Dear future hubster

 Dear future hubster, there is this cliché of women changing their hair right after a breakup, and I think often it can be real and true, when they need to do something bold, to make a drastic visual change that somehow represents the turmoil inside, and sometimes maybe they need to do things they have been putting off, for fear or experience of being seen as too loud, too different, too much.  Other times though, there are no drastic changes visible. I find that every time somebody walks out of my life - somebody I very much wanted to stay in my life - , and I go around in circles in my head about what went wrong and how did we end up like this , and I dissect my behaviour, I end up doing an exercise of "who am I". And not in a self-deprecating, low self-esteem, putting myself down way.  I usually start with the things (I thought) the person liked about me, the beautiful things they said about how I show up and what I do and how I move around in the world and how that ma...

 Dear future hubster,  in the past few weeks I was informed by multiple people that they'd thought I'm much younger than the 42 I actually am. And I had that weird feeling where I think I should take it as a compliment but - I don't?  And why should I? Why is looking younger considered a good thing? (And from when on? If I was 20, it would be rather concerning if I looked 10 years younger.)  "I thought you were much younger" actually just means that I don't match whatever is their concept of a woman at 42. Which in and of itself wouldn't be a big deal - although it is probably rooted in patriarchal and prescriptive normes of what women of a certain age shouldn't be doing. Wearing cat stockings, short skirts, not matching earrings, for example, and certainly not sporting an undercut, being blunt and impatient, or having a foul mouth. Although swearing is frowned upon at any age - it is oh so not ladylike.  That all of those are preconceptions that they...

Dear future hubster, please find below a non-exhaustive, non-linear, non-coherent, not-entirely-coincidental list of things that I would qualify as little wins: When the coach of the coach asks you what other sports you do. And then tells you to do the advanced version of the exercise. When your kiné - whom you're not-so-secretly crushing on - laughs at something clever you say. When you run anything over 5k for the first time since you've been dumped. When you first make it to 72 hours without crying. And then to a week. When you go on holidays hoping for interesting work to come back to, and then two weeks later there are lots of interesting requests in your inbox. When you get to do something your way because nobody knows any better - or because they trust that your way is good. When you call into a meeting with somebody for the first time and they are funny and competent and on top of their game and and friendly and relatable. When you find out that people know you for run...

   The cat was in the box; it was a thing and it wasn't, the box was a liminal space of yes and maybe and tease and care and excitement  and then and then the wave function collapsed and for a fraction of a moment the questions seemed to have disappeared  and then and then everything else collapsed  and and now I'm here among the ruins of the box, looking for an elaborate metaphor to say that the cat is dead 

 Dear future hubster,  somebody once asked me "what radicalised you?"and of course that question carries a lot of value judgement already, because it implies that I'm somehow more radical than... the average? the acceptable? the expected? And the answer to that leading question is either that life radicalised me, mine and that of others, what I've seen and how that aligned with or differed from what I'd believed to be true, or, maybe, that my beliefs are neither radical nor naïve, and wanting to live in a world where everybody can be safe and healthy and happy shouldn't be a utopia to be laughed at. I'm far from being the first or only one to think and say that there is nothing radical in believing that people shouldn't starve or freeze or work themselves to death, and that nobody's life should be considered expendable.  What the question and the person was alluding to is probably more along the lines of "What made you so vocal about so many t...

 Dear future hubster, when things get hard, or actually when they just get a bit much, and we're lucky enough to have people to turn to, and in a low-key way, because we don't want to or we don't know how to say that things are hard or maybe just a bit much, and some of us don't know how to say that we need some saving because we don't recognise the signs in ourselves; and then the people we want to turn to just show up in low-key ways before we could even ask; and they do their low-key things in their low-key ways like let's go have fries on a random Monday like we're Belgians (only to find that Frit Flagey is closed on Mondays), or let's go watch St Gilles play agains Fenerbahçe, or let's buy all the baby clothes and visit our new nieces in Paris, or let's go to a fancy tea place and eat weird stinky cheesecake or let's rent a kayak because it's a gorgeous day on the canals and we can get koffie to boat, or let's go hike down the Mo...

