| Activist Tactic | PeaceCraft Response |
| Build perceived power | Examine how power is used |
| Stay within your side’s expertise | Know your capacity and limits |
| Increase the enemy’s insecurity | Understand the other person’s world |
| Exploit their rules | Apply principles to every side |
| Use ridicule | Refuse humiliation |
| Use enjoyable tactics | Build sustainable practices |
| Abandon stale tactics | Recognise when dialogue has ended |
| Maintain pressure | Maintain trustworthy presence |
| Use threat | Reduce unnecessary threat |
| Provoke reactions | Restore the capacity to respond |
| Use the opponent’s violence | Never provoke harm for advantage |
| Offer an alternative | Accept responsibility for what follows |
| Personalise and polarise | Name harm without freezing the person inside it |
Author: tinabrescanu
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From Activist Tactics to PeaceCraft Responses
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The Children We Were, The People They Are
A few years have passed since I wrote my first 500 words of wisdom, and one thing has not changed: I still stand with children.
Perhaps that is because I remember being one.
Adults often tell children to enjoy their freedom before work begins, but childhood is not always free. Children spend most of their days in school, followed by homework, expectations and activities arranged by adults. Their time is managed, their behaviour assessed and their distress frequently dismissed as a phase.
Growing up can be magical. It can also be exhausting.
My children helped me recognise parts of my own childhood that I had learned to overlook. Their teenage struggles were not inconveniences to manage. They were experiences to understand. Parenting, for me, became less about shaping children into successful adults and more about protecting the space in which they could discover who they already were becoming.
A parent leaves a mark, whether they intend to or not.
My children are not my legacy, because they do not belong to my story. They have stories of their own. But being their mother has changed me more profoundly than anything else I have done. They have brought me more joy than any story I have written—and I have written quite a few.
I still consider myself a beginner. Not because I have achieved nothing, but because I am still curious. Expertise can become another identity to defend. Curiosity leaves the door open.
As I entered what I once called my second rebellion, I began coming out in more ways than one. Menopause was not an ending. It was a refusal: of shame, silence and the idea that a woman becomes less valuable as she ages.
Grey hair, wrinkles and a changing body are not evidence that life has gone wrong. They are evidence that life has happened.
My identity has changed too. I once wondered whether I had lost my Swedishness. I had not. It had travelled with me, becoming entangled with my Karelian roots and my Irish life. We do not have to choose one place from which to belong. Sometimes belonging is what grows between places.
I have also spent much of my life thinking about death. My children used to think it strange that I practised dying each night and returning each morning. But death gave shape to life. Having survived times when I did not want to be here, I no longer see my continued existence as something ordinary.
It is not always easy to make peace with living.
I once wanted to disappear completely. Perhaps I wanted freedom from being remembered. I understand that differently now. We do not control what remains of us. We live in other people’s memories, in stories, in digital traces and in consequences we may never see.
What we can do is live honestly while we are here.
Tell your children your stories, including the ones that make you uncomfortable. Let them see that adults make mistakes, change their minds and continue becoming. Listen when their version of events differs from yours.
Allow them to be gloriously themselves, especially when they challenge who you thought they would be.
Perhaps that is what authentic parenting asks of us: not to create children in our own image, but to meet them as they emerge.
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Change Is Freedom, and Freedom Is Change
If you are here, you have a right to be here.
You do not have to earn your existence through achievement, obedience or usefulness. Worth is not a prize awarded to those who perform life correctly. It begins with being alive.
Children arrive as people, not unfinished adults. They deserve love, safety and guidance, but also respect. Their wisdom is often ignored because it does not arrive in the language of authority. We ask children to listen, but how often do we listen to them?
Parenting can change the world because it is one of the first places where power is learned. A child discovers whether love is conditional, whether their body belongs to them, whether questions are welcome and whether disagreement is dangerous. Families can take many forms. What matters is not how closely they resemble tradition, but whether the people within them are free to grow.
Love is not control.
Education should expand a child’s relationship with the world, not reduce it to obedience. Yet many schools reward compliance more easily than curiosity. They teach children to compete before they understand what they are competing for. By the time formal education ends, many people have learned how to meet expectations but forgotten how to recognise their own interests.
This does not mean learning has failed. Learning continues wherever curiosity survives.
