I was so happy to become a part of this year’s cohort of WIFT mentees, an incredibly unexpected occurrence because I’d only been in Finland for such a short while. It gave me a much-needed boost because I’ve discovered trying to settle here as a foreigner can be difficult, alienating, and lonely. (It’s not just Finland, it’s anywhere where you really don’t belong but you’re there because – well, life provides strange and circuitous routes sometimes.)

The other great thing was being chosen by Katri Aksola. I know first-hand at this point what it feels like to experience the marginalization and “shrinkage” that happens for ageing women in the professional realm, particularly one in which you have a public-facing role and career, and one in which the milieu itself is always hungry for the young, the emerging, the fresh-faced. As an executive casting director mostly working with young talents, Katri, although two decades younger than I, resonated with this element of life that I’m dealing with – in a new country, a new culture, a very disorienting and confusing transition into a different phase of life. And just when everything dovetails professionally, personally, and creatively in the sort of way you’d always hoped! But the actual experience of this exclusion – which is talked about and parsed in every woman’s magazine and journal, written about in books, and acknowledged as something very real, even by men – is mighty painful, and you only truly feel that pain when you get there.

There’s often a quite severe effect of dissociation, a process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity as one ages. An example: when the photos and bios of the five mentees were published on the WIFT Finland website, mine was the only entry in which I used “she”, a subject pronoun, when describing myself. Every other woman represented used “I” to describe herself. Along with being an obvious generational and stylistic marker, I found myself a bit embarrassed about it, something I’m sure probably no one else noticed or thought anything of, but wow, that really struck me. I had to stop myself from asking if I could re-write it, but it was already out there, so I let it stand.

When Katri and I, after getting acquainted a bit at the Cable Factory orientation meeting, made plans for our first meeting a week later, she suggested I come to her offices in Sörnäinen. I was prepared for us to sit in some boardroom and hash out an action plan based on the five themes of mentorship we were presented with:

Q: Where am I professionally right now? Other aspects of life? A: I don’t know!
Q: What is/are my goal(s)? Where am I going in professional life (and other aspects)? A: I don’t know!
Q: What does this program mean to me? A: I don’t know! (yet)
Q: What are the barriers I need to cross to reach those goals?
A: So many!
And the question Katri asked me before we met:
Q: What would be first concrete steps to attain those goals? A: My response to that – besides a general request for confidence building – was the following:

Integrating into some sort of small social sphere (that might have something to do with what I do – or not) that's comfortable for me here in Helsinki so I feel I have a small network of acquaintances and friends, foreign and local alike, that I can count on to go to things together since I’m super tired of doing things by myself.

Since writing that message, this is slowly being accomplished in various ways in the form of yet another mentorship through Föreningen Luckan that will start in late October, a Finnish-Swedish information and cultural center here that offers an integration program with information and counselling, workshops, social gatherings and mentoring for immigrants to Finland – a different, maybe more practical, mentorship since folding oneself into the culture and society here is more of an uphill climb than I imagined. As well, through Luckan’s CIRKELN program, I’ve been matched with four other women to form a social group based on applications that included descriptions of what we like to do in our free time for fun and enjoyment. I was matched with a woman from Hong Kong, one from Japan, one from Morocco, and one from India. And me: the token white lady from America. All have been here for varying amounts of time and in different circumstances, but I’m super excited about meeting them all.

The second goal I expressed to Katri was that I wanted to take some preliminary steps towards learning how to enter the voice-over or voice talent market for English speakers here. As a casting executive, she immediately connected me with someone and had a few other suggestions. Like the meek person I am, I wrote the contact she gave me a long email explaining who I was and blah, blah, blah – one of my infamous long emails that go on and on and on, displaying a dreadful habit of sharing too much information. I’ve yet to hear anything back.

I’ve learned that sometimes Finns just don’t return emails at all. Maybe this is due to said abundance of sharing and it’s all just too much. Or something gets lost in translation and they just don’t know where to begin. Or my email goes into someone’s spam folder because the email I’ve been using forever can sometimes be interpreted by AI as some kind of penis enlargement ad – pfunknmrk – understandable. So, we’ll chip away at that.