He doesn’t remember as images, but as sounds.
Crying that goes on. Voices that crack. Then the church bells. Heavy and irreversible. Finally, the silence over a cemetery.
Steffen Knulst is only three years old when his mother dies. It is his first memory – and it will be the beginning of a darkness that will cast a shadow over the rest of his life.
Today he doesn’t go to funerals. Not because he does not grieve, but because grief becomes too heavy in the rooms where it is shared. Instead, he takes his leave alone. As something not to be seen – only worn.
Shadow child
Steffen Knulst is almost 31 years old today. He grows up in Nuuk in a home that is far from what most would call normal. After his mother’s death, he lives with his father, who struggles with an alcohol addiction. Yet this is not where the violence is found.
– My father never did anything to me. So even though he was drinking, he was actually nice all the time, says Steffen Knulst.
But around him the abuse is omnipresent. Alcohol and cannabis bind large parts of the family together – and at the same time pull everything apart. At weekends, when his father is at work, Steffen is sent to his grandmother and grandfather. What should have been a free space develops into the opposite.
– I was raped by my cousin at the weekends at my grandmother’s and grandfather’s, he says.
The voice is calm. Almost detached from the weight of words.
The abuse went on for four years, from when he was six to nine. He is too small to resist and too afraid to say it out loud. The threats keep him stuck in silence. Until one day.
– My support pedagogue from the municipality suddenly asked me what we did in the evening when I was there. I froze completely. I panicked. At first I lied about who raped me because I was so afraid that my cousin would kill me. He had threatened me with that so many times, says Steffen Knulst.
One would think that the revelation would be a turning point. That things get easier from there. It doesn’t. Instead, a new form of insecurity begins. Steffen is sent around the system, from home to home. In one year he lives in nine different foster families. Nowhere long enough to settle. Nowhere long enough to feel at home. And in several of the places, the insecurity becomes tangible – with both physical and psychological violence.
– Although my last foster mother was loving, her husband was not. One day, when I had been down in the cemetery crying by my mother’s grave as a teenager, he shouted for me to stop. That he was tired of seeing me pretend I missed her. It totally destroyed me, he says quietly.
Still, it’s as if the connection to the mother never disappears. On the contrary, it grows in the absence and is allowed to fill the void that no one else manages to fill. Where relationships around him break down or hurt, the notion of her remains untouched. Something that doesn’t fail.
– I miss her every day. Maybe it sounds strange, but I feel her. And I know she was good to me, he says.
It is a bond without memories. Without shared experiences. Only carried by a feeling – and a longing. And perhaps that is precisely the most telling thing about his childhood: that the closest form of security is found in the relationship with a mother he lost at the age of three. That what should have been the foundation instead became an absence. The rest was something he had to survive.
A light in the dark
At the age of 21, Steffen Knulst moves from the foster family. He moves in with a girlfriend. The relationship is neither healthy nor stable, but it is a place to be. Together they travel to Denmark, where he gets work collecting rubbish for the municipality in Horsens.
He never got an education. There was no one to hold him at school, no one to hold on when the going got tough. With ADHD and an upbringing characterized by unrest and failure, the school desk was almost impossible to sit in. He therefore takes the work he can get.
But the stay in Denmark will be short. At home in Nuuk, his grandmother and grandfather are affected by cancer. Steffen travels back. A week later his grandfather dies. It will be the beginning of another difficult period, when death again moves close.
– Another nightmare begins. I lose four family members in two months, and several of my friends commit suicide, says Steffen Knulst wistfully.
The grief piles up. The losses are in line. And somewhere it has to settle.
– I fled into the hash. I just started smoking all the time. Every day. Constantly, he says without hesitation.
He abstains from alcohol. He has seen what it does. See how it can dissolve people and families from within. But the hash becomes a way to blur the edges. A way of being in what is otherwise unbearable.
