KIRSTINA OHLSSON: A BORED BUREAUCRAT’S GUIDE TO HAPPINESS

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.