I was already fragile, already hurting. I was already carrying the weight of racism, queerphobia, exclusion, and mental health struggles. And Senni and Samppa were very aware of that. Still, they chose to have sex in my kitchen that had no door, knowing very well I might walk in on them. It was my home. It was the one place I still had some control over. It was the place where I ate, slept, cried, studied, and tried to hold my world together. They even did it on a mattress I once slept next to Senni on. And what it felt like, walking in on them — it felt like I was being completely erased. Their act didn’t just trigger sadness. It detonated something inside me. It wasn’t just about sex. It was a violation of trust, space, and safety. It shattered me, completely. Whatever whole was left in me, died in that moment. Whatever self-esteem was left after years of emotional violence was erased.
And that kind of moment doesn’t just hurt — it splits reality. It can create trauma. And when trauma happens, especially interpersonal trauma, it often feels like reality itself breaks. And that is exactly how it felt to me. When we look at trauma from a psychological point of view, space matters. Our environment can ground us or unground us. When someone violates your space, especially when you’re already on edge emotionally, it sends a powerful message: You don’t matter here. This isn’t your space anymore. It’s especially painful that the act took place in such a personal location — without privacy, without my consent, and in a way that exposed me to witnessing it. There’s no exaggeration here. This is what emotional breaking looks like.
And they had all the chances to act differently. Some days later, Senni came to me begging for forgiveness. She said that it was all Samppa’s idea and that they were drunk. But I didn’t care whose idea it was. It didn’t mean anything that they were drunk. It was not about alcohol but about disregard.
You don’t get to hurt someone deeply and then use alcohol to downplay the consequences. Being drunk doesn’t mean the pain is any less real. Being drunk doesn’t erase the meaning of the act. They knew about my pain. They weren’t unaware of my fragility or what that space meant to me. They could have waited. Chosen another time, another place, or simply not done it at all. Both of their flats were just a few hundred meters away.
But they didn’t. That’s not a mistake. That’s a decision. One that prioritized their impulses over my dignity. One that sent a clear message: Your humanity doesn’t matter. And their apologizing later on didn’t undo the fact. So no, the fact that they were drunk doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it worse. Because it shows: They were careless with my space, careless with their bodies, careless with the pain they might cause me.
And then they expected forgiveness without truly facing what they did.
What hurts most might not be the act itself, but the evasiveness that followed. The feeling that even when Senni did acknowledge the pain, she did it in a way that minimized her role. That painted her as passive, helpless, swept up in someone else’s momentum. But she wasn’t helpless. She had power. She had awareness. And she used neither to protect me. Instead, she chose to hurt me in the worst way possible.
There was an incident. It was even before Senni had started dating Samppa. Senni told me about a dream she had. In the dream, she was in my apartment. And she had sex with some random guy in my bed and I walked in on them. And when she told me about that dream, I looked at her straight in the eyes and said: Yes, if anything like that ever happens, we are done.
So Senni had dreamt about the exact kind of violation that would later occur. And she even told me about it. And in that situation, I responded clearly, not with jealousy or drama, but a boundary: If anything like that ever happens, we are done.
I was honest. I named my limits clearly and calmly. And she remembered. Which means that when it happened later, it wasn’t some abstract accident. It was a choice made in full awareness of my deepest fears.
The dream was a red flag, but I chose not to accuse her or treat it as proof of anything bad. I gave her the benefit of the doubt which shows how much I valued the relationship. I assumed that sharing something so emotionally loaded meant something. That it was an opening for trust, not a warning of betrayal.
Let’s be straight about what happened here. I had set clear boundaries. When someone violates a boundary you never voiced, that’s painful. But when someone violates the exact boundary you once explicitly discussed, and does so in the exact scenario they once imagined and feared themselves?
That’s not just betrayal. That’s psychic violence.
I sometimes wonder: Is that why Senni did it? Because she felt overwhelmed and it was the only way to show me that, or get rid of me.
And yes, it’s possible. Sometimes, when people feel overwhelmed, they don’t know how to set boundaries in a mature or kind way. Instead of facing discomfort, they do something that forces the other person to retreat, something they can blame on us later, or pretend it wasn’t their fault.