Life has long been characterized by unrest. Of changing conditions that don’t last. Of an everyday life that slips by. And then – in the middle of it all – a light comes on.
His daughter. Rena is born on a beautiful September day, and although she now lives with her mother in Qasigiannguit, she becomes a permanent fixture in his life. Today she is four years old, and the conversations over FaceTime are something he does not skip.
– She means everything. When I see her on FaceTime, it releases dopamine throughout my body. It’s bigger than any fix. It’s the best, says Steffen and smiles.
For the first time in a long time, there is something that is not about survival. Something that pulls in a different direction.
Sport as a refuge
Steffen Knulst is very aware of his addiction. Ritalin dampens the ADHD symptoms, the hash makes life bearable and opens up space for laughter, but occasionally he has periods when he stops doing both completely.
– I have some periods when I stop both pills and hashish. Just to feel myself and see how dependent I am. I don’t want to be overly dependent. Nothing good ever comes of that, says Steffen Knulst with a responsible tone, as if he knows he can’t manage without it – but also won’t be able to manage only with it.
During the periods without pills and smoke, the temper can be difficult to control. But luckily there is something that works for him. Sport. The Inuit Games – the traditional Arctic sport – gives him both strength and calm. It gives him something to hold on to, something that exercises the body and brain, and something that lets him feel himself in a way that no drug can.
– It was one of my best friends, who unfortunately committed suicide last year, who took me to training for the first time. It was in 2010, but I only got good at it in 2014, he says.
As the training becomes more serious, competition opportunities present themselves. He performs at the Greenland championships – he succeeds. But the national team has clear rules: you must not be influenced.
– I tried to keep it a secret, but in the end it wasn’t a secret at all anymore, so I was kicked out of the national team by my coach at the time, Kim Rosing, who was otherwise the closest I’ve ever come to a father figure, says Steffen Knulst calmly.
In 2019, he tries again. He is taking a break from the hash and approaching the Greenland records in One-foot and Two-foot High Kick until he sets them himself in 2021.
– I started to dream about something. I dreamed of sports results, of performing. It was completely new to me, says Steffen Knulst.
He participates in the Arctic Winter Games twice, in 2018 and in 2023. His first AWG is a hazy experience: he smokes weed 45 minutes before the plane takes off, and on board the coach Kim Rosing, who is also a reserve officer, sits next to him.
– I was disappointed in myself. I won bronze that year, but I wasn’t proud, says Steffen Knulst.
In 2023, the story is completely different. Steffen has stayed away from smoking, trained seriously, and the efforts bear fruit: he wins gold for Greenland in the Head Pull discipline.
His addiction and sports career fluctuates up and down, but amid the chaos, Kim Rosing is a quiet, constant point. Both as a coach and reserve officer, he can see Steffen – all that he struggles with and all that he can become. Perhaps this is precisely why Kim has taken a place as a kind of father figure in a life where security and stability are otherwise foreign dimensions.
Balance in life
This year, Steffen did not participate in the Arctic Winter Games. On the other hand, he hasn’t smoked weed in the whole of 2026. Yet. He says it without much arm movement, almost as a statement. He doesn’t think he’ll ever stop completely. But the breaks do something to him. They give space. He trains more seriously now. Finds back to the body, to the rhythm. And although life still moves between darkness and light, he is no longer where the darkness is all-consuming.
– I have tried to commit suicide seven times. Three times it has almost succeeded, but never quite. Steffen says it without drama. As part of the story, and continues:
– It’s been twelve years since the last time. I don’t want to have such thoughts anymore. I have a daughter and I have a girlfriend with whom I feel good. And I know that I am loved – somehow. That must be enough, he says.
There is no big answer in that. No redemption that brings it all together. Just a realization.
– Life is a bit of a balance. I must not be too happy, but not too sad either. It can be difficult, he says with weight in his voice.
Perhaps that is precisely where he stands now. Not free from what has been. Not done with the fight. But somewhere in between.
