Today in school we talked about “Invisible Norms in the Media” and we went through issues like stereotyping, nationalism, color, identity and dominance. And the teacher made us do a little exercise that consisted in describing our identity in 3 words that we think are the most important. We talked in groups so after a 10 minute chat with my colleagues we came up with some really interesting conclusions and we found out some things that wouldn’t have crossed our minds otherwise. And that made me think a bit about me and who I am and if the words I use to describe myself are the same as the ones people use to build their image on me. I said about myself that I am a Romanian girl who loves tennis. Two of these things can be eliminated, depending on the context, the first and most simple to eliminate: I am a girl. Well, it’s pretty obvious. It wasn’t like that when I was little and acting and looking like a boy but those days are long gone. Second: I am Romanian. Important detail now because I live in Sweden but back home I doubt I’d use this as the first thing to describe myself. The “I love tennis” part is the same everywhere. So I replaced girl with student but I couldn’t give up my nationality: a Romanian student who loves tennis. The truth is that when you present yourself to someone who asks you “What are you doing in Sweden?”, saying that you are a student changes a lot of things. I haven’t felt this difference here as much as I felt it in France where saying that you were a student, even if coming from Romania, was a way to avoid hitting nationality-based barriers. However, my student status is the best way to justify my presence in Stockholm, probably even better than, let’s say, the employee status that I’d have if I were working here. Of course I could go deeper into the discussion and say that outside the University circle I am just another immigrant and then I’d hit against a lot of issues mentioned at the beginning of this post. And I don’t want to talk about them.

Being Romanian is way cooler than the perception of the majority on this nationality, being a student again is great, especially when you are studying what you always wanted and loving tennis is going to be there for long, probably just like music and my cat but I couldn’t use 5 words to describe myself so I stuck with just one of my passions. Though I like fishing too… and reading on the beach… and coffee. And probably 7 years ago I would have described myself as a goth or metalhead or something else, who knows?