#28 Eight years
oh, the places you'll go!
I fell down a flight of stairs last night in our shared apartment and hit my ass so hard, there’s a big purple bruise all over my right cheek. My elbow looks yellow and purple in one corner. I’m feeling so uncomfortable and bloated. AND YET: this past week marks eight years since moving to the Netherlands, and two years since I rebuilt my freelance photographer website into my business website (it sounds so annoying to call it a business website, but that’s what it is) as a self-employed girlboss.
So, even though I fell down a flight of stairs and got my period in the span of 12 hours, I am also feeling very reflective. I just went through what I now call Existential Summer. I spiraled and came back and spiraled and came back, panic-wrote on my notepad app about purpose and finding meaning, and now we’ve arrived in September, celebrating the last hurrah of the summer weather we missed in Amsterdam all Summer long. The week ahead forecasts hot, sunny days, climbing to 30 degrees before we head in, full-force, into the Fall. This is the current environment, the #vibes of it all. 26-year-old me is looking back at 18-year-old me and what she was like, the things she needed. Where she is now, where she might go next.
I came to Rotterdam all those years ago with the full intention of immersing myself in a new life as much as possible. I was disillusioned with what it felt like, at the time, to be Venezuelan - to have to leave my home country because I felt that there was no future there for me to build. I was very, very young and I wanted to start anew. I found my hometown suffocating and, frankly, the expectations of my parents were starting to make me feel a bit breathless, too. I had never been to Rotterdam until I flew into Schiphol in late August, around 5 days before the start of school on September 1st. Everything was grey, rainy, cloudy. I remember panicking in the car on the way to my sublet room in a shared apartment, while my dad and his wife went into the grocery store to pick up some snacks. I shed a few desperate tears before breathing deeply and telling myself everything was going to be alright.
And things were alright. More than alright. The more I look back at my university years - albeit fraught with an unrequited crush, a few lost friendships, and unprecedented amounts of teenage stress - the more I realize I built a sense of community simply by the power of having faith. A lot of faith. That’s the version of me I’m thinking about most lately, especially as I navigated a pile of existential angst during the summer. What would she do? What would she say to me now, sitting in my bed, writing this? That girl wasn’t as quick to second-guess herself. Looking back, the decisions that led me toward my greatest joys were also the decisions I made with more than just a little bit of faith. It was the decisions where I would tell myself, “Well, you have nothing to lose. Let’s see how this one goes.” It was that same blind determination that led me halfway through the world and into young adulthood, the same faith that helped me build a sense of home in a city so different from mine, in a completely different culture with its own set of idiosyncrasies.
It always squeezes my chest a little, to think about the 18-year-old girl who wanted, more than anything, to build a sense of her own life and try something, anything, different than the city she grew up in. I would’ve never imagined that, years later, I would cherish the weeks and months I would spend back home, rebuilding our tumultuous relationship, mending my pain and my hurt, and starting anew. When you’re that young (and I still am young, just not as young), your sense of identity relies so much on the town you’re from, the university you go to, the program you attend, the things you do. The past eight years have helped me build a sense of self as I tried to figure out all these things: what I liked, what I didn’t, all my hopes and fears.
My best friends and I love saying that the Netherlands has us in a chokehold. “We have it too good here,” we say over dinner, quoting the great quality of life, the walkability of Dutch cities, the wonders of living in a capital that, as dense as it is with activities, hotspots, and happenings, feels as quaint as a small, 15th-century (modernized) town. The charm of Amsterdam is hard to resist, and although Amsterdam is many things, it is, at its heart, a place that many people, regardless of origin, find themselves nestled in for years or decades.
Most of my friends have been here for roughly the same amount of time as me if not off by a couple of years. Our early twenties were about our first jobs, moving out of one city and into another, a mass migration. I took myself so seriously. Painfully seriously. I was so stressed! And I don’t blame her. She worked a job for 3 years and committed everything she had to it; that’s the way work permits are. If you’re not European and you’re not married to one, your next best bet is a work permit. What they don’t tell you is that the work permit ties you to the country. No job? No permit. It makes it difficult to not take your 21-year-old self too seriously.