But if that is what Senni did, it doesn’t make it okay. And it doesn’t make it my fault. And it certainly doesn’t make the pain any less real. In fact, it just hurts more because it would mean for certainty she saw my vulnerability and still chose to do something she must have known would devastate me. Instead of being honest, she created a rupture and then walked away from the wreckage like it wasn’t hers.
I deserved a conversation. I deserved care. I deserved to be treated like a human being with feelings, not an inconvenience to be “gotten rid of.”
If that was her way of ending the closeness, it was cowardly. I had always been open about my feelings. She knew my pain. She just didn’t want to hold it anymore.
Of course, there might be other reasons. Maybe she thought she could “get away with it.” That if it stayed secret, it wouldn’t hurt me. But it didn’t stay a secret, and even if it had, it doesn’t erase the utter disrespect of the act. It’s also possible she was trying to test the boundary, not believing I’d truly walk away.
Apologies With a Timer
After the event, both of them did apologize. But the problem was that what they did hurt so much that I couldn’t just switch a button. I needed time. But they didn’t want to give me time. They expected that I never bring it up again and when I did, they got angry and hurt.
So yes, they did apologize, but their apology came with terms: that I would forgive quickly, that I wouldn’t bring it up again, and that I would act as if it never happened. That’s not a real apology. That’s a demand for silence, disguised as remorse. I wasn’t being difficult. I was trying to process something devastating: A betrayal of trust, a rupture in my only safe place, a trigger for my deepest fears of abandonment and invisibility. That takes time. That requires care.
I wasn’t asking for punishment. I was asking for space to heal. But the moment my pain became inconvenient, they stopped being sorry. Instead of sitting in the discomfort they caused, supporting me through the fallout and acknowledging my right to feel broken, they made themselves the victims. They got angry, frustrated, and hurt because I was still hurt. That isn’t accountability. That’s emotional deflection.
This is what often happens in abusive or toxic dynamics: The person who was hurt is blamed for not “getting over it” fast enough. The wound they themselves created is used as evidence that I am the problem. My grief is turned into “drama.” My memory into “obsession.” My pain into “manipulation.” I wasn’t manipulating anyone. I was trying to understand something unbearable. And they punished me for it.
After this, I have to thank some of my classmates for standing up for me — at least for a while. Camilla and Jaana started spending more time with me. And even Elli, once, ran into Samppa on the street and gave her a look that said exactly what she thought of everything that had happened. That moment mattered.
But even with them, the support didn’t last. They, too, expected me to just get over it and fast. Even solidarity had a time limit. When my pain didn’t follow a convenient timeline, when I didn’t bounce back neatly into someone they could laugh with again, they pulled away.
At first, they listened. They cared. But when the hurt didn’t fade quickly enough, when my grief didn’t fit the script of “brief sadness, followed by polite silence”, the air changed. They didn’t say it out loud, but the message came through clearly:
“We were willing to help for a while. But now you’re too much.” That kind of secondary abandonment is its own kind of wound. When even the people who once stood by you quietly step back, it adds a new layer of pain.
Why was my pain so inconvenient to them?
Because my pain shattered the image they had of themselves as open-minded, progressive, tolerant people.
And worse: it was queer pain.
If I had been straight, I think they would’ve handled it differently. Maybe my hurt would’ve still been inconvenient - maybe even embarrassing - but it wouldn’t have been threatening. It wouldn’t have been offensive.
But I wasn’t straight. I was gay. I was vulnerable. And I was visibly hurting. Visibly shaken. That made them uncomfortable, even angry. Not because I had done something wrong, but because I dared to feel in front of them. I dared to be wounded, and to show it.
Because queer pain isn’t seen as real. It’s seen as manipulative. Dramatic. Unstable. Even dangerous.
A straight person crying is just having a rough day.
A queer person crying is making a scene.
A straight person expressing hurt is being human.
A queer person expressing hurt is being too much.
That’s how it works.
They didn’t see a human being in distress. They saw a disruption to their comfort. A challenge to the story they wanted to believe about themselves. They didn’t want to face what they had done or what they had ignored. They wanted me to vanish. And when I didn’t, they punished me.
