Diatribe of Belonging

Diatribe of Belonging

I wonder if I will ever be able to feel Dutch.

I felt this winter that Holland and I are not compatible.

Holland has a unique and particular way of hurting me.

To prick me where it hurts the most.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to learn Dutch.

Holland hurts me, attacks me,

(like the wind in my face full of sand and saltwater crashing against my glasses, my wet shoes, covered with damp sand)

with its harshness, its brutality, and its indifference.

It stabs me.

That’s why I reject it, although, at the same time, I need it.

I need it to open a door for me to feel at home, to put down roots because otherwise, I drown, I fly through the thin air, without oxygen, of the loss of meaning.

And I ask Holland, earnestly, to let me, for a moment, for a while, to allow me to feel a part, to grant me a little piece of ground under the sun.

But she rejects me too.

She looks at me with distrust, doubts that I can, doubts that I am up to the task.

And so, we don’t look eye to eye.

There was a Holland Phase One when I came to study and lived a student life at 27.

It started well, but ended badly, with traumas and betrayals, resonances that have changed my life to this day.

That’s why I say, I don’t know what it is about Holland, why Holland and not, for example, Sweden.

Maybe it was just timing, being in the right place at the right time.

But you won’t understand this because you don’t know the whole story.

It’s a bit of a coincidence, a chain of events, and it is what it is:

A difficult and mismatched situation.

She has everything and I have nothing.

***

And now it’s Holland sticking the dagger in me again.

Earlier it was those five professors with their heads down

Around the round table

With the capo at the head

The Rider.

(They are part of my story, the men with their heads down around the examining table

-the professors of the conservatory I came here for-

And Il Padrino at the front, the great Frans De Ruiter, giving his deadly speech, striking the last blow, take it! the fatal blow: a seven, because you have no talent. And you tell me this after four years of studies, for which I took an entrance exam, and during which I paid a hefty tuition fee as a student from outside the European Union).

And now who are the ones who are sticking the dagger in me?

The whole system is designed to help some and ignore others.

It’s not one person or one organization.

After all, we are all human.

But it is the machinery behind the organization, the person, that is Machiavellian.

The algorithms, which in the end, control us all.

But I suffer from an attraction to the difficult and to what rejects me.

That’s why I like to walk

open face

Against the wind.