admin – Empathy via Immersion

Friendships – Friends are the family we choose

Samantha Zehra Dzabic, Australia I have lived on this beautiful, messy, crazy planet for 61 years. Quite a long time, enough time to analyze, review and grow! I was born to a challenging family on a stormy Sunday morning in June in a small town in Bosnia. My childhood was tumultuous, and my youth even more so. I had a complex relationship with my parents, instability in life in general, nomadic lifestyle filled with lots of fear and uncertainty. For the longest time, I thought physical and verbal abuse was regular; that was how families behaved. I would love to say that I managed to change my life and my behaviour early on, alas, life had to unfold in a very different way for me, and my healing came about slowly and painfully. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, so when I look back, I can see how my friendships shaped my path to recovery. One of the most influential people is a childhood friend who hadn’t abandoned me despite periods when I wasn’t lovable. This remarkable man always gave me so much love, understanding, kindness, and from time to time, a “come to your senses” talk. This friendship endured through good and...

Transitions – The Power of Choice

Willemien de Rie - 1965 - Netherlands - Running away to Australia and back I was standing on London Bridge, a balmy summer eve in 1999. Looking at the water. Would I be missed if I jumped in? Would someone notice? I was 34. Professionally well on my way to a great career in finance. I felt lonely, unseen and detached. Didn’t really see the point of it all. A song playing in my head, that I had heard too many times already: Is this all there is, is that all there is ………… Fast forward to January 2001. My last project had been an enormous success. As a result, I was allowed to pick my next role and location. I chose Australia. Burying myself in my work allowed me to hide from my misery, and now it was allowing me to run away further than I had ever done! My first choice: Running away Sydney. Working hard – for those of you that think all you do in Australia is sit on the beach, catch a wave, and throw another shrimp on the barbie: think again. Partying and adrenaline kept me going in my spare time. To the outside world I worked...

Friendships – My messy way to let my friendships last a lifetime

Simone de Rie, 23-11-1966, The Netherlands I think friendships are complex, especially new ones later in life and more even if they come in a setting where collaboration is not simple but required. Friends have expectations, often unexpressed that become clearer and clearer over time, through experience and sometimes conflict. Often they turn out to be a discovery that evolves. If we are lucky over our lifetime and beyond. Work friendships may be the hardest of them all. And yet… They are one of my most significant sources of learning about relationships and myself. I sit on my couch and walk through my garden, reflecting on the friends I made and the ones that I have lost over time as I left jobs. I can never tell when I am amid the messiness of separating whether the loss is temporary or permanent. But, as we know, sometimes conflict metastasises into hatred. It can be too terrifying to lean in and ask the real questions or have the resilience to sit through the pain of the friend that could be lost. In my case, often the second rather than the first. When listening, I feel the pull to argue and defend, even when I...

Change of Profession – From Event Manager to IT professional

Marjolein van Kraanen, 12-04-1984, The Netherlands I was sitting in a job coach's office, for the first time in my life at 36, after being laid off for the first time in my life, rather expecting him to look through my cv and job experience to see what sort of things I was good at, and what sort of job that meant I should pursue. Instead, he asked me one thing: What is important to you? It was late 2020 in The Netherlands, during what we now know was one of the brief interludes between Covid-19 lockdowns where things were starting to look up for a while, and face-to-face appointments were allowed. I had lost my job of 13 years not long before - one of thousands of people whose employers could not afford to keep on staff if there was no work. Mine was an events organizer, professional and academic workshops and conferences rather than purely entertainment, though of course Covid-19 did not care much for that distinction. There was no one at fault, but it still left me with the consequence: how do I find a new job, without running into the same problem some time down the line, if...

Language Learning – Moving from English Speaking Canada to French speaking Canada

Mike Bird, 13-11-1988, Canada The familiar rumbling of a freight train passing through town could be heard, but better yet, it was felt through the vibration of my twin IKEA bed. Like a massage that helped me relax and doze off to sleep, I knew it must have been just after midnight in Trois-Rivières. It had been a few months since I’d started living in the town five-and-a-half days a week. The remaining 36 hours - usually spread over Sunday and Monday morning - were spent in Montréal: then and still my home base. Growing up in English-speaking Canada, you could say I was an outlier - dare I say outsider - in the town of just under 114 000. Just over 95% of residents identify as francophones. But Trois-Rivières was playing host to me while I carried out two concurrent missions. Mission One: coach the local college football team. Mission Two: learn French. Although I had attended university in Montréal, an officially French metropolis, I’d neglected to see just how important the language was to the culture of the province of Québec. Coming out of my studies, I found myself grasping for some sort of meaningful employment and feeling incredibly unconfident about doing so....

Change of Profession – From being an artist towards being a coach in IT

Jacqueline Schäfer, 26-03-1961, The Netherlands Unknown chances through gentle surrendering and immersing into the new. Introduction. I can only write and share what I wrote with others when I’m feeling well. That doesn’t mean that the topic always has to be about something positive. It can be a reflection on a serious negative experience, thought or feeling. But, I like to share it from a point of view and a moment in time from where I can show that I’ve overcome the negative and that it has brought me something positive. Cause that’s how I like to look at life. What positive lesson can I learn from everything that crosses my path? I write journals. I’ve done that for the largest part of my life.There I can share everything with me, myself and I. Problems and thoughts that I don’t want to share with others. Because it would make them, in all certainty, worry about me. And I know that when people worry about me, most of the time they’d like to come with solutions. To fix things. Being the youngest of five I’ve seen things taken out of my hands out of tender love and kindness. With older siblings taking care of business. That, in...

Adoption – Meeting biological mother for the first time.

Joeri (Kim Wan Suk) Kraaijestein, 15-07-1974, The Netherlands My full name is Joeri Kim Wan Suk Kraaijestein, and my name gives away that I am originally from South Korea. When I was two years old, my birth father left my birth mother with her two young children. Poor as she was, she could not take care of us and left us at an orphanage. I became a Dutch citizen when my birth sister and I were adopted in 1976 by our (Dutch) parents. My adoption was never a topic for me. It was for my sister, though. When she went to South Korea to meet our birth mother (our birth father had passed away already) for the first time, I was not ready to join her. Perhaps it was not on my mind because I didn’t know what to do with it. Still, as time passed, my sister told me that our birth mother’s dying wish was to meet me one day. It made me reconsider, and I realized it was a small effort for me to fulfill her lifetime dream, so the idea grew to meet my birth mother for the “first” time. In 2005, it was time for me to...