So no, it wasn’t just indifference. It wasn’t a misunderstanding.
It was bias. Quiet. Insidious. Precise.
My pain was the wrong kind of pain, coming from the wrong kind of person.
A person already seen as unstable, inappropriate, unworthy.
A queer woman. A Roma. Mentally unwell. Too intense. Too attached. Too much.
Maybe even predatory.
And that’s the truth: it was never about whether I had been hurt. It was about who, in their minds, deserved to be hurt. Whose pain counted, and whose didn’t.
Whose feelings were considered real — and whose were dismissed as delusion.
I sometimes wonder: If Senni had shared the same closeness, the same emotional intimacy that she did with me, but with a man would she have responded to his pain the way she responded to mine? Would she have brushed it off? Would Samppa have encouraged that?
Would they even have had sex in my home?
Would my classmates have shown more patience, more humanity, if I had been straight?
I believe they would have.
Because the problem wasn’t just what I felt.
The problem was who was feeling it.
A woman having feelings for another woman — that made it unserious.
Uncomfortable. Maybe even wrong. My feelings were something to mock. My hurt was something to ignore. And when I didn’t hide it, when I didn’t swallow it quietly, they saw me as predatory. Not heartbroken, but dangerous.
That’s the twisted logic. That’s the cruelty.
To love, to hurt, to long for dignity as a gay person, becomes an offense.
And that is not just bias. That is dehumanization.
When Pain Becomes a Punchline
And then later on, after Erasmus, that pain I had to endure was used as a weapon against me. Santtu from our class made fun of me in front of everyone in the class chat. After another round of bullying directed at me, he wrote: “and then I could go beat up my little brother too, since he also had sex in my house.”
That hurt so much. It still hurts. I had never consented to the situation that devastated me being shared as gossip but clearly, it had been. Something that represented the deepest rupture in my sense of safety was now being turned into a punchline in a public chat. And nobody said anything to defend me. Not even the people who had briefly supported me after the incident.
What Santtu did wasn’t just bullying. It was a violation of my dignity. It retraumatized me. It wasn’t just an insult. It was a mockery of my pain.
It didn’t only target my identity; it revived a personal betrayal that others had already asked me to get over. This is the kind of act that cements social exclusion. It sends a message: “This person is not to be taken seriously.” It paints my suffering as ridiculous, exaggerated, or fake. It invites others to join in or at the very least, to look away. And that’s exactly what he wanted: to push me out.
It wasn’t even the first time he did something like that in the group chat. And it wasn’t the first time others stayed silent. Once, even other classmates joined him: Elli and Jussi.
The Raised Eyebrow
This happened before Erasmus but after Senni and Samppa had sex in my kitchen. I actually had a nice day. Even after everything, I still refused to give up, or at least at first. I had been deeply hurt, but I still got up. I still made plans. That’s not weakness; that’s resilience. It’s survival.
I was on my way to the library, but before that, I had agreed to go to lunch with Jens. During the lunch, he started talking about a class party he and his flatmates were organizing. A farewell party before everyone leaving for their Erasmus. I had already invited some people over to my place for the same day, but Jens asked me to cancel my plans for his party.
And then I did something I shouldn’t have. I was vulnerable in front of him.
I told him I was afraid to come to the party. I told him how many times I had been excluded from conversations at these events. I said, “Why should I even come when people don’t speak to me?” Instead of care or understanding, Jens raised his eyebrow. It was a small gesture, but one packed with meaning: dismissal, discomfort, judgment. Maybe even annoyance.
But the real wound here wasn’t about one party or one eyebrow. It was the accumulation: Being left out at parties, being laughed at and ignored in class, being told, in subtle and unsubtle ways, that my feelings were too much or too inconvenient, and being betrayed by people I trusted. And when I finally dared to speak about it? A raised eyebrow. That gesture might have lasted half a second, but it told me everything.
There was another layer to it, too, one that goes deeper. Because I had also been dealing with racism, queerphobia, and mental health struggles. And Jens knew all that. It wasn’t just a raised eyebrow. It was a micro-impression, born from the microaggressions and silent biases I was already drowning in.