But it’s also helped me understand my relationship to work, what I want it to feel like, how I relate to the idea of working and making a living, how it can be a way to pay my bills or to fuel my sense of purpose (or both). Even the difficult periods like that one showed me something about myself I could work with. Not so much change or reconfigure, but more like understand. There is so much more space to breathe if you just stop to give it to yourself. It’s maybe the one thing I wished I would’ve learned sooner.
Coincidentally, this week also marks the second anniversary of deciding to work on my own and going full force at it. The same energy was there, back from when I was 18 in my bedroom back in Valencia. What do you have to lose? I remember feeling like I had no other choice at that point. I had one more month left of my old permit and no new, full-time contract in sight. One late afternoon in a café in West Rotterdam, I found the ZZP (Self-Employed Permit) application page on the government website. I had about enough savings for one more month of living expenses and I figured, why the fuck not, I might as well try.
I might as well try.
That’s the only attitude towards life that’s ever truly, really worked for me. Thinking about the past eight years, the only time I was ever really, deeply unhappy was when I decided to make decisions based on my fears. I’ve never felt like I’ve gained anything other than a false sense of safety from looking at the world as an unkind, scary place. The “But what if it doesn’t work? What if I don’t win? Maybe I shouldn’t try” part of my brain came knocking just a few days ago. And in the past eight years, maybe that part hasn’t gotten much easier. But it does get quicker to spot, and that means I often go back within myself to find that version of me sooner. I’m trying, now, to stop and smell the proverbial roses. To not drown in impossible high standards, become unambitious to truly become ambitious again.
That Ask Polly article resonated with me because I’ve noticed that inside me, there’s the bludgeoning perfectionist and the ambitious slacker. And I’ve felt existential about accepting that in many ways, I’ve been more of an ambitious slacker all along. But shouldn’t I want to reach some idea of perfection? To be great or to be nothing?
And yet, wanting to be great or nothing never led me anywhere worthwhile.
Being mediocre used to be one of my biggest fears. And it used to make me push myself for longer, try harder, do more, especially at my old job. It was saying yes to everything, doing what was asked and always taking on more, then quietly resenting anyone who didn’t offer to do more, to help, to try harder. Except I never asked them to. No one ever really asked me to.
The past eight years have been more about understanding that being great isn’t about glamorizing the struggle of becoming great or always having to overcome adversity. I can be great and have fun. I can succeed, and settle comfortably. I can achieve things without them having to feel insurmountable in exchange for an inflated sense of self-esteem. Being enamored with the idea of struggle in exchange for success makes life seem a lot harder than it really is.
If there’s anything I really, really know to be true is that life is made up of a really rich, really dense tapestry: grief and joy coexist. They are always holding hands, moving in tandem, telling you to just try. Telling me to just try. To be there for the grief and the joy in equal parts. That there was nothing I could do to avoid grief or fight an invisible fight - I could embrace the grief and the beauty and understand that they’re all part of the world. The world was never a fight or a scary place. It can open you up. It can help you expand.
The past eight years have shaped me so much, almost as much as I’ve tried to shape my life in the Netherlands. The truth is that there’s so little that is under my control. I’ve started to find comfort in that as I’m leaving my mid-twenties behind. I’ve found that the faith I had when I was 18 was never gone, I just had to find my way back to it. So many of the parts of life I’ve enjoyed most have been the unplanned ones. The unforeseeable circumstances. The unexpected Google search result in April of 2015. The arrival to Rotterdam that August. Meeting someone on the dancefloor in 2018. Going on a month-long trip to Rome with no ensured employment in sight by the summer of 2021. Deciding to go after something that meant I could keep building a life here, later that Fall.
I visited one of my best friends late this August, and we mentioned it was a little crazy, how I lived in eight homes over the past 8 years. “But it always works out!” she says, marveling at the years between us, the moving vans and the boxes, the 5 suitcases, and the posters I hoarded in every residence I occupied. This is exactly the feeling, the knowledge that it always works out.
It does. You just have to hold your own hand.
