Greta Thunberg - Our House Is on Fire - Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis

It only takes a few weeks for our everyday existence to once again be pulverized.

I’ve just started working at Stockholm’s Civic Theatre and I fall fast. My reserves are drained and the adrenalin isn’t there like it was with Greta.

Not at all.

‘It’ll work out,’ Svante says, and decides to break the pattern and travel away with Beata so they can spend time together, have a little peace and quiet, whatever that is. And do all those things that people do when they’re on vacation.

Greta can’t travel because of her eating disorder and, besides, she now refuses to fly because of the climate thing.

‘Flying is the absolute worst thing you can do,’ she explains.

But she says that if it can help her little sister then of course they should go, and so Svante and Beata fly to Sardinia and take a rental car to a nice hotel close to the Strait of Bonifacio.

They jump in the pool and eat at a restaurant and Svante’s rational thinking has come to the rescue yet again. The change of scene makes her happy and calm. It’s working.

For a few hours.

Then she panics and wants to go home. There are lizards and sounds and it’s too hot and she can’t sleep.

‘I want to go home now,’ she cries.

‘But we can’t go home now. The flight leaves in a week.’

And that’s a reality that she can’t handle.

Beata gets a panic attack and she cries herself through the night and the panic doesn’t pass until breakfast. They try a little swimming in the pool, but all Beata does is cry and ask if they please can’t go back home. She’s scared and isn’t doing well.

So Svante checks out of the hotel and packs up everything in just a few minutes and they jump in the car and drive the whole long way back to the airport with Little Mix blaring from the car stereo.

They make it in the nick of time for the afternoon flight to Rome and I book them on the SAS flight to Stockholm the next morning.

Svante finds a nice last-minute hotel close to the Piazza Venezia and from the rooftop terrace they watch the sun set behind St Peter’s and it turns into a really nice picture on Facebook that gets a lot of likes and comments: ‘Enjoy!’

Svante leaves yet another bit of his sweep-it-under-the-rug thinking in the Eternal City, and they fly home towards the glittering shores of Stockholm Arlanda. Beata is completely calm and content.

It is Midsummer Eve 2016 and all four of us walk home from the airport train shuttle with Moses on a leash. Greta and Beata each pick a bouquet of flowers along Kungsholms Strand: seven midsummer flowers – as is the old Swedish tradition – to put under your pillow so you will dream about your intended future love.

‘You just released 2.7 tonnes of CO 2flying there and back,’ Greta says to Svante when no one else is listening. ‘And that’s the equivalent of the annual emissions of five people in Senegal.’

‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Svante says, nodding. ‘I’ll try to stay on the ground from now on.’

It doesn’t turn out to be a good summer. Neither of the children can go anywhere. Beata tried, and now she no longer wants to. We entice her with everything we can think of to do in the city, but she is not having it.

Everything we suggest is answered with a ‘Shut up, you fucking idiot.’ Meanwhile Greta can only eat a few things that have to be prepared in a special way in our kitchen. She can’t eat around other people and even if her weight has increased and stabilized, she can’t afford to miss any meals.

So we stay at home in the apartment. New experiences are now out of the question for Beata. She can’t stand us and she can’t stand hearing the sounds we make. Everything makes too much noise and holding all the thoughts in her head is impossible and there are too many thoughts and all the thoughts move too fast. Even Moses has to put up with her projections. He cowers under the piano and does his best to stay out of the way.

We just have to be real quiet.

Beata makes up her own games to play but the games are too hard. Instead they degenerate and take a compulsive turn, and when they don’t work the way she wants them to work she rages at us because we are the only ones who are there. And when that’s not enough the frustration grows. In the end, she develops compulsive behaviour around anything to do with sound, as a kind of defence mechanism.

The slightest little sound can cause an outburst. So the rest of us go out in the park or take little outings between meals.We look at greenhouses and organic gardens and dip our feet in Lake Mälaren by Vinterviken bay.

Beata turns the day on its head, falling asleep at 5 a.m. and waking at 3 p.m.

A week or two goes by. Svante, Greta and I eat in the guest room on plastic plates so as not to make a sound. Everything rolls along. It’s far from ideal, but it more or less works, and at least the days are passing by. We inch our way through the summer holidays from hell.

Then, one morning we wake up at seven because the whole building is shaking. Two neighbours have flown away on holiday and decided to have their bathrooms renovated at the same time.

They are refitting the sewage system in the concrete floor and the sound inside the building is deafening, but Beata can’t go out and this is set to go on for more than two weeks.

In an instant the fragile foundation that we’ve built up collapses completely.

We beg and we plead. We curse and we swear.

The chairman of the housing association tries to help us, but obviously everyone has a full right to renovate their bathrooms, and everyone is doing what they can to limit the disruption. But that doesn’t help us.

An unsustainable situation has become considerably more unsustainable and we take turns in losing our minds. Some days we try to set limits but that only makes everything worse, and somewhere in the midst of all this we get an appointment at BUP and I collapse inside the consultation room, hyperventilating.

Of course they want to help us but it’s not easy during the summer holiday and instead we go to the Emergency Room at Sachsska Children’s Hospital with scratched-up hands and arms and faces but they’re closed. We carry on like that for several days, back and forth between BUP and the ER, and at last we get some tablets that will help Beata get to sleep in the evening.

But the whole family has already lost its footing.

I quit my job at the Civic Theatre and I’m prescribed antidepressants and sedatives, while waiting for summer holidays and bathroom renovations to end.

We scream. We kick down doors. We scratch. We pound walls. We wrestle. We cry. We ask for help and we somehow endure. But slowly, slowly an insight arrives, and with it, Beata’s journey begins.

The number of psychiatric diagnoses has increased exponentially in Sweden, as in many countries. The reason is, of course, that the number of complications has increased for those with various suspected diagnoses – complications that are very often stress-related.

More people simply have cause to investigate why their everyday lives don’t function as other people’s everyday lives seem to function.

More and more need tools to describe, for example, a functional impairment: and a diagnosis can be one of those tools. That’s why diagnoses are a good thing. They save lives.

At the same time, the vast majority of us don’t fully know how diagnoses function along with the fact that we are constantly being fed incorrect, stereotyped images which very often risk doing more harm than good.