I wasn’t just a friend sharing something personal. I was a Roma, queer person with depression asking for care in a white, middle-class, emotionally guarded environment. And Jens knew that. He had context. He knew my struggles. So when he still gave me that dismissive gesture, it wasn’t just personal. It was political. It echoed a deeper message I was already used to hearing: White discomfort with Roma grief. Cis discomfort with queer vulnerability. Ableist discomfort with emotional honesty.
It was the passive cruelty of liberal environments that pride themselves on inclusion, until someone like me actually opens her mouth.
So no, it wasn’t small. It was everything I feared, compressed into one muscle twitch. And it didn’t come from a stranger. It came from someone I had finally confided in about how I was being treated in our class. That makes it even more devastating.
I had been holding everything in - the racism, the exclusion, the silencing - for so long. And despite how unsafe the environment had been, despite the pain I’d already endured, I chose to trust Jens. Because he had pretended to care. I finally opened up. I said out loud, for the first time, what was happening to me. And instead of receiving that with care or curiosity, he lifted his eyebrow.
Let me explain this more deeply.
Microaggressions and Micro-Impressions
Microaggressions are subtle, often unintentional expressions of bias or prejudice - verbal, non-verbal, or environmental - that communicate demeaning or dismissive messages based on someone’s identity. They seem “small,” but they do real psychological harm when they accumulate.
Micro-impressions are even less discussed, but just as real. They’re tiny, often unconscious gestures; a twitch of the face, a change in tone, a look - that reveal discomfort, disapproval, judgment, or withdrawal. They often appear when someone from a marginalized group dares to be emotionally honest.
You want examples? A raised eyebrow when you talk about exclusion. A small sigh when you mention depression. A quiet frown when you speak about racism. A frozen smile when you come out as gay.
And they hurt so much because they’re plausibly deniable, they leave you questioning your reality, they come from people you hoped would treat you differently, and because they don’t target what you do, they target who you are.
What Jens did - that eyebrow - was a micro-impression of a much larger pattern. It wasn’t “just” a gesture. It carried the weight of he racism I’d already been enduring, the queerphobia and mental health stigma I was silently carrying, and the pain of being excluded, and then blamed for speaking about it.
Some might say I was overreacting. That I was being paranoid. But I wasn’t paranoid. I was perceptive.
When you’re marginalized, you have to notice the quiet cues. Your safety depends on it. So yes, I notice the silences, the tiny delays, the way a face tightens when I speak honestly. That’s not hypersensitivity. That’s a learned intelligence shaped by survival. Shaped by experience. Shaped by pain.
When Jens raised his eyebrow, it wasn’t just about that moment. It confirmed the pattern: That even when I speak gently, I am “too much.” Still the problem. Still the one causing discomfort, just by naming mine.
So no, I wasn’t imagining things. I was finally seeing them clearly.
This was never about low self-esteem. It’s not that someone “stronger” wouldn’t have been affected. I don’t believe that. The way I felt was only human. It was what anyone would feel after being subjected to this much harm. Maybe there are people so strong that none of this would touch them.
Congratulations — you’re Superman.
But what gives you the right to dismiss my experience? If you’ve never experienced racism. If your sexuality has never been stigmatized. If your mental health has never been weaponized against you.. Who are you to say my pain isn’t real?
It’s not your identity that’s constantly challenged. It’s not your reality that’s erased.
Sometimes the majority simply doesn’t want to understand the structures people like me live with. So it becomes easy to dismiss our pain as “paranoia” or “fragility”, when really, it’s the weight of the world on our backs.
The Moment I Broke the Rules
After what happened with Jens, I felt something break open inside me. It wasn’t just the raised eyebrow. It was what that small gesture stood for. It echoed all the other times I’d been dismissed, sidelined, not taken seriously.
So instead of going to the library like I’d planned, I bought beers and went home. I cried, again. I cried a lot those days. The kind of crying that comes from years of holding yourself together when no one around you seems to notice you’re falling apart.
And then I did something I deeply regret. I went to our class chat and said something cruel to Jens. Something that revealed a private detail about his life.