Question what you inherit. Not because everything old is wrong, but because nothing becomes true simply by being repeated. Systems are created by people, and people can change them. What feels permanent may only be familiar.
Choice is a human right, but no choice exists entirely outside circumstance. Freedom is not simply doing whatever we want. It is understanding what shapes us well enough to decide what we wish to carry forward.
Being yourself is not a final achievement. The self is not something hidden inside us, waiting to be uncovered once and for all. We are always becoming—through experience, relationships, mistakes, loss and change. Differentness does not need to be corrected. Belonging should not require disappearance.
Make friends across the imaginary borders we are taught to defend, but also learn to be present with yourself. Self-knowledge is not self-indulgence. It helps us recognise when we are living from desire and when we are living from fear.
Do not turn pain into a moral failure. People reach for substances, distractions and escape for many reasons. Judgment rarely heals what understanding has not yet reached. Sometimes we save ourselves. Sometimes another person helps us remember that we are worth saving. Most often, healing is something we do together.
Talk about death, because death gives shape to life. We do not need to pretend certainty about what comes next. It is enough to recognise that endings are part of being alive—and that awareness can make the present more vivid.
Look after your body, your mind, your sexuality and your capacity for joy. Pleasure is not the enemy of wisdom. Laughter is not a distraction from seriousness. Gratitude, empathy and forgiveness are forms of wealth, but even these should not become obligations used to silence anger or avoid truth.
Find the language that connects you to something larger, whether you call it God, nature, humanity, mystery or cosmic love.
Change is not the loss of freedom.
Change is how freedom remains alive.
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Can Menopause Trigger Suicide?
Yes, it can.
Not because menopause itself causes suicide, but because the hormonal changes of perimenopause and menopause can trigger severe depression in some women. That depression is unlike anything many women have experienced before, yet it remains poorly understood and far too often dismissed.
Menopause and suicide are uncomfortable subjects, but they belong in the same conversation. For too many women around the world, this stage of life pushes them into a darkness they never imagined possible.
Menopause Is More Than One Day
There are three stages of menopause: perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause. The entire transition can last around ten years.
Technically, menopause is just one day—the point at which a woman has gone twelve months without a period. The years leading up to it, known as perimenopause, are when hormones fluctuate the most. This is when many women experience their most severe symptoms.
As oestrogen and progesterone decline, the brain is affected too. Hormonal changes influence neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which helps regulate mood and emotional wellbeing. For some women, these fluctuations can trigger anxiety, panic attacks, depression, feelings of hopelessness and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts.
Women who have experienced depression, severe PMS or postnatal depression may be particularly vulnerable. Others are caught completely off guard, having never struggled with their mental health before.
Induced Menopause
For women who enter menopause suddenly through hysterectomy or other medical treatment, the transition can be even more devastating. Instead of hormones declining gradually, they fall abruptly, leaving many women to cope with overwhelming physical and emotional changes almost overnight.
Menopause-induced depression is not simply about feeling low. Many women describe it as unlike any depression they have known before. It can feel as though the mind has turned against the body, making everyday life frightening and unrecognisable.
Yet menopause continues to be brushed away as little more than hot flushes and mood swings. Women deserve better than that.
The Silence Is Costing Women
We prepare girls for puberty. We educate women about pregnancy and childbirth. Yet millions enter menopause with little understanding of what hormonal change can do to their mental health.
That has to change.
Menopause education should begin in schools as part of sex education, but it cannot stop there. Women already in their late thirties and forties also need information through healthcare services, public awareness campaigns and targeted screening.
Knowing what is happening to your body and brain can be the difference between seeking help and suffering in silence.
We Must Link Menopause and Mental Health
We routinely screen women for cervical cancer and breast cancer because early intervention saves lives. Why are we not taking the same approach to menopause?
A menopause check, particularly for women entering their forties, could identify those at greater risk and connect them with support before they reach crisis point.
We cannot continue separating menopause from mental health. The hormonal changes are real, the depression is real and, for some women, the suicidal thoughts are real too.
Simply diagnosing depression without recognising the role of hormonal change is not always enough. Women deserve healthcare that recognises the whole picture.
There Is Help
Every woman experiences menopause differently. Some move through it with relatively few symptoms. Others find it completely overwhelming.
