Unsigned dreams

Oh hi! I’m so sorry it took me so long to see your message, I tend to come to this account a little less these days, but I still check it from time to time. I do hope you’ll see my reply and thank you for sending me the ask <3

I’m happy you could feel seen by my post 🥺 And I can relate to what you’re saying. At the time I wrote the post I was kind of semi-part of the Karelian community here on tumblr and on discord and just happy to learn. I’m not really part of those anymore, I think in the end I didn’t really fit in. Maybe partly because of what I explained in the post, but also I just didn’t have the same passion to connect more with the culture at the time as I felt was expected. But as much as I sometimes look at Karelian language courses and wonder if I should take part etc, I do still feel like I live the culture, maybe the finnish version of it, but it’s part of my culture and identity in subtle ways and I don’t currently feel that I’d have to perform it more than that, if that makes sense. And just a week or so ago I made Karelian pies from scratch for the first time, somehow it came from muscle memory after watching my grandmother and mom make them so many times and having been taught by them over the years. That was kind of a proud moment for me and made me feel like the tradition will have continuation through me too. So I feel like at least at the moment being Karelian for me is in these kinds of little things and I do feel at ease with that thought. And in a way I am making my own, maybe slow and guided by whatever interests me at times, reconnection to other parts of the culture that I might not know that much about. But I try to not pressure myself with it, I have my own pace.

About you saying your family has been lutheran, mine has been too on my mother’s side, but then I found out my grandmother’s family turned lutheran from orthodox quite a bit before my grandmother was born. So that’s always a possibility around here. Also part of my family line comes from värtsilä too.