– at least it felt like a tsunami at the time.
I was asked to go into politics. Not that I was a typical ‘partisan’; I had never really understood how you could see people as enemies just because their opinions were different from yours. It felt more like a kind of visionary military duty, to work on a number of issues that I felt were important, like research and entrepreneurship.
I was an outsider who made my way into a system that was hard to understand, and both the preliminary party election and the parliamentary election went unexpectedly well. Just in time for the 2006 election, I moved home from Great Britain with three of the children, while my husband remained with one son for a transitional period. I was elected to parliament and also quite unexpectedly became trade minister. The whole thing was unthinkably strange. But I had a dull feeling in my stomach.
After only a few days, a storm arose when I said that my family had paid a nanny under the table in the 1990s, long before my political involvement and before Sweden implemented the ‘RUT’ tax deductions for household help. With four small children and my own business, as well as two ailing parents, I couldn’t have made my life work any other way. Of course it was completely wrong – I realised that. But it was hard to explain myself once the machinery was set in motion. What I said in explanation sounded crazy or confused when it was printed. As an outsider in the political system, I felt completely helpless. I didn’t have good political networks; I had no one to talk to and little support.
At home, the Swedish Security Service, or Säpo, explained that my family had received death threats and that they couldn’t protect us since we didn’t have a fence around our house. My children cried. We couldn’t go out and walk the dog because there were so many journalists standing in the garden. We were on the front page of every newspaper.
Finally, I couldn’t handle it any longer. I asked the prime minister to be excused from my post because I felt that I would never be able to perform any meaningful work at all. We were in total crisis, near a breakdown.
This is not the book in which I’m going to describe this in detail – the enormous lessons that I learned from being a non-politician in the political power centre, about the powers and counterforces that arise, about the tough political game. And about myself and my weaknesses, but also my unexpected fighting spirit and my great toughness. Perhaps I’ll write about this some day.
In any case, the dramatic journey came to affect my inner life and my body – big time, as the Americans say.
We moved back to Great Britain, to my husband and the son who had stayed. I couldn’t sleep for weeks, in spite of strong sleeping pills; I woke up every night in a sea of sweat and pinched myself in the arm.
Is it true that all this happened to me?
I was confused and shocked. Family members went into depression. I felt a deep sense of guilt for everything I had exposed them to but had a hard time providing the support that I wanted to since I barely had enough energy for myself.
Then I found Emelie. This ethereal woman was a personal trainer at a gym in the area, and she carefully trained me twice a week. When she massaged my back at the end of one session, my tears began to flow.
‘Why are you crying?’ she asked.
‘Something terrible happened,’ I explained. ‘In another country.’
She looked at me with her kind eyes.
‘That doesn’t mean anything right now.’
But of course it did. The questions gnawed at me. Would anyone ever want to have anything to do with me again? My husband, who had never even felt I should become a politician, was fantastic in supporting all of us and bringing us back together. But I needed to find my inner strength again.
With her exercise sessions, Emelie helped me do it. My self-confidence began in my body, like a steady flow from her wonderful sessions. I strained and worked with my body and began to realise that I had been barely breathing for the last two months, just panting like a panic-stricken dog.
I also began having new thoughts that I had never had in my life. I had experienced difficult times before, but they had always been about someone other than me. Now I saw things with new eyes. I thought about women’s vulnerability, life’s fragility. How could I use what I had learned in order to help others?
I looked up a well-known business leader in London who was on the board of a growing microfinance organisation with extensive activity in India. At the end of the meeting he asked me if I would like to go there and see how I could contribute, and within two weeks I was on a plane to Chennai.
I ended up among some of the world’s poorest women and children. The children crept up in my lap and gave me eager hugs. The women lent me their children across borders of skin colour, language, religion, culture – and I was incredibly thankful for that. My heart couldn’t defend itself. They just crept right in, and I decided that I would process what I had experienced and turn it into light, for other people. It could begin here, with these people.
After a while I became CEO of the organisation in London. The world was my field of work, and I gained many insights into life and fates far beyond what I could have imagined. It gave me completely new perspectives, a completely new sense of humility.
During this time, I learned a vast amount about our complex world. I was able to do hard things, big things, and work with exceptional people from all backgrounds.
I met poor and vulnerable women in India, South Africa and Kenya and got to see the female power that helped give them the energy to start businesses to earn money for food and clothing . . . similar women, although with different skin colours, all over the world.
One day in Swaziland, the little mountain kingdom that lies in the blue haze of the southeastern corner of South Africa, I stood in front of a self-help women’s group where all – yes, all – of the women showed traces of abuse. It was so common in the village that no one reacted to a black eye, or even a broken arm. The women came with bowed heads to the self-help group that we supported, and they left with backs that were a little straighter than before. I didn’t even have words in my vocabulary to describe the struggle in their lives, the sorrow for those who became infected with HIV when their men had returned from working in the mines of South Africa.
It was huge and mind-opening to see all this. One day I was talking to donors at the world’s largest banks, and the next day I would meet with the world’s most vulnerable people. I got to see everything – all the great and wonderful things, all the fighting spirit but also the vulnerability and awfulness. All in the same week. I learned an incredible amount and gained perspective, and things fell into place.
But it took a hard toll on my body – all these constant long trips that were often taken in the middle of the night, on a plane to or from Asia or Africa, as the only woman and sometimes the only European. I visited airports in cities that I barely knew existed just a few years before.
On a midnight flight between Chennai and Doha, I met Indian guest workers who were on their way to Qatar to build roads and football stadiums. One man told me that they were treated almost like cattle and worked under extremely hard conditions. Several of his comrades had died in workplace accidents. Their eyes were desperate, their bodies sunken. I will never forget that night.
In
