– You can't write like this?
It becomes completely silent on the phone. The colleague, who is now clearly disappointed, is a role model. He guides me in my professional role and my writing. I have just authored a reflection about countryside and city for Svensk Jakt, the member magazine of the Hunters' Association, which I work for, and asked him to read it before publication.
I look at the screen in front of me and then read aloud to myself. I hear the sentences, now with our conversation fresh in memory, pronounced in the colleague's thoughtful dialect. I see the person in the text, she stands at the front of the picture. A then 31-year-old woman – I - who in a maximum of 1,000 words will tell 120,000 subscribers about their rural areas. For an audience where many have lived and worked outside the city, in symbiosis with our green industries, their whole lives. Many for generations back. An audience that struggles against the elected democratic process that takes away their ability to make decisions at the local level. An audience that knows what their place needs, but often does not have the mandate to act based on this knowledge.
Someone else tells instead of them how things should be done.
Just like I have done in the text that the colleague has read.
Last spring, Lovisa Westling, the operations manager for Leader Lappland, bravely raised her prejudices about Skåne here in the blog. And perhaps that is the very starting point, to dare to confront oneself? To be able to admit that one does not, as an individual, have all the answers? That one's own perspective may not be that of others? That we, fortunately, learn over time.
To learn to listen to the stories, and not always tell oneself.
Sweden is not a template where one can place different questions in a grid that fits in the city versus the countryside. Sweden is us who live and work in different places, and it is we who can tell about our own place, our own dreams, our goals, and the circumstances we are under. We are all equally valuable parts, but the parts do not look the same.
A regulatory framework does not cover the different conditions that depend on where one is located. A decision-making process may be assumed to be democratic and fair by those who make the decisions – but can at the same time be experienced as deeply unfair or incorrect by those affected.
Certain parts of Sweden, and certain places, simply receive more than others. But it is not due to a lack of will or knowledge or insight among those who are disadvantaged. It is not about the city or the countryside as phenomena.
Today I reason with greater caution. It is, as mentioned, a process.
And my text? I went home, somewhat dejected, and wrote a new one that I didn't have to be ashamed of afterwards.
Maria Lundgren, communicator at Leader Skåne Mitt Nordväst