[A compilation of thoughts: June – September 2023]

I’d like to believe that when I do the right thing, I can make something of my life. I meet people who are unemployed knowing they’ll never work again. Sick, knowing that they will die young. In their case I can understand one digs deep into the Bible, holds on to mindfulness or practices meditation as if it were a religion, because that’s all there is left. But I’d like to believe there is more.

A friend recently said to me: There are not many people our age who have to wonder whether life can be made or not. To be honest, I believe in what Oprah calls co-creation and Lao Tzu called Wu Wei. I call it ‘The Surf of Life’. Going with the flow of life’s waves. Don’t try to resist. Work with the waves, so you can ride them. 

I miss the nineties though, when the sky was the limit and movies like Jerry McGuire and Romeo + Juliet still moved me. When life was simple. I hadn’t seen the world and marveled at the Twin Towers or the Burj al Arab yet. I was nobody and still had to become someone.

But today, twenty plus years later, life is simple once again. 

I promised myself to be more thankful the other day. Who gets to go to the movies in the middle of the day? There art thou happy. Who gets to still see their parents every day? There art thou happy. Who doesn’t have to go to work every day, but still gets a paycheck at the end of the month? There art thou lucky. Right? 

Well, don’t get too excited. It’s still raining out, in the middle of Summer. 

There’s your business, other people’s business and the Universe’s business. Anything happening in another’s life is their business. Anything affecting the world and its complexity is the Universe’s. Mind your own business, it’s the only thing you have control over in life.

It’s easy to celebrate and congratulate yourself when life treats you kind. But when the going gets tough, can you still cheer yourself on? Life has been no picknick over the past ten years. But life is the best school. Some things you simply can’t learn from books, you have to experience them.

I am on a mission far beyond earning a living and raising a family. Forget about living happily ever after. All that is so once upon a time. I am a bamboo plant. Slowly growing under the surface. Question is: will I grow sky high one day?

‘My Leonardo’ is not one guy forever, he’s a million guys in a lifetime. I have travelled the world and lived in different places, therefore I have met many men. Some I remember, others were just passing through, because people come and go.

For a while I was the one night stand, the rebound, the friend with benefits. But is that who I want to be? They all want to hook up at five in the morning, but I’m still home alone on Saturday night.

‘It’s not who you want to spend Friday night with, but who you want to spend all day Saturday with’. – No strings attached

Also read [Finding Leonardo]

My 42^nd year on this planet is coming up, time for some Q&A:

[Happy Birthday]

Why did this have to happen to me? Life is like a set of waves, sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. Just like anything in the Universe, human life has its cycles.

[Just do it]

My dreams have come true and I have a sense of magic. What if I dream up something else, can I have that too? The answer is: Just do it.

Who am I and what do I want? To figure that out, go on a quest to the rest of your life.

[Cape Leeuwin]

[The monkeys up in the trees]

[Finding Leonardo]

I have always loved stories. I remember my dad reading me bed time stories when I was a little girl. Watched so many Hollywood movies in high school. And in University I really learned to tell stories myself through the many, many papers I had to write. I have always journaled and since a few years I have my own blog. 

But lately I have started to dig into the stories of my favorite storytellers. And you know what they all have in common? Great storytellers ask great questions:

Storyteller	Their question	My answer
Oprah Winfrey	Who am I and what do I want?	I’m a storyteller and I want to tell stories
Mark Manson	What are you giving a f*ck about and why?	I want to spread an idea and inspire people
Les Brown	Why don’t most people want to work on their dreams?	I don’t know, why not?
Simon Sinek	What do you believe?	I believe I’m supposed to go off the beaten path
Tony Robbins	Why not have it now?	Exactly

So the question arises, what is my big question? I think right now my big question is: am I doing the right thing? But this leads to more questions. Like: what is the right thing? Is it the right thing to me, or the right thing to the people I am trying to please? Why am I a pleaser? Why do I have such a hard time figuring out what I want?

When you have a Master’s degree, made a career and travelled the world by the time you are forty, you might ask yourself: is that all there is? I suppose that’s my big question. Is that all there is? How about a place to call home, or a family? Or a new career path? Or financial independence? Or love? So many things to pick from. Should it even be one or two, or can I have it all? 

Maybe doing nothing for now is the best option. Because figuring out what to do every day, is also doing something. Trying to push things in a certain direction. And I have to learn to stop trying so hard and start going with the flow. Wu Wei right?

I met with William the Psychic on a Thursday afternoon in the Pearl, just a few blocks away from my house. I had just lived in the US for over a year. I was excited and curious as I took the elevator up to his office, he was already waiting for me at the end of the hallway. We shook hands and I sat down in a comfortable leather chair across from the couch where he sat. He looked really hipster for a psychic, well-groomed beard, designer glasses, Apple watch, shorts, and tattooed arms.

     He closed his eyes and started ‘reading’ my energy. The seven layers of my aura as he called it. When he came to the second layer, that was about emotions, feelings, sensuality and sexuality, it was clear that what I wanted was love. But there was an inherent fear of being swallowed up by the other person and that fear was in the way, he said. He told me my next big dream was the relationship. But no one had shown up for me yet. He saw a picture of me in the jungle, dressed like Indiana Jones, ready to hack through the fear, to have what I knew I wanted. But there were not many people like me, who wanted to experience the fullness of life, he read. I had been looking in all the wrong places. I had been looking on the ground, but my people were the monkeys up in the trees, the ones who could have the whole forest, he said metaphorically. I would soon notice a profound shift in that loop. I would find those people, he promised. The monkeys, my people. 

Also read [Finding Leonardo]

It was September 2^nd 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 31^st 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]

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