It was September 2nd 2013, Monster Mike sat across the table from me at breakfast and he goes: “You do realize you are just as crazy as the rest of us right?” I decided not to say anything, just gave him a big smile and took a bite off my sandwich. That day was my 31st birthday.
Weeks earlier I was walking down the street with quite the pace. And as I saw my reflection in a window, I clearly heard a voice saying: ‘Slow down. This is your life. Tell him.’
Diagnosis: Bipolar I Disorder. And I didn’t even know what a Bipolar Disorder was. That was the end of my life as I knew it.
Twelve years have passed. Since then, my dreams came true when I landed a job on the US West Coast, but I found myself back on home soil two years later. Homeless, unemployed, with just two suitcases and all my belongings on a ship somewhere on the Atlantic.
I had a sense of magic, what if I dreamed up something else, could I have that too? The dream was the relationship, but no one had shown up for me yet.
After my return to Holland, I went back to school, fell off the grid, to eventually work on my recovery. Off to the rest of my life it is now. Whatever that might be, because life is given to you, my late great coach Caroline once said.
All my life I have been living other people’s lives: boyfriends’, parents’, society’s. It’s time to start living my life. I have been running around like a crazy person trying to make things happen, it is time to slow down. And one day, hopefully, I will be able to tell him. Even though I don’t know who ‘he’ is and what I am supposed to tell him, yet…
But I do believe there was a reason I was ripped away from my old life, quit my career and have been in recovery for over a decade.
[To be continued]
The Surf of Life 