There is no single solution. Hormone therapy helps many women. Others benefit from counselling, medication or a combination of treatments. Lifestyle changes, social support and simply being believed can make an enormous difference.
The important thing is recognising that menopause-induced depression is real and treatable. No woman should be made to feel she simply has to endure it.
It’s Time We Started Talking
For decades, menopause has been reduced to jokes about hot flushes. Meanwhile, countless women have been battling panic attacks, despair, brain fog, loss of confidence and thoughts they never believed they could have.
We know far more about the physical symptoms than we do about the psychological ones. That imbalance has left too many women feeling isolated, ashamed and misunderstood.
It is time we stopped treating menopause as an inconvenience and started recognising it as one of the most significant hormonal transitions in a woman’s life.
We must also start talking openly about menopause and suicide. Not to frighten women, but to save them.
The more we understand the connection between hormonal change and mental health, the more women will recognise the warning signs, seek help sooner and realise they are not alone.
Menopause is a natural stage of life, but there is nothing trivial about it. Women should not have to suffer in silence, and they certainly should not lose their lives because we were too uncomfortable to have this conversation.
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Mamma svarade alltid
19 juli 2022
13:25 – Har inte hört något. Hon kanske är ute i skogen.
13:27 – Meddelar om hon hör av sig. Gör du också det.
15:03 – Har du hört något ännu?
15:04 – Fan, man blir ju orolig.
15:06 – Inget svar.
15:11 – Hon var här igår vid tolv.
15:23 – Jag vill vara säker på att hon inte är i Järle.
15:24 – Hon kan ju ha kommit dit plötsligt.
15:31 – Skicka ett vanligt sms också.
17:08 – Jag har provat både Viber och vanliga meddelanden.
17:12 – Telefonen verkar vara på.
17:13 – Vänta ett par timmar till, sedan går jag dit.
18:11 – Telefonen måste vara på eftersom signalen går fram.
18:13 – Jag kollar hela tiden.
18:15 – Om vi inte hör något går jag vid nio.
18:44 – Jag får nog gå ner och kolla senare.
19:01 – Ska jag gå eller vänta lite till?
19:03 – Okej, jag går om fem minuter. Det tar ungefär en halvtimme att komma fram.
19:59 – Jag ringer om ungefär en halvtimme.
20:16 – Det tar tid.
20:17 – De håller på för fullt.
20:29 – En stund till.
21:31 – Tråkiga nyheter. Hon dog på toagolvet. De gjorde vad de kunde. Jag vet inte allt ännu. Fonus kommer snart.
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Old Age Doesn’t Have to Be a Sexless Destination
When we talk about ageing, we talk about health, pensions, housing, and care.
We rarely talk about sex.
The silence is revealing.
Older adults are still portrayed as vulnerable, dependent, and increasingly disconnected from desire. Popular culture celebrates young bodies while treating older sexuality as embarrassing, amusing, or invisible.
Yet the evidence tells a different story.
Many older adults continue to experience attraction, intimacy, desire, pleasure, and love throughout their lives. The desire for connection does not disappear simply because someone turns sixty, seventy, or eighty.
The problem is not ageing.
The problem is ageism.
Ageism teaches us that growing older means becoming less relevant, less attractive, and less fully human. It encourages younger people to fear ageing and older people to internalise limitations that may never have existed in the first place.
The pandemic exposed this clearly. Older adults were often spoken about as though they were a single vulnerable population rather than individuals capable of making decisions about their own lives. Protection frequently slipped into paternalism.
The same dynamic exists around sexuality.
Older adults are offered care but denied desire.
Love but not lust.
Companionship but not eroticism.
Yet intimacy remains important throughout life—not only because sex can be pleasurable, but because touch, affection, connection, and desire contribute to wellbeing, identity, and quality of life.
Growing older should not require giving up an essential part of being human.
Old age is not a waiting room for death.
It is still life.
And life deserves pleasure.
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The Labelling Paradox: How Society Creates Deviance
What makes someone deviant?
The obvious answer is behaviour. People break rules, violate norms, and challenge expectations. Yet sociology suggests something more unsettling: behaviour alone is not enough. A person only becomes deviant when others decide they are.
A child skips school. A teenager experiments with drugs. An employee questions authority. An immigrant struggles to fit in. Whether these actions are seen as mistakes, phases, acts of independence, or signs of deviance depends largely on who is doing the judging.
