Autobiografie
Op dit moment ben ik mijn autobiografie aan het schrijven met de titel “Beautifully broken – how I upcycled myself”, die ik op 1 augustus in het Engels in eigen beheer ga uitgeven als e-boek.
Beautifully Broken; how I upcycled myself
Proloog
“A dancer dies twice – once when they stop dancing, and the first death is the more painful” – Martha Graham.
They say some people are born to dance and that may be true in my case. When I told a family friend I was dancing as soon as I could walk, my mom sitting next to me contradicted me: “You were already dancing in my belly before you were born”.
But my dance steps on the stage called life were not without obstacles and struggles. From the moment you are born, your surroundings will put you in one of the two binary ‘boxes’; boy or girl. The ‘box’ the obstetrician lays you in will affect your whole life, if you let it.
Whether you are lucky enough to have room to move outside those two boxes, depends on the family you are born in. They will either bold down the door, you are okay with that and have to live with the fact that you can only leave that ‘box’ when you leave your family of origine. Or your family will leave the door open for you to move into the binary ‘box’ you are most comfortable in. Or even move outside of that binary ‘box’ entirely. I was lucky enough to be born in a family that raised me gender free. There were very little restrictions as to what I could wear, what to play with and whom to play with. I had two best friends; one boy and one girl. And I was just Juul.
With the boy I played with cars, boardgames and Action Man and with the girl I played with Barbie dolls and make-up. At home I played with the doll house my dad made, with wooden dolls I got from Santa. And when I won a prize at the bingo event at my grandparents campsite as a child, I picked the yellow digger truck with catapillar tires, playing with it all summer.
But why was my gender journey still such a struggle, when I had so much freedom?
That struggle started the moment I stepped on the dancefloor at age four, when my mom took me to Dutch Folk dance. Where boys had to wear the traditional uniform with shorts, girls had to wear skirts and the boys would lead the girls. The gender freedom I would feel was only at home, in the outside world I had to conform to the gender role I was born into.
Until music group BTS came into my life at the start of the 2020 Corona pandemic and they showed me that dance has no gender, giving me back a piece of my soul that died when I stopped dancing three months earlier.
Chapter 3 snipped:
“About six months after I started my volunteers job at the second hand store, as medical transition leave was not a well-known or used thing here in the Netherlands, I asked the second hand store foundation board if I could take the unsold and rejected for sale items from the mostly wood container. I’d take them home with me in my bike card and repair, upcycle or restyle them at home in my back yard with nice weather or my spare room if it rained. One of the items I worked on was this old damaged cemetery lantern. It was one of two ‘labor of love’ items I worked on for many hours!
In the Corona pandemic lockdown at the end of March 2020 where the second hand store was closed for the first time until at least the end of April, working on these items, starting my pre-rehabilitation dance routine, working out to BTS songs and watching BTS dance practice content on YouTube was what kept me sane. As I lived alone and was in self-isolation by myself, the members of BTS kept me company. Feeling like friends…”
My physical and mental state at the end of 2019 was similar to the state of the lantarn on the left, before I restyled it to the wall light on the right.