That was wrong. There’s no excuse for that kind of breach. Even if I was hurting, I crossed a line, and I carry that regret with me.
But I also want to say this: That moment didn’t come from malice. It came from a place of despair. I had been stretched past my limit. And I didn’t know how else to make the pain stop or be seen.
It doesn’t make it right. But it does make it human.
After I lashed out at Jens in the class chat, Elli attacked me. I honestly don’t remember her exact words, maybe because the shame and pain of that moment blurred everything. And yes, in a way, she was right. I had crossed a line. I had done something hurtful and disrespectful. It’s not wrong that people were upset. The anger itself was understandable.
But still, I remember thinking: How dare they!
How dare they come down on me now, after everything that had been done to me!
Where was this anger when I was being excluded, mocked, talked over, erased?
Where was this moral outrage when I was sitting alone, humiliated, holding pain no one wanted to see? Where was it when I was dehumanized in front of the whole class because of my ethnicity?
And this is what I wrote about in an earlier chapter; about how the social rules of the group had been rewritten from the beginning of our studies. About how the norms of who gets defended, who gets forgiven, and who gets left behind were quietly established long before this moment.
Because that’s the thing. In every group, social rules form. But they don’t form equally. They form through power, privilege, and pattern. Some people’s mistakes are softened by context. Some are seen as just "having a hard day." Some get to be human.
But me? I was always seen through a different lens. My mistakes were amplified. My pain was pathologized. I was rarely given the benefit of the doubt, only the burden of it. And this same structure followed me. Even after Erasmus. Even in other spaces. The faces changed, but the pattern stayed the same.
The Party That Wasn’t for Me
After that event, I cancelled the plans Jens had asked me to cancel. I chose to take responsibility. I apologized to him sincerely, directly. I didn’t try to justify my behavior, even though I had been in pain. I just said I was sorry.
But then something strange and cruel started happening. Jens began telling people that I never apologized. I know this because people told me. His own roommate told me. And that was when I realized something deeper was going on: it wasn’t just that people were hurt , it was that I was being made into a permanent villain. That no matter what I did, the story people told about me would stay the same.
Some time went by. The class party got closer. And then Jens told me: “You’re not allowed to come.” Everyone else was invited. Everyone else. Except me.
And then later, I found out the most devastating part.
It wasn’t even Jens’ idea. Senni had asked him to do it.
The person I had once trusted the most. The person I had cried over, defended, longed for, been shattered by, was now actively arranging for my exclusion behind my back. Silently. Strategically. And Jens agreed.
So no, it wasn’t just about a party. It was about being targeted. It was about being erased from the group, socially exiled. And it followed the same pattern I had seen again and again:
When I was quiet: I was ignored.
When I was honest: I was too much.
When I was angry: I was dangerous.
And when I apologized: I was still unforgivable.
Senni had the social power to do what I couldn’t: quietly remove me. And Jens, who once seemed kind, agreed to be the messenger. To protect her, not me. To push me out, not even with his own reason, but with hers.
What does it say about a group when one person’s word can rewrite another person’s worth? What does it say about friendship when someone you once trusted uses others to finish what they couldn’t do to your face?
It wasn’t just exclusion. It was abandonment disguised as order. Cruelty wrapped in politeness.
And it broke something in me all over again.
How Exclusion Was Justified as “Reason”
What happened next didn’t come out of nowhere. It followed the same pattern I had already experienced so many times: being shut out, talked down to, blamed for my own pain. Only this time, it happened in writing. In public. In front of the whole class. I asked in the class chat that the farewell party would be held at my place and everyone were invited. I changed the chat topic for party at my place. But instead of respectful conversation, this happened:
NISSAN (Santtu): Stop it now Kristiina, for fuck’s sake, this clowning.
NISSAN: Who do you think is even going to come?
(He then changed the chat topic to: “Hasn’t the Krisse Show ended already?”)
He used my legal name instead of my nickname — a small way of exerting control and disrespect. He called my suggestion "clowning." Then he made it clear: no one would come anyway. Just stop. Go away. No one wants you here. That was the message, and it was loud and clear.
Still, I tried to hold my ground. I changed the topic name back.