Deviance is not simply discovered. It is assigned.
This is the central insight of labelling theory. Society does not merely respond to deviance; it helps create it. Once a person is labelled delinquent, difficult, unstable, disruptive, or dangerous, the label often becomes more influential than the behaviour itself.
The label follows them.
Teachers become cautious. Employers become hesitant. Neighbours become suspicious. Opportunities narrow. Over time, people may begin to see themselves through the eyes of those judging them.
The act becomes the identity.
Labelling and Power
Labelling is never neutral.
Those with greater social power are usually the ones who decide what is normal and what is deviant. Adults label children. Professionals label clients. Majorities label minorities. Institutions label individuals.
The ability to define reality is a form of power.
This does not mean all labels are wrong. Some behaviours are genuinely harmful and societies need ways of responding to them. The question is not whether labels exist, but who gets to apply them and whose interests they serve.
The same behaviour can be interpreted very differently depending on who performs it.
A wealthy teenager’s rebellion may be dismissed as youthful experimentation. The same behaviour in a poorer neighbourhood may be treated as evidence of criminality.
The act remains the same. The reaction changes.
When Difference Becomes Disorder
One of the most powerful forms of modern labelling occurs through the language of illness.
In many cases, this has reduced suffering. Behaviours once treated as moral failings are now understood with greater compassion. Yet labels can also become limiting.
When every difference is interpreted as a disorder, people risk becoming identified by a diagnosis rather than understood as individuals.
A label intended to explain can sometimes become a cage.
The challenge is to distinguish between genuine suffering and simple human variation.
Not every difference is a disease.
Why Deviance Matters
Durkheim argued that deviance serves an important social function. It clarifies boundaries, challenges assumptions, and sometimes drives social change.
Without people willing to question accepted norms, societies stagnate.
Many ideas we now celebrate were once considered deviant.
The danger is not deviance itself. The danger lies in confusing conformity with virtue.
A healthy society needs people willing to ask difficult questions, challenge dominant narratives, and test established boundaries.
Not because they are always right.
But because the freedom to dissent protects everyone.
The Real Question
Perhaps the most important question is not:
Why are some people deviant?
But:
Why are we so eager to label them?
Because every label reveals something about the person receiving it.
And something about the society applying it.
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What Is Peace, Really?
Europe says it wants peace. But peace has become a brand — not a practice. A word used to mask fear, project virtue, or justify silence.
I remember a line from an old song, rasped out by Thåström of Imperiet in the 1980s: “Är det verkligen fred vi vill ha — till varje tänkbart pris?”
Is it really peace we want — at any price?
It wasn’t just a lyric. It was a warning. Because peace, too, can become dangerous when it is used to avoid conflict rather than resolve it. When it becomes a way to surrender truth in the name of harmony, or a tool to suppress dissent in the name of order.
What is peace, really?
Most define it as the absence of war. But that’s not enough. Real peace is not just silence. It’s not compliance. It’s not stillness imposed from above.
Real peace is:
- The presence of justice.
- The freedom to disagree without fear.
- The space to remember who we are, and still welcome others.
It is not uniformity. It is not amnesia. It is not obedience.
We live in a time where leaders shout about war but brand themselves as peacemakers. Where NATO expands in the name of defence. Where sanctions starve civilians in the name of freedom. Where the word “peace” is printed on missiles and survival brochures.
Peace has become sterile. Marketed. Safe. Hollow.
But true peace is not safe. It requires self-reflection. It demands that we look in the mirror and ask:
- What are we afraid to give up?
- What lies are we still protecting?
- Who do we become if we stop pointing outward and start looking inward?
Sometimes, war feels easier than peace. Hatred gives us direction. Enemies give us purpose.
And peace? Peace asks us to love. To forgive. To compromise. To be vulnerable.
So maybe the real question is not how to achieve peace, but whether we even want it. Because peace means giving up our favourite myths. That we are always right. That we are always the good guys. That power equals security.
Maybe the reason we keep choosing war — again and again — is because we are terrified of what peace might demand from us.
But if we don’t ask, now, what peace really means — someone else will define it for us. And they will call it peace, even as they destroy everything it ever stood for.
Let us not be fooled by a peace that costs our dignity. Or our truth. Or the future.
Let us want peace — but not at any price. Let us want peace that is worthy of the name.
