🥶🚩 Plan F: When Propaganda Outlives the People.
🔥 RSO™ Entry 007 - You should always listen to the downvoted nobodies the Kool-Aid choir always try to drown.
One of them called Sweden a tar pit. They were right.
Do you listen to the Basement Voices?
Not a travelogue. Not an origin story dressed as inspiration. But the cost of ignoring the nobodies who dared to say Sweden isn’t what it preaches. Result? Buried in downvotes on Reddit and Facebook pages, flagged jealous, wrong, broken, or too hostile for politely fake forums.
I should’ve listened. But my partner’s posho optimism infected my commoner scepticism. Never the fuck again.
Even writing this is a chore. That airport day is still bile, still rot. Planning this post I could feel my blood pressure tap-dancing. You know when you say 2 + 2 = 4 and some smug prick keeps shouting it’s 10? That’s when frustration-rage kicks in. I literally start to shake. The more I’m gaslit, the worse it gets. My dad’s teaching of ‘throttle a bitch’ doesn’t work in all scenarios, so I swallow the anger until I can taste it. That’s what this felt like to relive. But if I don’t write it, the myth keeps winning.
As Barthes warned, myths thrive by passing off ideology as weather: neutral, inevitable, unarguable. Like fools, we bought it, because we ignored and fobbed off people’s negative experiences with: maybe they didn’t do this, maybe they didn’t try enough. Until the fog cleared, and the iron cage clicked shut, and the bubble burst.
What follows is my version. No fairy-tale leaps, no blond-worshipping fantasies. Just a Plan F move that took more than it gave.
Prompt: Which opportunity turned out to be just another shade of fucked?
My partner grew up without hunger, without dreams, without bigger goals. No path, no passions. Only the holy trinity of a Surrey-mam mediocrity: house, wife, mortgage. Raised on stagnation.
He’s more inclined to say ‘yes sir, three bags full sir’.
I’m more inclined to say ‘fuck you very much’.
Sweden loves his kind of person.
Plan A: London. Plan B: America. Plan F: This.
London was home. Not home-home, not the valley of childhood ghosts and daffodil cults, but the place I belonged. A city where my face fit, even when it screamed colossal bitch across the Tube on a Monday morning. I’d lived away for a few years and wanted it back. Wanted the noise, the grit-with-a-heartbeat. So many safe fucking spaces, so much free weird shit, so many feral minds to talk to.
But my partner didn’t want it, then. Too expensive, too busy. London was off the table. So we ended up here. Sweden. Because apparently, in his maths, crossing an ocean was cheaper than Zone 2 rent.
That’s not romance. That’s logistics. That’s a spreadsheet in drag. That’s a decision you regret. The mind of a posho at work.
If not London, I wanted America. Boston, Austin, maybe L.A. if I felt reckless. Salem, Savannah, New Orleans — historic and haunted towns and cities to experience for a year or ten, who knows.
But Sweden? It wasn’t even Plan C. It wasn’t on the map.
If London was Plan A and America Plan B, this was Plan F. The fallback nobody speaks aloud. Not a dream. Not chosen. Just… allowed. A job offer with easier paperwork. You want a change with more life. The change you want is out of reach. And then, boom. Deadland.
And that’s the lesson, isn’t it?
Don’t mistake convenient for right.
Back home, nobody dreamed of Sweden. People fantasised about Australia, America, Spain, maybe Canada.
Nobody, ever said: You know where I’d love to move? Sweden.
The only Swedish export that raised an eyebrow was IKEA, and even that barely stirred a rat’s-arse worth of interest. Flatpack wardrobes, not fever dreams of emigration. When I told people I was moving here, the response wasn’t envy. It was confusion. Borderline pity. Like I’d just announced I was relocating to a car park.
‘Why of all places? There’s nothing there.’ One even said ‘You're too young to give up on life already’. Should have been a hang on moment right there.
Airport Sweden: Welcome Committee of Lies.
They tried to deport me. Not metaphorically — bureaucratically. Border police running the full ‘you don’t belong here’ routine.
Why? Because I wasn’t married to my EU partner. Sweden. The country that preaches progress, feminism, gender equality. Yet here I was, 2024, Arlanda Airport, passport seized, a pack of walking, talking contradictions trying to kick me out for not being married. Make that shit make sense.
