'Have fun bye'
Last year I stared at my phone in disgust. 'Have fun bye'? I was going to go abroad for three weeks, I had no idea if there was going to be wifi and the only thing my best friend said was 'Have fun bye'?! I couldn't handle it. Not at all. You see, saying goodbye for a longer period of time is an art form. It's supposed to make you feel something, and I'm not talking about the mild annoyance this text made me feel.
As the months passed, I noticed that my best friend wasn't the only one who isn't great at this kind of goodbye. That's why I'm writing this post: to teach you how to say goodbye like a pro.


In my humble opinion there are five steps in the process of saying goodbye. Don't get them all mixed up or things will get awkward. Believe me, my words are all based on years of experience. Let's just start with step 1, shall we?

So imagine your best friend is leaving the country for three weeks and you only have one day left with them. What do you do? Well, you certainly aren't going to shrug and say goodbye early, no, you're going to make every second count! You don't have to be in the same room to do this, you can just keep texting or talk on the phone the old fashioned way. But if they tell you they have to go in half an hour, saying goodbye already is a big NO. You better make those 30 minutes count as well!

Eventually you will have to say goodbye, but sometimes silence says more than words. Or maybe you just need a little more time to find the right words. Either way it's a good idea to take a moment of silence just before you say goodbye. Just appreciate the fact that you have this person in your life and remember they'll come back soon enough. Then, just before things get awkward, move on to step 3.

Now we've all said 'bye' often enough. Nothing special, nothing difficult about that. But I'm not talking about a normal 'bye' here. This isn't an 'okay bye' kind of occassion. You gotta make this one special. You're gonna put your heart and soul in those words and let that friend of yours know how much you'll miss them!



I'm a firm believer that you should practice what you preach and I usually follow my five steps in real life. I'm the queen of crying after a goodbye. But when it comes to an online goodbye, it's a bit more difficult. You see, this is not just a weird tutorial post. This is also a goodbye. Not a permanent one, but I have decided I need a break from the internet. In a few days I'll be on a plane to Southeast Asia and I won't come home until the second week of August. I usually schedule some posts when I'm gone for such a long time, but I can't put the work in right now while knowing I'm rushing these posts, posts that won't get the love and attention they deserve as I'm not there when they go live. There's also this little thing of me just not feeling it when I'm writing. It makes me sad, but I need to find my writing voice back. I think Southeast Asia is the perfect place to get some time away from the internet and get my shit together. I'm going to miss you all like crazy, but it's for the better. I hope you guys won't forget about me. I'll see you in August...

Art work by Kanra Khan from The Lunar Descent

When I was nine years old a Dutch rap formation called De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig scored their first gigantic hit in my country. Their name is the Dutch equivalent of 'kids these days', which is funny to me because their main audience seemed to be kids back then. I wasn't one of the many kids who liked them though. You see, one night their song 'Watskeburt' was so firmly stuck in my head that I didn't sleep all night. I was angry and unforgiving. Nine-year-old me vowed never to like a song by De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig ever again.
Then 2010 happened. I was 14 years old and found myself singing along with my friends to a song called 'Sterrenstof' (Dutch for 'stardust') by... De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig. No matter how hard I tried, I could not hate this song. This caused quite some concern, but the follow-up was crap and I never spared the group a thought again.

Fast forward to 2017. I hadn't heard a full song by the group I loved to hate in years when I broke down crying, panicking and hyperventilating because I saw no way I could finish the most important college assignment of my life on time. As I pulled myself together on that morning in April, Sterrenstof came on the radio. I smiled, because it made me think of the time one of my classmates sang it in 9th grade physics class and completely screwed the lyrics up. The song brought so many happy memories back that I managed to sit back on my chair and write five full pages before the next wave of panic came. From that day on I put the song on repeat every single time I worked on this assignment that'd bring me a whole lot closer to being a certified teacher. Sterrenstof began to turn into something more than just a happy high school memory.

The first hours of writing were awkward. Even though the song brought back six-year-old memories that were all good, the group reminded me of my ex-boyfriend, who likes them way too much. I felt bad for listening to a song by one of 'his' artists. Until I remembered he hated this song. I felt better then. The song didn't just calm me down, it helped me get over him a little more. Yes, I was enjoying something he'd liked, but on my terms. It felt better and better to slam my keyboard relentlessly to the beat of Sterrenstof. It was then that I remembered I'd watched a documentary on these guys with my ex-boyfriend (hey, we all do stupid things for love) and that he'd told me one of these rappers, Willie Wartaal, was a certified high school teacher. That motivated me to no end. If a guy who had written songs about, and I kid you not, schnitzels of all things could become a high school teacher, I saw no reason why I couldn't become one. I worked and worked and worked, listening to Sterrenstof every single time.

