I never understood the concept of hate following. Actively dedicating part of your time to looking at content you don't enjoy seemed the most pointless thing ever to me. Besides, with a climate crisis, Brexit and Trump's possible impeachment on our hands, I like to keep my social media feeds a bit more light-hearted and positive than our current reality is. Hate follows do not fit those criteria. So picture my surprise when March rolled around and I found myself hate following Caroline Calloway.

Caroline Calloway caught my attention in the early days of this year. Like many others, I'd never heard of this New York-based influencer before a Twitter thread about her "creativity workshop" went viral. The workshops were supposed to be part of a tour, which was canceled, uncanceled, called "a scam" by internet dwellers and was ridiculed all over social media. I followed every second of the drama that ensued, laughed at Calloway's lack of skills in the event management department, lost it when she got stuck with over a thousand mason jars in her teeny tiny studio apartment and made sure to share this beautiful mess with my closest blogger friends. I checked Calloway's Instagram stories at least twice a day, until the drama blew over (at least on this side of the Atlantic Ocean). That's when I finally hit the follow button.

At first, following Caroline Calloway was just about being the first to see the next installment in the Scam Saga. But after a week or two, I was following with genuine interest. The hate, which is a strong word for me anyway, subsided. I was confused about the content she put out and absolutely unimpressed, but interested nonetheless. Later on, I learned that I'd joined the madness long after Calloway rose to fame with her long captions on posts about her time as an American student in Cambridge and that her current content had little to do with her original brand. Not that I cared. Because the things she does on Instagram now are oddly fascinating.


I can't say I truly like any of the things Calloway makes. "Like" is too strong a word for how I feel about her content. I'm also not interested in any of the things she's interested in. I don't obsess over art unless it's been spraypainted on a wall and I don't care for Oxbridge and the prestige linked with it. Neither do I like sharing every single little detail of my life online, the only thing Calloway seems to be doing these days. It dawned on me that I was hate following this girl just to see her make more dumb mistakes. I wasn't proud of this at all and told myself to unfollow her. But I couldn't do it. I kid you not, as my finger hovered over the button, I thought to myself: "I'm going to miss the plant content..."

I couldn't do it. I couldn't unfollow her. So I didn't. Just for her plants. Deep down, I did kind of like what Calloway showed the world in her Instagram stories: the small studio apartment, all the plants, her art. She showed me a variation of the life I was dreaming of, a life full of creativity. I hated to admit it, but I wanted that kind of life too. Minus the unexplainable Caroline antics. Every few days I found myself looking at her content and going WTF out loud. There are plenty of articles and Twitter threads to fill you in on all the weird and questionable things this influencer has done. Believe me, it's all highly entertaining. I often find myself laughing out loud over how disconnected from the real world she can be. And, in a weird way, that inspires me.

You see, Calloway sells her art on Instagram. It's not my cup of tea. If you want my uncensored opinion, I'd say that it's nothing more than an overpriced crafts project. She used to sell minimalist paintings of boobs for $40 and is still making copies of Matisse's Blue Nudes, which are usually priced at $140. Most of the time I just roll my eyes and move on when I see these pieces of influencer art, but sometimes I see something so bad that I just have to make my own version of it, to prove that anyone can do it, and that I can do it better. In some weird and twisted way, Caroline Calloway is now my muse when it comes to painting.


The first time I made Caroline Calloway inspired art, it took me two days - a long time compared to the two hours it takes her to cut out a shape created by Matisse, glue it onto store-bought paper and slap a $140 price tag on it. My own project started as an attempt to prove that you can be inspired by Matisse while still adding your own flavor to the work. I kept the position Matisse's Blue Nude is in, but redrew it in my own style. It took me an entire day to get the figure right, mostly because my drawing skills are a bit rusty. Since I do like the paper with stars and constellations that Calloway used when she first started her Matisse series, I kept with that theme and placed the figure in a black night sky. By the end of the second day, I had my own "dreamer bb". Art inspired by Caroline Calloway's Matisse-inspired art. Very meta.

During those two days of being artsy, I kept checking on Calloway's Instagram stories. It was almost like I was making art with someone else, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This realization pushed me into a bit of an existential crisis: I didn't genuinely like Calloway's content, did I? It all felt so paradoxical. I couldn't figure my own feelings towards this influencer out, so I did the only thing that seemed to fit the situation: Make more art. I sketched two more figures in different positions and painted their silhouettes onto pages of an old book that was on it's way to the dump, creating a triptych. I daydreamed about selling my art at reasonable prices. I learned more about anatomy. I learned how to handle my paintbrush better. I learned how to make a speed paint video. I learned so much.

