponized in a way that I believe had to be done knowingly.