Tinder Gold

[Read after you have read Bamboo tree and The monkeys up in the trees]

When I returned from the US in 2018, my old friends had all moved on with their lives. I was 35 and what did I do, since I was not raising kids or making a career? I joined Tinder Gold, because sure, that was the solution to my existential questions. But soon my naive little self found out it wasn’t easy to find a man without an ex-wife, kids, or fear of commitment. With an education, a job and hair on his head. I thought these were the basics (but they turned out to be the exceptions to the rule). And listen, Holland is not a tropical resort, so that one week a year you went scuba diving on de Maledives or kitesurfing in Brazil with your shirt off says nothing about who you are. So you had fun that one time, but what do you do the rest of the year on a Tuesday night? So much for Tinder.

In the years that followed, I took a vacation, a vacation from life, during which I learned valuable lessons, like: ‘God turns you into a wife first and then you’ll meet a man’. Or ‘You shouldn’t compare yourself to other people. Their success is not a reflection of your failure’.

My coach called me a bamboo tree once. Which I found peculiar at the time, but did you know it takes five years to grow, years underneath the surface and then up to 30 meters in just a few weeks?