In November of last year, the Dutch government sent out pamphlets reminding citizens to keep water and food on hand in case of an emergency. In today’s world, the timing felt grim, but when I read it, it seemed more like a preventative measures campaign than an outright warning of impending doom. That said, it was less than 100 years ago when practically the whole of Rotterdam was blitzed to rubble so…
In December, our shower began to leak. We didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. All we knew was the ceiling in the downstairs hallway looked and felt wet. Then there came the slow drips, but they were never consistent. This minor interruption turned out to be the first in a series of changes that confirmed how much looser my sense of control has become.
Being a cold (and snowy!) winter, we thought it was the in-floor heating. It’s an older house, and this is the wildest thing that’s happened to us here. Over the festive season there was quite a drama over a non-resident leaving a car parked in someone else’s spot. For a people who prize order, it was very dramatic. At one point, residents coordinated to use trash cans and box the stranger’s car in…but I digress.
The holidays being what they are, and the Dutch taking work-life balance seriously, most of the folks needed to assess or leaky situation had long lines unless it was an emergency, which it was not. While I was in France our landlord brought in what I imagine is like a modern day dowser: a leak detection guy. After the assessment, they asked us to stop using the shower for a couple weeks, and lo and behold the leak dried up.
Don’t cry for me, dear reader, for we also have a bathtub.
Now, I’ve always been a shower guy. I used to joke that if I ran for office, I’d campaign on being pro-shower, pro-nap, and pro-making out. I might have taken a bath a few times a year because I truly thought I preferred showering. Looking back to five years ago, I was still wound so tight that the sudden removal of my shower time might have sent me spiraling. My regular rituals used to be almost obsessively observed; I mistook familiarity for preference, and control for comfort. It was an unfulfilling coping mechanism for stress during a tough career learning phase, the 2016 election, and buying our first home.
I was still in France when the dowser came and William called to break the news of our going without the shower. Because he definitely endured the more rigid version of me from the past, he told me to enjoy the one at the chateau. It was a lovely, blue tiled affair. But when he said it, my first response was laughter because it hadn’t even occurred to me that something so very far beyond my sphere of control would bend me out of shape.
After we got off the phone, I realized that I’ve cultivated a much stronger sense of peace, to a depth I haven’t known in I don’t know how long. Life in the Netherlands isn’t perfect, but living here has been good for both of us, physically and mentally. Losing the shower didn’t unsettle me because I’d already been practicing this larger shift: challenging my assumptions about how life is supposed to be and paying attention to what actually feels better.
I’ve consciously tried to experience Dutch life more directly and approached using the tub as an exercise in curiosity. Using the spout, I noticed the thing wasn’t filling super fast, but I soon learned there’s magically more water pressure coming through the shower wand. Something I’ve not been able to enjoy in most residences is listening to music loud enough while in the shower, but the tub lets me prop my phone up in the corner and enjoy.
After a couple of weeks of nightly baths, I’ve determined the optimum depth is about 15 cm to get into. Then I run the wand over my skin to massage my body with warm water as it fills more. I cut the water off when the tub is pleasantly surrounding me, or, as the Italian landlady in Eat, Pray, Love would say, “Everything that’s important gets clean.” Instead of hurrying through, I soak for ten or fifteen minutes, using a washcloth and soap. It’s a more comfortable application and my skin has been more moisturized.
Do I sound like some new age influencer, trying to sell you on a spiritual experience of bathing? Is it working?
I didn’t expect to realize that by thinking I only liked showers for way too long I missed out on so many more enjoyable bathing rituals. Mentally I was convinced they take too long, but I’ve discovered it’s not that much longer of a process. Now, a bath is simply not as convenient as a shower for some situations; for sure not after a run. But a soak in the tub before bed is a whole other level of wind down.
It’s wild to think I was so mindless about something I did so often, how I went through my own life not wondering if I was only doing things a certain way because I thought that’s how I liked it. Why, oh why didn’t I open up to other ideas until I’d shocked my system by resetting it in a new culture? I’d also like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to my friends Kate and Nikki Kallio for not going on the paddle boat.
In a world where we are increasingly inundated with the constant need for connection, for an online presence that’s better than our everyday one, it’s a bit of a revolution to go back to something so much simpler. Sitting in a shallow bath in Europe is exactly what generations of artists have done for centuries, so I’m also carrying on a noble tradition, I guess.
Now, I do face an unfortunate consequence of this newly embraced fondness for an evening soak. According to the pamphlet, they advised to fill the tub and use it for non-potable water storage. In that case, I think I will be a little bent out of shape, but that’s probably because I’ll be projecting my fears onto small household stresses where I can exact the most frustration.
