A BORED BUREAUCRAT’S
GUIDE TO HAPPINESS
How many of our
dreams do actually come true?
Only
a few.
I’m
a highly rational person. I don’t believe in miracles, only in hard work. A
cynical way of looking at life, which quite early made me very ambitious,
always ready to do my best.
Writing
was different, though. It was never about competition or perfection; it was
solely about pleasure and about having fun. I have always loved to write
stories, since the first day at school. And I always wrote with a vague
ambition to get my work published.
- When I grow up, I want to become an author;
I told anyone who cared to listen.
But
dreams and ambitions change over time, and so did mine.
In
seventh grade I said I wanted to become a concert pianist. In eighth grade I
wanted to work for the CIA. And in ninth grade, I said that I would probably
end up working with business administration.
I
did nothing of that. But with regard to the CIA, I came kind of close.
I
had one single goal with my political science studies at the university. I
wanted to be accepted to a PhD-programme and write a thesis. Become a
professor, and never ever have to leave the academic world that I had come to
love so much. But it never happened. Despite all my efforts, I failed.
But
when one door closes, another one opens. Instead of becoming enrolled in
further academic studies, I was offered a position as an analyst at the Swedish
National Security Service. It sounded so cool. At least to my friends. There is
something extremely mysterious about the intelligence sector, a natural and
direct consequence of all the secrecy that surrounds it. I questioned that
level of secrecy from the very beginning. To me, there was nothing special
about what we were doing. There were no fancy top-secret missions, no dangerous
excursions in the middle of the night. Sweden is an exceptionally calm and peaceful
country. A fantastic thing, of course, but it does make the work at the
Security Service slightly abstract. Or dull, to put it more precisely.
In
2007 I was almost bored to death. I have never felt a stronger need to change
my life. This was at the time when more or less all my friends got married and
had kids. But not me.
- I think I’ll try to write a book, I told
one of my best (pregnant) friends.
And
so I did. Strongly driven by a desire to fulfil one of my oldest dreams (and to
have some fun), I wrote my first book in less than four months, at the same
time as I was working full time. One could say that the book practically wrote
itself. It was the most thrilling experience ever, to see how the book grew
page by page, day by day.
After
I had finished, I was certain: I would continue to write. More books, more
stories. And so I have. My manuscript was accepted by a fantastic publishing
house, which has continued to be very loyal to my writing. And I quit my job at
the Security Service. Life’s to short to spend it behind a desk in a heavily
bureaucratic organization, producing papers that no one will ever read.
Again:
How many of our dreams do ever come true?
Few.
Very few.
But
it happened to me, and it can happen to someone else as well. There are no
guarantees for success. But one thing is clear: if you don’t even bother to
try, you will definitely fail. Good things don’t automatically happen to good
people, they happen to those who dare to have aspirations and who make an
effort to realise them. One of my schoolteachers used to say: You haven’t lost
until you have given up trying. A saying that I kept really close to my heart
for many years.
Because
you see, dreams do come true.
We just
don’t know which ones and when.
Kristina Ohlsson is a political scientist and until recently held the position of Counter-Terrorism Officer at OSCE (the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe). She has previously worked at the Swedish Security Service, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish National Defense College, where she was a junior expert on the Middle East conflict and the foreign policy of the European Union. Kristina lives in Stockholm.
Her novels, Unwanted, Silenced and The Disappeared have sold nearly 1 million copies.
