🕊️🥴 This Is Not the Sweden Ordered

🔥 RSO™ Entry 004 - A travel brochure they’d never print but you can sure as shit smell it.

Cities sell stories.
Stockholm’s version? Neutrality, equality, calm. Top 5 countries for women’s safety in the world, apparently.

The lived version? Piss, booze, cameras, harassment.

This isn’t a travel brochure. Not a balanced cultural review. It’s part journal, part piss-soaked anthropology, part satirical propaganda.

If you came for neutrality or national branding, look elsewhere. What I’ve got is honesty, grit, and a few posters pissing on the excellence parade.

This is my Stockholm, seen at street height and skin-distance. If yours is cleaner, congratufuckinglations on the bubble you live in.

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Journal prompt: What does a sanctuary look like when it fails?

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Creature of Habit Finds Alcohol and Piss-Soaked Purgatory.

When I lived in London, I had my spots.

Hyde Park. Regent’s Park. Trafalgar Square, Eros fountain in Piccadilly Circus. Prime people-watching territory. The kind of places where you could scribble in a notebook, share a silent moment with a pigeon gambling its life against a double-decker, or have a strange five-minute chat with a tourist who thinks you’re local because you look permanently irritated.

Turns out my concentration face screams colossal bitch. A free accessory every Londoner owns, right up there with Oyster cards.

The worst thing that ever happened? A downpour. A street preacher with hellfire in his eyes. A pickpocket who chose the wrong target. Nothing you couldn’t fix with coffee and a muttered ‘for fuck’s sake’. Annoying, but not memorable. Nothing that burrowed in and made permanent housing under my ribs.

In winter, I migrated indoors. Museums were my hideaways. The Science Museum, the V&A, the British: warm radiators, free entry, weird old shit to stare at while I scribbled or zoned out. No pressure. No sales pitch. Just space. Neutral space. Free to all; neutrality in practice, not in marketing.

And guess what? Nobody pissed on the parquet or shadow-boxed the mummies.

But my favourite was always The Hunterian. A haunted medical textbook you could walk through. Floating organs. Skinless figures mid-scream. Foetuses suspended like tragic jellyfish. Gruesome and glorious. No chairs, so your legs went numb, but worth it. No photos either, which somehow made it feel sacred.

Depending who you asked, you got different reasons:

• ‘Respect for human remains’.

  Sure. Nothing says respect like jars of dead babies on display. Next to the gift shop.

• ‘Colonial ethics’.

  Fair. But don’t sell that line when half the jars were nicked from god-knows-where. Grave robbing with mood lighting. Hard to claim the moral high ground while displaying a shrunken head labelled: ‘South America, c. Unknown’.

• ‘Preservation concerns’.

  Also fair, but my phone flash isn’t why the century-old bones look like they’ve been through a tumble-dryer. It’s because someone mangled the fuck out of something or someone, whilst dead or alive, both plausible. Little more to it than this, obviously.

• My personal favourite: shrug, ‘because’.

  At least that’s honest. ‘It is what it is’ with jars of people.

Södermalm, hipster shrine or piss-stained shithole? Progress on the brochure, chaos on the bench.

Why This Matters - Routines become Religion.

I’m a creature of habit. I liked knowing where I can vanish — not to disappear. Without explaining, being pestered, strangers demanding a smile, or the stench of booze and bad decisions.

These places weren’t backdrops. They were neutral spaces.

• Bad day? Fuck it, park bench therapy.

• Uni or work stress? To the gardens.

• Too much noise? Museum silence, pronto.

It wasn’t just comfort. These were the places I could disappear without erasing myself. I could exist among people without being expected to perform. I didn’t give two fucks about performing. But the expectation that I should? That still fucks me off.

This moment exemplifies Judith Butler’s notion of gendered performativity under Foucault’s gaze. Where even non-participation becomes a form of resistance in a landscape saturated by soft surveillance.

I don’t think most people realise how much your body learns to scan for neutral spaces. Places that won’t demand too much. No performance. No threat. No pressure to smile.

In London I had them down to muscle memory: the corner bench near the lake; the gallery wing no one bothered with; the museum cafés with cheap tea and no faff; the little spot that did a brie and sun‑dried tomato panini in Aldgate.

A city should feel like a worn‑in pair of boots: a bit worm but comfortable.

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Then came Stockholm: VERY unforever!