Look, I know that I am coming from a very different place than my friends in the United States right now, which is an expression but also a literal truth. I chose to leave that country because I was increasingly scared to be myself there. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have people who loved and cherished and protected me, but it means that I saw a future where I was going to have to fight against something I was done fighting for.
For me, it is not possible to be happy in a society that seeks to invalidate my existence, to dehumanize or criminalize some fundamental part of me. I realized in my forties, when a Supreme Court decision determined that I could not be fired for being gay, that my legitimacy wasn’t inherently guaranteed under the laws of my country…or at least granted dubiously enough as to need to be litigated. Once you see your personal safety as something that can be taken away, you start noticing other ways you’ve been contorting yourself just to get through the day.
For me, it was toothpaste I couldn’t get back into the tube.
I only get one chance at this life, and in our middle forties William and I decided we wanted to move somewhere where the quality of life was better. And so we uprooted ourselves and repotted. One of the pieces I wrote at the beginning of our first year used that metaphor, and it really sums up what happened for me since leaving the United States. When my mother came to see our new home here, she took me to buy plants.
Much like William and I, they’re thriving.
I came home from France a different person, who is freshly committed to himself as an artist. I’ve always been one, slowly evolving and wandering through various pursuits along the way. I gravitated towards theatre during college, founding a company with some friends in Oklahoma City after graduation. That led to me performing for children in elementary school gymnasia across the state and teaching acting as an adjunct. I worked in an industrial paint shop. I went on to tour with a broadway show and have done everything with wardrobe, including getting a mild concussion from a dancing plate backstage at Beauty & The Beast and watching Lou Diamond Phillips get disemboweled in the abandoned halls of a high school at 2 AM.
But this new version of me is a writer. I wrote a damn good book in France. I know that I have some other good work that I can make better and ways I can produce in more media (can’t you imagine The Lost & Foundry on TV?). If I’m going to make a voice for myself in this new country, ik moet ook in het Nederlands schrijven. In the wake of my revelations, I took a hard look and realized my product management job wasn’t a good fit, so I decided to leave it shortly after returning from my residency and have spent the month of February finishing out my contract.
I realize it’s an insane gamble, I really do. But it felt like forcing myself to do something and “steal” time to focus on writing. In only a few months, I lost so much momentum toward my personal goals and I saw the signs of my body holding stress in a way that I have before. So much of the work I had done to find the version of me that would be the happiest was being sacrificed for someone else’s KPIs. In hindsight, this was the same decision I’d already made with bathing and moving to a different country: stop optimizing for survival and start choosing what actually sustains me.
It’s a rather strange thing to realize I’ve been chronicling my life on this platform for a whole year now. Alongside my own transformation, I’ve watched Substack change. Working outside the home, I haven’t had the time to play the platform in a way that maximizes my profit. Honestly, I’m okay with that, because being good at Substack doesn’t inherently mean good at writing (not that I’m that either). You can, FYI, get yourself on the rising boards if you comp subscribers on one day. It’s just a gamification of who “sells.”
Learning to be a stage designer ruined going to the theater for me, just like being a product manager ruined platforms. Once you learn how to see things…
Shortly after my father was diagnosed with the Lewey body dementia that would take his life in a matter of years, I left my job on a Broadway tour and spent some time living with my parents to hang out with my dad and help my mom. Within a year, I’d met William. Another later the pair of us were looking to move out of Minnesota (the first time) and both my parents encouraged us to go out and live the life we wanted for ourselves. Together, William and I ventured to Maryland and New Hampshire before returning to Minnesota the second time, after Dad had been gone for several more. When we left for the Netherlands, my mom gave me a bronze compass engraved from him that reads, “I am always with you.”
That’s how I was able to find the courage to make this giant leap across the ocean. To love my husband and build a life together in a new place. To take the chance on me. Look, I don’t know what the future holds. None of us do. All we have is the time we are given. And I’m old enough now to know that “I don’t want this for myself” is a perfectly valid reason to stop doing anything. As fool-hardy as it sounds, I’m willing to place a few more bets on myself. After uprooting our whole lives for this chance at becoming different people, I don’t think I want to spend any more of my time doing anything but what gives me the most joy.
And right now that means writing…and taking baths.
Immigrant Hagelslag will always be free. It’s my ongoing record of this life abroad that I am building. But if you’d like to support the rest of what I create, I’m offering a twelve dollar annual subscription.
You can also name your own price for a copy of CALLED or TAUGHT (books one and two in the Algorithm of Life series) over on Gumroad.
Can’t contribute financially? One of the ways you can help me is by liking, commenting, or sharing. Indie creatives like me rely on your engagement to reach new readers who love immigrant diaries, serialized mysteries, and thought-provoking fiction. Forward this to your friends or register a hundred email addresses and subscribe them all. The sky’s the limit!
I cannot tell you how much I love this.