In the end, I came to the finish that it really doesn't matter how I feel about Caroline Calloway and her content. The world keeps turning, no matter what I do. I don't have to support Calloway financially, which I won't, and I definitely don't have to follow her. But I choose to follow her, no matter how conflicting my feelings about her content can be, because at the end of the day, it leads to me making art and enjoying it. As long as it doesn't come from a feeling of hate, but a feeling of curiosity and confusion, I think it's a wonderful thing that could only come out of an era like ours.

Half an eternity ago, I was in the process of throwing my goals for 2019 out of the window. It was January, the nights were long, the days were short and I was bored out of my mind. Everything I wrote down was either not exciting enough, or was bound to happen anyway, regardless of how hard I'd work. Then Ella from Ella Was Here came to the rescue and challenged me to visit a new city each month of the year. The Twelve Cities Challenge was born. I went to Paris for January, but had to stay a lot closer to home for February because of university assignments. After a quick glance at the map of my country, I knew exactly where I wanted to go: Dordrecht.

Dordrecht is a small city very close to Rotterdam. It's not very well-known, often ridiculed in a local saying, but . You can reach Dordrecht within minutes if you take the train from Rotterdam Central station, or you can take the Waterbus, a boat. Paying the fare works the exact same way is it works for all other public transport in the Rotterdam area; if you don't have an "OV chipkaart", you buy an RET day ticket and scan it upon getting aboard the boat. Even though I love trains, I like boats even better, mostly because I rarely get the opportunity to go anywhere by boat. I'd followed this route once before, back when I was in kindergarten, but barely remembered it. It was time to really get to know this city so surprisingly close to home, yet so unknown. So on a sunny day way back in February, I got on the Waterbus to Dordrecht.


As usual, I arrived at my destination with no plan at all. Actually, that's not entirely true. I'd thought about doing a street art route and had the vague idea of walking to the city center, whichever way that may be. Neither of those plans was thought through, so after picking a friend up at the quay where I got off the boat, I did what I always do when I don't know what to do in a new place: I started walking.


The walk to the city center would have taken no more than a few minutes... if I hadn't gotten distracted by just about everything along the way. Dordrecht became a city in 1220 and wasn't bombed to pieces in the Second World War, so it has something Rotterdam doesn't have: old, monumental buildings from centuries ago. Many of the streets in and around the city center are small, winding and flanked by high, small houses from the 19th century and earlier. Some of these houses are now antique shops or sell vintage items. I spent ages windowshopping - until I saw the water of the marina.
As in many parts of my country, water is everywhere in Dordrecht. But whereas Amsterdam has its canals and Rotterdam has the river Maas dividing the city in two, Dordrecht's water isn't as omnipresent. It's been turned into a marina some time in the Middle Ages. The marina is relatively small, very cute and a perfect example of an old Dutch cityscape. Countless little boats and yachts bob up and down gently in the calm water. There is literally not much more to do than walk along the quays and look at all the sails, gear and old boats, but that's exactly what makes the place so charming. I could feel the stress leaving my body as I took pictures of the marina. I could have stayed there for hours, just looking at the water, oblivious even to the Pokémon Go players who had come to Dordrecht that day for a community event.


A million pictures of boats later, I decided it was time for lunch. My friend and I discussed our plans for the rest of the day over sandwiches: We'd do the street art route, look at the Church of Our Lady, go to the comic book store I vaguely remembered from a visit almost two decades ago, then catch the boat back home. I have to admit I did a terrible job preparing this short day trip. I couldn't find the street art route online anymore, and when I did find it, I noticed that my reading comprehension skills were not strong enough to understand the description. There was no map available, but since we had access to Google Maps, we figured we'd be fine.

We were not fine. The challenge began as soon as we'd left the old city center behind us. We did find the starting point, directly next to the train station, but the next street in the description was nowhere to be found. A quick Google search showed us that we first needed to walk down another street, which wasn't mentioned in the description, to get to the street we needed to be on. This happened time and time again. You had to be a local to be able to follow this route. We fell into a time-consuming and frustrating pattern: Read the description, google the street, get directions to that street, read the description again, follow the description for a couple of dozens of meters, maybe find a mural, and repeat. We gave up after three murals and went to a Japanese store instead.


Although the sun was still shining when we left the store, I was getting cold. We headed back to the old city center and walked around for a bit in search of a small coffee shop. We came past a machine that was writing a Bible, the comic book store on Scheffersplein which was still there after all those years, the only mill left in the city of Dordrecht and the Church of Our Lady before my friend spotted a place called Francis Lunch & Baked Goods. We ordered some drinks and talked for a while. It had been a good day, but it was coming to an end. At 5 pm, exactly 6 hours after my arrival, I boarded the boat to go back home. As I sat down in my chair and looked out over the water, I felt an unexpected sense of relief. With Paris and Dordrecht under my belt, I only had ten more cities to go to complete the Twelve Cities Challenge. I already had my next destination in mind. Bring it on, I thought to myself as the boat left to bring me home.