Dear future hubster

Dear future hubster, it might be a little late for New Year's resolutions, but since I usually don't make any, this is as good a time as any. And starting over new doesn't have to happen in January; winter is for hybernation anyway, as most mammals know, who don't force themselves to respond to emails and produce GDP as we humans do. And this is not even a starting over new situation, it's something that has been mulling and simmering for quite a while now. Being a villager, that is. A member of that proverbial village that "it" takes. We never quite define what "it" is, do we? It takes a village to raise a child, that's how I think the original saying goes. But probably the child is proverbial and at that symbolic too. It takes a village to do anything, to get anywhere, to not go it alone. Especially when you live away from your original community, your family, your childhood friends, and/or if you, like me, have moved around a bit too much....

 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.

 Dear future hubster,  you know as much as anybody who's ever met me and paid attention that I spend a loooot of time searching for meaning. Almost as much time as I spend wondering what and where home is , and how I can make it where I am. Oh and also trying to resist the feeling of home when it starts approaching, because complicating my own life should be an Olympic sport.  And I know when it starts approaching, I recognise the signs, and I welcome them every time. Whether it's going to a concert venue three times in as many months, returning to the Christmas concert at the Danish church for the second time (doing anything annual for the second time really), being invited to a random theatre show because people know I'd be around ,  knowing a backup cocktail bar when the first we go to is closed, seeing a familiar face coming out of the metro because I see them on my Saturday morning runs in the park, knowing people at the office party, knowing people at the book ...

 Dear future hubster, you don't need me to tell you that a lot of awful things are happening in the world, more so nowadays than what I think I remember, and you also don't need me to tell you that it's difficult for a girl like me not only because I want the world to be a lovely cozy wonderful place for everybody,  but also because I don't know what to do to make it so. (Now come think of it, statements starting with "you don't need me" don't make it any better either.) So when we're lightyears away from when WTF was an appropriate and accurate response to the things happening, when a girl like me, one who lives and thrives on reading and writing, one who would not ever shut up, doesn't know what to say because the words have no meaning or the meaning they have doesn't reflect the reality we're experiencing, the nagging voices asking what I'm doing here and what for and what the point is are getting all the louder, and the "wh...

 Dear future hubster,  earlier this summer people kept asking me where I'm going for holidays, and depending on the level of small talk-ness of the interaction, I responded in more or less detail that I don't really have a lot of leave days because it's my first year in Belgium etc etc. But then I started thinking and had to admit that even if I had the days, I wouldn't know what to do or where to go. In the past ten years since I left my home by the (Petrusse) river, my summer holidays consisted of The European Tour: a few weeks of couchsurfing between my friends and family, living out of a suitcase that infamously exploded in many living rooms, dropping keys in mailboxes as lousy part-time lovers, forgetting personal items of a great variety, as if wanting to leave proof that I was there.  So when I finally acknowledged that it would not do any good to anybody if I didn't I took a week and did what I do best: got on a bunch of trains and covered a thousand kilomet...

Dear future hubster,  you know that I don't need much inspiration for some self-help wisdom;that I love a good anniversary, that I am a firm believer and a frequent promoter of the "without [insert experience] I wouldn't be here" notion.  So it should be no surprise that this week I've been thinking and talking about The Big Move I made ten years ago this time. When I exchanged Lower Bonnevoie to Tshukudu roundabout, although didn't exchange polka dot heels to combat boots as some people expected. When I left a place I loved and where till present day I want to go home to, took a deep breath and a leap of faith and landed in a place I ended up loving and for which I till present day feel waves of homesickness for.  You might say, dear future hubster, "but love you get attached to every other place and pretty much every group of people you encounter" and you wouldn't be wrong and it's also kind of the point I'm trying to make? That every l...

Dear future hubster, there are moments of grace about living in Brussels. The commonplace ones when it's almost the longest day in the year and you're walking home after a dinner where the small humans of the household know you as Kata from Congo and you're walking because you missed the bus but also because it's one of those mild nights that are not exactly warm - it's still Belgium quandmeme - but it's not cold and for the first time in months you actually guessed the weather right and it's almost 11 and it's not completely dark yet and you can see the light towards the West so the opposite of where Gandalf is to be expected from and for a brief moment it makes you forget about the riot police you saw earlier and that you just foster girlfriended yet another lost boy to yet another safe harbour and you feel whatever the Greeks had among their 7 different words of love for the love of life itself and let's be real the Greeks knew what the deal was, ...

 Dear future hubster,  In this life I have that I might have chosen or that might have chosen me, it's easy to just get in the groove of things and just do do do (as opposed to [here comes the sun] dudududu). And while it's actually kinda often kinda hard to get into the groove of adulting when it's not exciting but rather daunting or just plain boring or involves having to interact with products and services that fail to deliver on the one function they were designed for, it is even harder to let go of the pressure to at least pretend having my shit together at presenting some semblance of order. Worrying about keeping my apartment tidy and my hair neat and my syntax correct and my clothes only moderately quirky because what if I suddenly have to impress somebody or justify taking up space.  And yes yes I know that those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind and all that jazz but first of all it's not always true and then even when it is, it...

 Dear future hubster, Ever since that June afternoon when that guy who knew literally nothing about me declared (not that I asked) "you're not gonna last 6 months", I've been- defiantly,  nervously, angrily - watching the calendar every time I ended up somewhere new. Why he felt the need to share his unhelpful wisdom is unclear,  and by now, frankly,  unimportant.  That I reacted with raised eyebrows on the outside and "watch me" on the inside is no surprise, and that he was wrong is a fact. And it's been nearly ten years,  I do hold on to my grudges.  Since then I've learned that 6 months really is not a long time - I did double that in a place that genuinely made me sick (was not fun, don't try it at home). And that lasting 6 months or a year or 15 is as much a matter of the circumstances as it is a continuous and conscious effort. That there is beauty in being new in a new place, and that beauty and excitement is very much a given, and it is v...