I arrived as a cohabiting partner. Legal under EU freedom-of-movement rules. Documented. Verified EU law in advance with the European Commission itself via europa.eu webforms. Receipts in hand.
But in Sweden? Law is seasonal and only implemented when it benefits them.
The officers claimed residence cards didn’t exist. Only ‘permits’. Leave the country, wait 18 months. Maybe I’d get one.
Nah bitch.
I corrected them. They knew they were wrong, they kept scrambling for ways to cut me off. I told them: check your migration website. EU directives. Even my email from the European Commission.
What did they resort to? Gaslighting. They tried to convince me I was wrong. They said they understand that the websites can be ‘confusing for people like me’. That there’s ‘a lot of misinformation’. ‘It doesn’t work that way’. Then the kicker: ‘You voted Brexit, you have no rights’. She didn’t know how I voted, she just heard the accent and decided for herself.
No rights, huh? Not ‘no EU rights’. Not ‘limited rights’. Just none. Clean wipe.
Swedes seem to love taking dig’s over Brexit, but they hate it when you answer back.
I’ve been here roughly a year, I’ve learnt: Swedes, hate being proven wrong. Hate being proven they’re not as good as they think. And this old executioner in flats really hated being proven wrong.
Her reaction? Disdain. She demanded my partner’s Irish passport even though he wasn’t with me. She could obviously see that. And if she really had access to my flight logs, tax registration, migration files, then she already knew: I was registered, I had evidence of partnership, and I’d flown with him every time except this one. I pointed out the absurdity of needing to carry someone else’s passport as my ID in such an independent country. She smirked. Miserable bitch thought she had me.
So I whipped out my camera roll: his passport, his birth certificate. And the cherry on top: two extra photos of him holding his IDs. The older one fidgeted, tugging at her belt, looking around. The younger one asked to take a photo to check with the big boys and girls upstairs. Who apparently had to check with even higher up boys and girls again. Multi-level incompetence.
Swedes love EU law when it flatters their self-image. When they can serve themselves with it. When it paints them as functional, progressive, morally luminous. But the moment EU law protects someone not Swedish. The myth collapses. The shrug returns. And the law suddenly becomes ‘confusing’, ‘complicated’, ‘doesn’t apply’.
They adore the EU in brochures. The moment it protects someone they don’t want protected the law becomes optional. Discriminatory, EU-loving cunts in uniform, all performative. The EU’s a costume for the photos; in practice: free movement for me, not for thee. They’ll bend the rules until the foreigner is baggage.
I wasn’t the only one. That day they’d seized passports from a few, one flying from Poland, heard that clear as day, another, I think, from Latvia. Another around the corner crying her eyes out. All of us had to be let through in the end. The difference? They got a male officer who wasn’t overly pleasant but at least he admitted the mistake. I got a miserable bureaucratic sadist serving Miss Trunchbull vibes who sneered.
And people still ask why I don’t buy the girls’ girl rhetoric. Why I don’t buy this bullshit fantasy that women are automatically kind, good, or looking out for each other. They aren’t. They don’t. Kind and good doesn’t come prepackaged with tits.
This thing and her minion disappeared upstairs. When they came back, there were three of them, not just the old bitch with the emotional range of wet toast and her junior. Apparently they needed backup, for little old me, one woman, three of them.
‘We’ll let you through this time.’
This time.
Like I’d been granted mercy. Like I was begging. Like the law didn’t fucking matter. I looked at her, and her younger colleagues, with a grin. Then the junior said it, the quiet part out loud, the thing the older bint didn’t want to say.
‘We have to let you through. Your partner’s EU-Irish.’
No fucking shit Sherlock.
That’s what the uniform hides: institutional power and a sneer. The performance of fairness on top of the rot. Some twat who thinks being a lackey with a desk makes them divine.
But there it was. They weren’t doing me a favour by letting me through ‘this time’. They just didn’t like being caught.
Response: ‘Yeah, I know love’. I was met with silence from the old authority tourist for the rest of that conversation. Only the young ones talked to me after that and struggled to respond to my cunty questions: ‘So you do have residence cards for non-EU family members then? You don’t have to be married then? I do have rights then?’
I was roughly detained for an hour and thirty minutes.
That wasn’t policy. That was hierarchy: accent, passport, postcode, and womanhood ranked in order of permission.
Let’s break it cleanly: