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Since I last posted I've finally moved house! Very happy but there's also so much still to do... I'm lucky to have two spare rooms but everything (painting, flooring, curtains, even furniture) still needs to be done and one of them appears to have a small leak from the upstairs neighbors so maybe it is fortunate that nothing's been done there yet. I feel alternating fine, bored, exhausted. Mostly bored which also leads to exhaustion. Who knows that moving out of a very complicated and uncomfortable housing situation will leave you with so. much. time?

It's been a while and I've been sort of hanging on, reading a lot and then doomscrolling a lot, getting through an almost break up and then getting probably covid, and getting terrible sensory overload for several weeks, likely due to both more fatigue than usual and de-conditioning due to being in bed for two weeks. Some happier things: I enjoyed a giant book fair and started volunteering for a local used book store and it's a great fit so far.

I don't want to review every book I've read since I last posted, because a lot of them were kind of just entertainment and not much more, and also because being foggy in the head doesn't make books stick, so I have few interesting things to say about them... but some I do want to mention:

De tolk van Java [Java's interpreter] by Alfred Birney, about the Indonesian independence war and the personal story of how a family was impacted by the war and the fall out. Autobiographical and raw. The perspective alternates between the son growing up into an adult and his father's war experiences. I plan to reread it.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, about the Sackler family's role in the opioid epidemic. I had limited knowledge of the opioid epidemic ~~(probably still have because 1 book won't fix that)~~
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry is one of those books where the prose draws you in from the start. Beautiful and devastating.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is a wonderful multi-generational book, with mysteries that get solved at the last moment and full of the kind of scenic descriptions I enjoy so much.
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant was an interesting introduction to the daily lives in Renaissance Florence, including religious unrest. I was surprisingly touched by the main character's thoughts about religion, the kind she was raised with VS the kind that took hold of the city. And some nice twists and turns in the story!
The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon was tense but wonderful. An 18th century midwife gets wrapped up in a murder investigation that turns things upside down in the whole town. Lovely descriptions too.

A quote on grief goes like this: 'I'm on planet "my friend died" when everyone else is on planet Earth".' I feel like I'm on planet PTSD when everyone else is on planet Earth.

After over six months of chaos and misunderstanding, I've had to determine that my current (professional) support system is just not working. There are too many different people and it's too hard to figure out how to talk to all of them about what's going on in my head. The frequent misunderstandings and unsolicited advice pile up and grow over my head until I feel I have nowhere to go.

PTSD affects my daily life to the point that I'm deemed unfit for employment. Being constantly on high alert makes for exhaustion, overwhelm and physical health issues. Being on the spectrum alongside that makes me even more sensitive to all those nasty side effects.

I developed PTSD after growing up in volatile and violent households, being assaulted at random on the street and being dumped at a group home age 16 where there was plenty of sexual intimidation from housemates which culminated into the assault of a close friend by someone who had previously threatened me. All of which was promptly swept under the rug. I was able to move out after several years into what felt like freedom with support, but it has turned out to be another disappointment.

I don't know how to get through trauma therapy without having someone to talk to in depth about things in between sessions. The list is too long and heavy to go to friends or my boyfriend. I go to my support workers and get very little understanding. I have to explain things all the time, over and over. I wanted to start running recently but as I was gathering my new sports clothes to pull on and go for my first run, I was paralysed with fear, sweating, shaking, the whole ordeal. I can't do it, and I can't do this because of some POS who decided to bother me a decade ago. What the hell.

I sit on the sofa staring at the clothes and decide to text for help, I want to start running but I'm too afraid and it's really upsetting me. 'Can't you go tomorrow morning?' I drop my phone on the sofa and cry, feeling ridiculous. Why do I still text if it goes like this? How many times do I have to say, I don't need advice, I need a conversation? Do I text this person saying I was assaulted and that's why I'm afraid? Who even is one the phone right now? I've had 2 years of therapy and I still feel like this. When will it work? And who is there for me to reach out to in moments like this, who knows me well enough? Will I have to explain traumatic events over and over and over, to people who are unequipped to support me? The running is something small but this is the way it goes all the time and it's wearing me down and making me feel so incredibly alone.

I'm going to move out into my own independent apartment with different support; just two people, set appointments during the week, available during working hours. The council will assign me an apartment, somewhere, sometime, with some persons to help me. Nothing certain. I talk to my support worker of the day: it's so uncertain, I feel like I'm ripping up the foundations of my life and I have no clue what it will look like next. Reply: well, the housing market is uncertain! And then we have a dumb conversations about social rent housing and how they don't let you know anything (and I realise this person is too dim to log in and check her dawned account) and I get home from our walk and think, oh God, I'm so alone. Who is there to listen?

Moving is a trigger, being ditched by one parent to live with the next, then being dropped at a neglectful group home full of neglected teens and then moving out of there because I'm crying all the time and have no faith in support anymore and now 4 years later the story is the same. Being sad is a trigger after growing up being punished for it. I don't feel safe in my apartment. I sleep poorly. I feel separated from the few people in my life. I text my boyfriend daily, we ask each other about our days and I want to stop saying 'I'm sad' and 'I'm tired'. I feel a burden on him and all my friends and it all makes me feel even more alone and desperate. The gap between me and the rest of the world feels miles wide and miles deep. I do all I can, therapy and the daily activities that are a constant exercise in exposure therapy, I walk over an hour every day, I get 8 hours of sleep, I try to eat healthy, I try to arrange a volunteering job, get psycho-motor therapy, even when it is with a male therapist and he tries to be nice and understanding and I just feel nauseous and alone.

I live on planet PTSD, waiting to be able to leave, enduring awful therapy, I'm forever in a waiting room, talking about my fear of wearing yoga pants while my stomach churns and know how ridiculous it is: I've walked in that park daily for years and somehow I feel so intensely afraid to wear utterly commonplace clothes, and as I cycle home I keep zoning out and stop biking. My friends are working or in university or meeting friends or making things and I'm in bed staring at the ceiling. My therapist tells me this something to just endure, and I say, I've been enduring all my life and I would like to live. I know life can't always be fun or easy but this isn't tolerable and I'm sick, so so sick of enduring. I'm in a dark tunnel and I cannot see the end and I've been told I'll get there for over a decade and I don't know if I believe that anymore. Our time is up and we'll continue next week. She moves on to her next client and I go home to planet PTSD, population one, while everyone tries their best to pretend I'm on Planet Earth and that nothing is wrong.

In January of this year I read

Kindred (transl.) by Octavia E Butler
Tramhalte Beethovenstraat (transl.) by Grete Weil
Croix de cendre (transl.) by Antoine Senanque
De weduwe van de kolonie, by Marja Visscher (audiobook)

I often find it hard to say anything sensible about the books I've read but I would like to practice that, hence this first dingy little monthly review.

I've seen Octavia Butler's books around and I would like to read the Parable of the Sower as well. I just don't have any intelligent thoughts on Kindred, it was just fascinating to read about this main character being pulled into time to save the life of the slave owner of her ancestors, who was also an ancestor of her. The conflicting thoughts and complicated emotions about being dragged through time were interesting to read and I do recommend the book.

Tramhalte Beethovenstraat was also a fascinating read. My family didn't experience persecution during the Shoah, but the war was a topic on any family gathering on my maternal side as my grandfather had living memory of the war. My grandmother was a few years younger and never speaks on her experiences, but all through my childhood she has given me books about the Shoah in particular. In my life I've read quite a lot of (older) fiction on WWII, but never from a German perspective like this. The main character boards in a house that is near the tram stop at the Beethovenstraat, where Jewish people are gathered to be sent away in the night. The main character doesn't understand what is happening and seeks help from a 'nerve doctor' because he thinks he has lost his mind. It's a very poignant book and it doesn't shy away from the dark aspects of history. I would like to read more books by Grete Weil but my local library doesn't have any more of her titles at this point.

Croix de cendre broke my brain a few times because I wasn't familiar with the specific time period or the happenings in the church at the time, but it was a sort of mesmerizing read about religion I sometimes could barely grasp, and about deep, long friendships.

De weduwe van de kolonie is a fictional account of life in the Society of Humanitarianism in the Netherlands, and I have 2-3 generations of ancestors who lived there and tried to make a life for themselves there. I previously read Will Schackman's non-fiction books about the colonies and I found them very interesting and illuminating. Susanna Jansen wrote a book Het Pauperparadijs about her own ancestors and both this and Schackman's books seem to have started a new wave of 'colony books' (the colony in the North of the Netherlands) including De vondeling van Veenhuizen by Patricia Snel.

But with Dutch historical fiction I tend to run into the same problem over and over again: I love historical fiction with detailed descriptions of the physical environment of the characters, and complex inner lives, and in my experience the Dutch historical fiction genre falls flat compared to so, so much of foreign historical fiction. The environment feels empty and the character's inner worlds even flatter. I find it hard to empathize with main character Kaatje and the decisions she makes, and her relationships with others just seem shallow in a way. In the beginning the story is quite strong, but then events follow each other up so quickly that there is not really any space to process them as the reader or for the main character. I feel like the decisions she makes aren't deeply supported by an internal world; something happens, there is an immediate reaction and the character moves on, there aren't any deep reflections or scenes where you can tell the character is impacted by her environment and experiences. It all stays quite shallow and chronological.

Decided to dare myself to go for a bit of an adventurous walk/hike today, cycling to a local large park. Immediately when I stepped out the door I was pelted by a sudden hailstorm but I persevered. Parked my bike at the park and somewhat impulsively decided to do the 5km route, despite the mediocre weather and slight chill but in the end I've no regrets. It's nice to follow a marked out route, haven't walked around in nature like that for a while because I've been feeling very afraid of going somewhere alone to walk alone. All went well, I had a good time and about halfway I reached that mental place of calm and peace that comes with mindless walking, no need to think about much other than spotting the next marking so you don't lose your way. Feeling the sun on my skin and the chill as soon as the sun disappears behind clouds or trees. The landscape was fairly changeable, from pine trees to deciduous trees to patches of blueberries and heather. There's something soothing in all of it, and I felt very calm when I arrived back at my bike an hour later, windswept and rained on and warmed up from the exercise and patches of sunlight. I'll go back some time soon and try one of the longer hikes.

Current Mood: calm

I've been trying to get back into my crafty hobbies, starting with knitting. I think I really really started knitting last autumn, when I knit a pair of socks, started mittens (the second one is still waiting for the thumb to be knit, shhhhh), and recently I've finished another pair of socks and a... Frog. You might've seen those cute cute frogs on instagram reels and I just really wanted to try making one. I worried about the cost of the yarn from the pattern because there are some real expensive varieties out there, but when I finally looked it up it was just not at all expensive. So I finally got around to ordering and making frogs! The first one turned out a little lumpy but still cute and yesterday I started on the second one.

Today I'm visiting my mother to help her unpack, she moved house yesterday and I've yet to see the place - moving between rentals is hasty and there wasn't time. From the pictures it looks quite nice, and definitely an upgrade from her apartment. She now has a little garden and the house is in a better neighbourhood. What's also a nice surprise is that it's only a 15 minute walk from the train station, no more buses needed to visit! (my wallet will be delighted)

I'm still reading A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne. The perspective keeps shifting in a way I'm not used to. The main character Maurice is an ambitious and manipulative man who sucks up to successful writers to get them to help him along, promptly ditching them after they've helped him as far as they can get him. The first perspective was from one of the authors he uses, an old man with a secret 'evil' and complex past. Maurice weasels the story out of him, publishes it and ruins the author's good name and the last years of his life. The second perspective was from another famous author, whose friends were visiting him, one of them bringing Maurice. The third is from Maurice's wife, he marries at some point and he seems to have been stealing her work while she's working on the final stages. Maurice seems to be an all-round piece of shit and I wonder what drives him to act this horribly. Insecurity over his own skills? Ruthless ambition? (Though success would feel hollow if it wasn't your own achievement, I think) I was reminded of this video on plagiarism.

Meanwhile, I've been reading the Outlander books for some months and found them to be surprisingly enjoyable and interesting. I'm currently reading A Breath of Snow and Ashes, which is the 6th book in the series. The Outlander community/forum seems to be a bit dead on here, but maybe fellow fans are still out there?