 Dear future hubster, please, please, always hold my hand - literally more so than figuratively. Hold my hand, kiss me on all the bridges, at all the red lights, put your arm around my shoulder on the way to the train station, brush my face from across the dinner table. Physical touch is my love language yeah yeah, but also, joy shouldn't be hidden. Affection should be loud, love should be in the air. Out in the open, so it feels unrestricted, where it can expand, as love is supposed to, so it can touch everything and everyone around.  So yes, kiss me in public, as a quiet revolution, in service of the greater good. 

 Dear future hubster,  when you share a book with somebody, how do you choose which one it should be? Is it something you think they would like, or is it something you like and want them to know it too? Do you want to share an experience with them? Do you want to show them a piece of your soul, in a relatively safe way, since the words written are somebody else's, you're not even a vessel for them, you're but a distant, shy promoter, gently guiding text and reader towards each other? Do you want them to feel what you felt? Do you want to think that now there is a feeling you share? Is it some secret, sacred joint knowledge, like watching the same improv play, knowing that this is the only moment it can exist, and those experiencing it are joint in a quiet, inconsequential, and elusive bind? Are you then, maybe unconsciously, maybe unintentionally, trying to create that bind? To signal that "here, in the reading in this book, we belong together"?

 Dear future hubster,  my supermarket rose, one which I became - was made? - responsible for against my own will and despite what I thought were very clear statements regarding how I don't  want flowers, well, that rose is now entering its second year and decided to teach me a very unsurprising, annoyingly didactic, and yet somehow profound lesson.  It decided to reward the two repotting, the watering, the coffee grains, the crushed eggshells, the sticky things that are supposed to catch bugs, and the motivational talks with not one, but three new buds (and counting). I know that this is what roses are supposed to do. What I also know is that the repotting was reluctant, the watering sometimes rhapsodic, the coffee and the eggshells a bit of a desperate move to counter the not always exactly heartfelt motivational talks. In short, I know that I wasn't always fully committed to raising this rose, and that it would have been understandable if it didn't thrive. I would ...

 Dear future hubster,  sometimes a few fake spring days pop up right after the coldest night of the year, the winds are suddenly not icy sharp, the birds are shouting before it's even sunrise, and this girl pulls out the shorter skirts and the spring fragrance.  And as she walks through the usual street and feels that the cold hard crust around her heart might be softening a little bit, and considers picking up pastries for the office, she thinks about a song she hadn't listened to in years. One that she'd liked very much at the time, one that she remembers having meant a lot for somebody else, and at the time she didn't understand how it made that somebody else so emotional.  So naturally she puts the song onto the playlist, mood already altered by the mild temperatures, the self-inflicted olfactory trigger, and the fact that it's a Friday, and... there it comes. All of them feelings hit her out of nowhere, resulting in nostalgic crying three times over. There is ...

 Dear future hubster, there is a dark side to all of those "home is" moments, I just usually choose to not give them too much airtime, partly due to the false belief that if I pretend it doesn't exist it will go away (if that ever worked for anybody please let me know), and partly because I do give in to the other false belief that I don't have the right for dark moments because of the bright moments. Pick your lane kinda thinking, you should be grateful kinda thinking. The dark side does exist nonetheless, and sometimes it pops up in what should be the brightest "home is" moments. When you're somewhere you've been waiting to be and suddenly don't know what you're doing there; when you're with people you've been longing to see and now you doubt if they've been longing to see you  too; when you feel like you're being pulled in a hundred directions and you don't want to go to any of them; always, always when you have to live...

Dear future hubster, May the odds be ever in our favour. May the year be generous and kind and forgiving, and may it help us getting closer to everything we want. May what we want overlap with what we need. May our love keep shining, may it be appreciated, amplified, and returned. May we receive plenty and pay it forward. May we keep dancing when the lights go out. May we hope defiantly; may our love shelter us from our fears. May it be better; may we make it so.