My move to the Dark Forests in Sweden, was, from a professional POV, sort of career suicide. At least that's how it feels when I am in a negative mood.
I am a professional writer. I work with words. I get paid a nice salary for my words. For 8 years I worked as copywriter, publicist and editor in New York. (I still work freelance in this milieu) I also got my MLS, with my hopes that one day I'd be able to be like my Grandma and work as a Young Adult librarian (I love YA lit and I adore the pop-culture library programming for teens)
Anyway, long story short, I speak Swedish fluently but my reading and writing in the language is on grade-school level. (Learned spoken Swedish through real-life situations/immersion) I feel like Clarice Precious Jones - Precious from the book "Push" by Sapphire or the film "Precious" by Lee Daniels. I dislike reading in Swedish. I hate writing in Swedish because I cannot express myself with the ease that I do in English (or even in Spanish). Even my 3 year old son realizes that his mama becomes flustered when he asks me to read aloud from his favorite Swedish books.
I'm not an architect, nurse, IT dude, dancer, baker, or accountant. For me, the written language isn't just a professional by-product or circumstance. To succeed in my given field(s) I need to not only master the written language, but to finesse it, coddle it, love it up, outsmart it and whip it into shape.
I start an intensive grammar/reading/writing course in Swedish this Monday. Wish me luck.
I am not really in a rush for success. I am in-a-family-way, after all. And with the extremely generous ma/paternity leave here (480 paid days awwwwwwww yeah), I won't really have to worry about this for a relatively long time.
If all else fails, I'm starting a lipstick line. I already have a great name for it.
hi miss amy,
ReplyDeletei chanced upon your blog while searching for vaxjo expats. i'm a student from singapore, and i just moved to vaxjo to look for an internship, after doing an exchange at stockholm. but now that it's vacation time for most swedes, internship search hasn't been great. plus, jag kan inte svenska.
i want to learn swedish not through english, but through swedish itself, like a toddler learns it. i think that's the best way to learn a language. given that you had to learn and still learning it, do you have suggestions for me?
thanks a dozen -sheng (unamednet@hotmail.com)