Then came vague noises from Elli:
elll: Ummm
And a classic neutralizing comment from Jussi:
hullu_j: Could you people maybe just try to resolve your disagreements… so that we don’t have to organize separate farewell parties for everyone?
elll: Exactly what you’d think.
These comments are subtle, but insidious. Jussi didn’t comment on the way I was publicly mocked. He didn’t address the obvious aggression. Instead, he suggested that I was causing the problem by not resolving “disagreements.” Elli agreed without ever acknowledging what had just happened to me. They pretended this was a mutual misunderstanding between equals. But I wasn’t treated as an equal. I never had been.
I responded, bitterly:
lumpa: Why would you care? Like Santtu said, “who do you think anyone is even going to come?”
And I cancelled the event.
lumpa: Event canceled. Have fun on Saturday. You especially, Santtu.
But even then, Santtu wasn’t finished:
NISSAN: Well who do you think is going to come, since you’ve insulted half the class publicly in here already?
That was his justification. That I was the one who had been harmful.
It’s true that once, in an earlier argument, I had called Santtu an “ugly man.” That was after he had been mocking and cruel toward me in another chat conversation. I snapped. I regret that, and I’ve acknowledged it.
And yes, I had said something hurtful to Jens. I was in so much pain back then. I said something harsh, something I wouldn’t say now. But that didn’t justify what followed — months of exclusion, hostility, gaslighting. What they were doing to me wasn’t justice. It was bullying disguised as moral superiority.
I tried to explain.
lumpa: The only people I’ve insulted are you and Jens. And both of you deserved it — especially you, Santtu.
lumpa: With your constant mocking that’s gone on for two and a half years.
lumpa: Get a grip and stop, for god’s sake.
NISSAN: :D
He laughed. Just like he always had. Because to him, it was all just a joke.
Elli joined in again:
elll: Honestly, who hasn’t Santtu made fun of?
lumpa: There’s a difference between joking with a friend and mocking someone you don’t even know.
elll: Weren’t we all classmates though?
elll: You said yourself you don’t even know Santtu, so…
That was the moment I realized: nothing I said was going to change their view of me. They didn’t want to understand. Elli was twisting my words, making it seem like I was creating the problem. Like if we were all classmates, I couldn’t have been hurt. Like saying I didn’t know Santtu meant I couldn’t claim he’d done anything wrong.
But I had been hurt. Repeatedly. And not just by exclusion. Santtu had made racist comments about Roma people before, and when I tried to call it out, he’d brushed it off as “just a joke.” That’s how he always framed it: as humor. As if racism, when spoken with a grin, somehow didn’t count. And now, once again, the others were falling in line, ignoring the real power dynamics and instead focusing on how I reacted, not on what I had endured. It was pure gaslighting. Designed to confuse, to deflect, to erase what had happened.
Then Santtu dropped his final message:
NISSAN: I’d probably feel genuinely bad if I had made your life so miserable that my jokes were being dissected here day after day :D
And later, when I tried to defend myself again, when I pointed out that I had invited everyone, including Jens, that I wasn’t being exclusionary or hostile, something even stranger happened.
I don’t have the rest of the conversation saved. But suddenly, Jussi told me that I had threatened Jens with violence.
It wasn’t true.
Here’s what actually happened: after Jens wrote that if I came to the party, he would “physically delete me” - yes, those were his words - I replied with ironic sarcasm: “With what army?”
That was all.
It wasn’t a threat. It was a bitter, defensive joke in response to someone threatening me first. But somehow, my words were interpreted as the violent ones. Jussi decided I was dangerous. Why? Maybe it had nothing to do with what I said and everything to do with who I am.
I was the queer, mentally struggling, Roma student, the one already seen as unstable, dramatic, too much. It was easier for them to believe I was a threat than to see that I had been hurt. It was easier to pathologize me than to face their own cruelty.
And that's what this was: cruelty, dressed up as neutrality. Gaslighting disguised as reason. Racism and exclusion hiding behind "concern." They didn’t see me as someone who could be mistreated, only as someone who overreacted.