As the days went by and my panic became more intense I noticed I needed more distraction than just the music. Also, Spotify was being a pain in the ass, so I turned to YouTube to get my writing jam. I'd seen the video clip for Sterrenstof about once or twice when I was in high school, but didn't really remember it. Half a minute in I was smiling from ear to ear for the first time since December. It's not a very special video, just the four guys from De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig being goofy on a hill and very awkwardly dancing, but it struck a cord with me. Okay, they have some weird ass songs that seriously pissed me off when I was a kid, but they were living my dream: they clearly had fun doing what they loved for a living with people they liked. It only motivated me even more to work hard on my assignment so that one day I could live that life too.

It was early May when I was rapping out loud in my room; rapping out loud in Dutch, something I'd sworn I'd never do, not even to save my own life. But I did it, every time I felt the panic creeping up on me. Every time I felt like my assignment was going to be shitty, I turned the volume up. Every time I felt tears stinging behind my eyes, I danced around the room in my own weird way. And when it all became too much, I'd rap. Softly at first, then louder and louder, even though I messed the lyrics up worse than my classmate from 9th grade physics. Eventually I looked them up and finally discovered that a song I'd seen as innocent was actually most probably about LSD. I couldn't care less. The song made me feel better and also had parts about overcoming addiction and making it on your own, which inspired me. And to be honest, yelling 'DAN BEN IK LOESOE IN DE SKY MET DIAMONDS ON MY NECK BITCH DIAMONDS ON MY NECK' made me feel better than I'd felt in months. I was sure I'd pass my assignment, assessment and kick ass in senior year, thanks to De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig.

Then things changed. I'd worked my ass off and had simultaneously learned the lyrics to one of the most misheard song lyrics in Dutch history when college just... well... screwed me over. Apparently I couldn't do what Willie Wartaal could, because college made it impossible for me to hand the assignment in and apply for assessment on time. I dropped out, but that's a different story (which you can read in this post). For what felt like the millionth time in 2017 I spent my days crying, thinking I was a complete failure. I didn't listen to any music, shut myself off from all of it.
I think I stopped crying after a day or three. I realized I'd made the right decisionby dropping out. I felt like a weight had been lifted, like I could breathe again. That's when I also played music again. The first song I listened to after dropping out of college was, of course, Sterrenstof.

It's now been well over two months since that first breakdown when Sterrenstof came on the radio. Since then the song has calmed me down numerous times, has prevented at least eight panic attacks and kept me from crying on a daily basis. It's the combination of happy high school memories, upbeat music and a video clip that reminds me of my goals in life that makes this song so powerful to me.
I have hated De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, resented them with every cell in my body. Not anymore. Sterrenstof gets completely stuck in your head once you've listened to it, but I don't mind. I'm thankful for that now. If it weren't for De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, I would have given up hope a long time ago.

I took art classes in high school. After about a year, I quit. The reason was simple: I did have the skills, but I didn't have pretentious meanings behind my work. If I wanted to draw a girl playing Quidditch, I drew a girl playing Quidditch. It drove my teacher crazy. She kept asking me the reasoning behind everything I did, where the inspiration came from and what the meaning of my artwork was. I had no answer for her. The idea was just there, out of nowhere. Maybe it's a giftedness thing, maybe it isn't. Either way, I quit. I was tired of being forced to make 'meaningful' art.


Fast forward four years. Occasionally I draw. Sometimes I paint on walls, sometimes I paint on paper. But most of the time I work on art journal pages. I enjoy the creative process and the endless options of art journalling and decided I wanted to share some of my work on Instagram. There was just one thing I didn't like about that idea: explaining my art in a caption. Loads of people online try to be artists by trying to be as meaningful as possible. It feels forced. Every post has some deep philosophical meaning behind it, even if that meaning is nowhere to be seen in the actual post. 11th grade art class all over again, no thank you.


Still I wanted to share some of the things I make, especially my art journal pages. So I took to Instagram anyway and posted my work. It was accompanied by only two lines of caption: a very short description of the work, followed by the three simple words 'end of story'.


End of Story represents my attitude towards my work. I make it because I like it. Period. I could write long paragraphs on inspiration for an art journal page, while in reality I made it simply because I like manatees or something silly like that. Art doesn't have to be complicated or extremely meaningful. That's what I'm hoping to show on my art journal account.


