Dear future hubster

 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...