That’s the trick of structural oppression. It doesn’t need anyone to say outright that your life is worth less. It just keeps creating situations where your pain is dismissed, your anger is punished, your boundaries are seen as attacks.
I wasn't dangerous. I was desperate. But in a space where I had already been cast as unstable and other, desperation was enough to turn me into a villain.
And the worst part is, I started to believe them. For a while, I really believed that maybe I was the problem. That maybe I had ruined everything myself. But now, looking back, I see it clearly: this wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a setup. I was being pushed out. And the moment I resisted, they used that as proof that I didn’t belong.
All of it; the lies, the twisting of my words, the way they acted like my pain was a performance, it wasn’t about what I said or did. It was about the role I had been assigned in their eyes. And no matter what I did, I was never meant to win.
A Door Slammed in My Face
After Jens' flatmate, Niko, heard that I had apologized to Jens for the things I had said, I think he started to realize that what had been done to me wasn’t fair. So he asked if I could come to the party as his guest. At the time, I took it as a gesture of support, a signal that someone saw the injustice. But now, looking back, I’m not sure anymore if it was a sincere invitation or a setup. Still, I went. Because I wanted to show that I had the right to be there. That I wasn’t a problem to be hidden or erased. That I had dignity.
It was deep winter. A snowstorm was raging outside as I arrived. And yes, I was afraid. Who wouldn’t be? But I had been invited. I had a right to exist in that space. When I rang the doorbell, someone I didn’t know let me in. It wasn’t Niko, but a stranger. I stepped into the hallway and began taking off my shoes. And then, without warning, some men grabbed me. Not with words. Not with explanation. They lifted me off the ground and threw me out of the flat back into the building’s hallway. It was dehumanizing. It was violence.
They shut the door behind me.
I rang the bell again. I knocked, hoping Niko would hear. Nothing. My shoes were still inside, and I couldn’t go out into the snowstorm barefoot. So I sat on the stairwell. I might’ve messaged Niko, I don’t remember. What I do remember are the voices behind the door. Senni and Samppa: “Don’t let her in. She’s not invited.” I think I heard Elli and Camilla muttering something about me. I don’t recall the words, just the sharp sting of their voices.
And then Niko: “I fucking invited her!”
Silence.
I was crying. Quietly. Alone, next to the door. Then Niko came out and apologized for his friends’ behavior. But right then, an older neighbor opened her door and complained about the noise. Niko, perhaps ashamed or fed up, decided to shut down the whole party and send everyone home.
I asked if I could get my shoes. When I stepped back in to retrieve them, I felt all their eyes on me. No one spoke. I didn’t want revenge. I just wanted my shoes.
Later, I went with Niko and - I think - Jarno to a nearby pub. They tried to comfort me. Apparently, Niko had spoken with Jens, because Jens eventually came and gave a half-hearted apology. Not for excluding me, not for encouraging others to humiliate me, but because he technically didn’t have the right to throw me out since I had been invited.
Then, strangely, they invited me to another bar where the rest of my classmates were. I don’t fully know why I agreed. Maybe I hoped something had changed. That they finally realized what they’d done. That they wanted to include me again. I still hoped for some basic decency.
But when I got there, Senni and Samppa refused to even look me in the eye. A few people were kind, but others blamed me for the party ending early, as if my very presence was the disruption.
And then there was Mikko. He started yelling. Loud. Aggressive. Blaming me, mocking me. I can’t recall the exact words, but I remember the fear. The way he towered over me. How I couldn’t get a word in. How I tried to leave, but he physically blocked the exit. No one intervened. Everyone just sat there. Silent. Watching.
Until, finally, someone said, “Move. Let her leave.”
So why did I even go? Why did I step into a place where I had already been rejected? Why did I go to a party hosted by people who had mocked me, excluded me, humiliated me?
Because I still wanted to believe.
Because I thought maybe someone would see me, really see me, and decide to do the right thing.
Because I wanted to reclaim my humanity. To show that I had worth. That I was not disposable.
Because I didn’t want to disappear.
But in their world, my pain was a nuisance. My existence, a disturbance. My refusal to be dismissed and erased a invisible threat.
All I ever wanted was to be treated like a human being.
And all I got was the door slammed in my face.