Breathe..

There are the stories you tell to make yourself look decent, and then there are the stories you bury. You bury them because nobody enjoys talking about their weaknesses, and everybody has them.

I used to think I was immune to all of it. When I was young, I moved through the world with a kind of blind, invincible momentum. I was flying high, and primary school, secondary school - it was all just scenery. I drifted, failed a year, changed schools, and never opened a book until the day I graduated. There was no need; I passed anyway. The motto was simple: have fun, will travel. I was an extrovert, a happy-go-lucky kid handing out easy smiles, convinced that whatever I touched and whatever I saw in front of me was all my life would ever need to be. I assumed the hard consequences of life were meant for other people.

Then came teacher training. I wanted to teach English, but through some bureaucratic misstep or my own carelessness, I ended up in Science and Math. The subjects meant nothing to me. So I just stopped going. I found other ways to spend my time, and I failed school miserably. It wasn't a strategic retreat; it was a total collapse. The first trickles of doubt started pooling in my head. I hated failing. I tried switching to English the next year, convinced I could just flip a switch and be competent again, but I hadn't changed how I approached the work, so the work crushed me again. There was no hiding it this time. I chose, and I failed at my own choice.

My parents had had enough and pulled the plug on the money. You can’t blame them, really. With nowhere to go and no future to speak of, I ran. Like a scared rabbit, I gave up, went to ground, and ended up existing somewhere, suspended in the air for a couple of years.

Looking back, I shouldn't pretend it was some dark, tragic time. It wasn't. In a lot of ways, it was an easy, floating existence. We were just digging a hole and forgetting the sun. It was a time of marijuana and cocaine, a haze of smoke and white powder that kept the real world at a comfortable distance. We were insulating ourselves from the heavy demands of growing up - from the terrifying realization that in the adult world, as soon as one piece of work is done, you can't sit down; it's time to start another one. Being responsible meant making choices, and choosing meant you actually had to care. And I was terrified to care, because caring meant you could fail. So I just stopped choosing. I checked out. The days blurred into the nights, and the drugs did exactly what they were supposed to do: they smoothed out the sharp edges of my own disappointment. For a couple of years, I didn't have to face the man I was failing to become, because in limbo, the future simply didn't exist.

But you can't suspend gravity forever. Eventually, my understanding of my failure to secure a future mutated into doubting if I even had one. I became obsessed with death and dying. Not just a passing thought, but a heavy, physical dread.

I masked it well enough to the outside world. Any change in my personality was gradual, but I traded my easygoing nature for a tight, introverted defense. I was pretending to be the same guy, but I was suddenly ready to aggressively argue my point just to keep people at arm's length. By this time, I had stopped doing drugs, but that only meant I had lost my release valve for all that pent-up pressure. Even taking a holiday with my partner felt like standing on the edge of a cliff. Leaving home brought this paralyzing, irrational terror that I would never be able to return, forcing a constant compromise between what I was willing to give and what she needed from me.

What I needed was a way out. My friends and I were reading Carlos Castaneda, looking for alternative realities, rejecting normal medicine, normal anything. That’s how I ended up at a classical homeopathic clinic in Eindhoven. It was expensive and time-consuming, but the doctor, Hans van den Braak, was a good listener. They used a new, experimental machine that supposedly traced blockages in your nervous system. For a while, I really felt it was helping me.

And then the illusion snapped. I was looking at the machine’s results, and it hit me: literally everything the machine found wrong with my nervous system was one hundred percent identical to the fears and self-doubt I had already confessed to Hans. I was treating myself, healing my own mind, and paying other people a fortune for it. I walked out of that clinic and never went back. It took me a while to process, but the truth was finally clear: I didn't need anybody's help or acceptance but my own. My way up started there. In order to be alive, you have to start living, you have to ride the tide!

My father eventually threw me a lifeline, bringing me in to work at his printshop. It took a while to find my feet, but once I did, I found I could do everything that needed to be done, and do it better than everybody else there, too. The old confidence started to return. I started looking at the future again. We were successful for a while, but then the shop started hemorrhaging money, and we had to lock the doors for good.

Just as I was looking for a new job, my old school called out of the blue and offered me a teaching position. I said yes, but the old panic flared up instantly. The self-doubt was so loud I backed out of the agreement. But I didn't quit entirely. I returned to teacher training instead, and to my surprise, the old trick still worked. I reverted to my younger self's approach—passing without really studying—and coasted through my Bachelor's and Master's exams without really trying. I was back.

I carried that with me into the Waalwijk city council, where I ended up serving for 16 years. The work came easily to me. The old unease never entirely vanished—holidays were always a mixed bag of happiness and that lingering dread—but I learned how to carry it. I stopped drifting. I looked around and finally chose my own ground. I never allowed the bad feelings to overshadow the happiness anymore, and happiness there is. I have a great partner, two great kids and three lovely grandkids, whats not to be happy? Only one shadow remains. I lost a lot of people along the way, happens to everyone, but to me it feels disproportionate. They are alive in the back of my mind, high and mellow, waiting for me to trip like they did. I won't!

And here we are, looking back in nothing like anger. Just the quiet realization of how long I spent hiding from the things I was supposed to be, afraid to care, and how strangely you have to break before you finally stand up and just breathe in the air.

Breathe, breathe in the air

Don't be afraid to care

Leave, but don't leave me

Look around, choose your own ground

Long you live and high you fly

Smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry

And all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be