admin2023-08-07T13:42:41+00:00
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...
admin2023-02-02T11:39:44+00:00
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...
admin2023-01-31T16:21:59+00:00
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...