That doesn't mean there's no meaning behind any of my pages. Yet sometimes that meaning is too personal or too weird to share. And why would I want to share it anyway? The beauty of art is that everyone can give their own meaning to a piece. I don't see any reason for me to force a meaning upon you through a long winded and pretentious caption. End of Story.

The title of this post is actually pretty misleading. Don't worry, it's not clickbait. It's just that I didn't catch the travel bug later in life like most people. I was born with it. You know how some diseases get transferred from mom to unborn baby? That's how I got the travel bug. I was a freaking fetus in the Himalaya and Boston. I was born with it. I grew up with it. It's part of my DNA. So this post isn't really about how I caught the travel bug. It's more about how it developed with me.

The first symptoms of the travel bug showed itself immediately after I was born: Instead of just lying still on one spot like newborns are supposed to do, I decided to crawl away and explore the great big world of my parents' bed.
From there on out it went pretty fast. I went abroad within weeks and flew to southern Europe within months. I was a bad ass travelling baby.

As I grew older, my parents and I went to the USA every summer. I learnt English there and eventually Marin County, just north of San Francisco, became my second home.
Marin County was home base, but from there we discovered the US. Every summer became one enormous road trip. I kept travel journals during those road trips. I had this obsession with maps and road sings. I always had to know what was around the corner. By the time I was eight, I'd seen the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle. I'd been to Mount Rushmore and the Florida Keys. I wasn't aware of my travel bug yet though. That awareness came three years later, when I left elementary school.



My parents have showed me the world and I'll always be grateful for that. But my travel bug has gotten out of hand. As you're reading this, I'll be discovering Edinburgh. This summer I'll see Finland, Thailand (finally, after all those years!), Laos and Cambodia. That won't be the end of it though. My travel bucket list is longer than I am and I'm more than ready to start crossing things off by myself!

Sometimes life is shit. You're failing your classes, your friends don't have time for you and you can't do anything right at home. Before you know it you're hating on everything. Before you know it you're stuck with a negative mindset. Since I'm easily sucked into these downwards spirals of negativity, I decided to start a Happy Jar to remind me of all the good and fun things in my life. One year ago I put the first happy memories in it. Now, in 2017, I'm a bit stuck in my negative mindset. It's time to open my Happy Jar and snap out of it.


I first heard of Happy Jars when I'd only just started blogging. Coincidentally I got a jar of peanut butter that Christmas, so when all the peanut butter was gone it became my Peanut Butter Happy Jar. Since I've started anew in January of 2016, I've collected this heap of memories.
I fold them all into half, then into half again. That way I never know which memory I'm going to look at when I take one out. It's great to let a happy memory take you by surprise.
I write my happy memories in Dutch, which is actually quite weird for me since I usually write in English. Because of this switch in language it'd be pointless to share some pictures, but here are the translations of a few of my favorite memories.
10 January 2016: Had cheesecake. Nuff said
1 November 2016: Got my first paycheck ever!
4 January 2017: Talked to Shubhaish on Skype :D
I usually don't write more than a few words, a few lines at the very most. I don't need more than those few words for the memories to come rushing back to me. Because of this the scraps of paper in my Happy Jar are very small. The few pieces that are bigger are these.
Some quotes stick with me, though I'm not as much of a quote person as most other bloggers. Yet sometimes a few words motivate me to no end. When that happens I try to make them look fancy. Whereas the memories bring me happiness, the quotes give me motivation.
Since December I've also been adding pictures to the mix. Pictures capture moments better than my words ever could, which is why I started adding them to my Happy Jar.
Most of the pictures are selfies Jerneja and I took when we met up in Slovenia. I've also added a picture of my high school friend and me from when we went to see Bill Bailey in Amsterdam back in September. My happiest memories always have something to do with the people I care most about.
Then there's one last thing left in my Happy Jar. They're the most recent additions: tweets. That may sound silly to some of you, I know. But sometimes when someone tweets me a compliment or quotes my tweet, I just feel so happy and appreciated. It would make no sense to keep the tweets away from my Happy Jar. They make it so much more diverse and personal.

Once I've gone through all the items in my Happy Jar, I always find myself smiling. No matter how bad my day, my week or even my month is, the memories and pictures in the jar always make me happy again. A year from now I hope I can open my Happy Jar to many many more happy memories and share them with you guys again.

Yes, you read that right, I'm officially back! For those of you who've missed me: don't worry, I won't disappear the way I did ever again! For those of you who didn't notice I was gone: I was gone, but now I'm back! Minus a boyfriend, but with a plan for the future and a lot more optimism. Now I'm getting ahead of myself though. Let me fill you in on the details of what happened, where I've been and what's going to happen on Lost in Translation from now on.