For those of you who don’t know this, I recently ended up in the middle of an actual care home. I suppose that this was very hard for me also because I watched my mother suffer for years and then die when I was 14. But that’s an aside.

The huge housing shortage in the Netherlands made me click on a place for which I was placed first on a waiting list of 2600 people in the housing allocation system. I clicked on another one – max 2 allowed – and visited that too, in Amsterdam, but it was being renovated and should have been ready. It wasn’t. I needed a place to live. (How bad could it be?) My apartment was supposed to be a pretty normal apartment. At least, that’s what I expected. It wasn’t. It was anything but. Things were pretty bad from the beginning and were getting worse and worse and worse. It’s not the people who live there who are the problem. The other wing on my floor had dementia patients, but they were not the problem either.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted my life back. I want my life back.

Wanting to get out of a place where most people around me were considerably older and merely waiting to die, in surroundings that make them miserable, while having to deal with people (staff, mostly) who make them miserable and where I too was expected to want not much more from life any longer than to wait for my death and do exactly as told by “the young ones” and keep my mouth shut was right.

The place was killing me.

(I know that this sounds dramatic but getting away hammers home how true it is.)

(Too much misery around me, that tends to get to me too. Of course. Research has shown that your environment is a big factor in your happiness.)

Yesterday, I was forced to walk with two suitcases through the pouring rain for an hour because the only two local taxis were on their way to a nearby city. 😭 😂

My clothes were soaking wet and my bags were soaking wet when I got to the hotel where I am currently staying, and some of the rain got into one of my suitcases. I hope it will all dry out in the course of today because it’s not helping.

A practical complication when traveling these days is all the electronic gear you need to have with you. You can’t do “life” without them any longer.

The stalking – whatever exactly it is – has already made its continued presence known a few times. I can’t rule out that what he’s trying to do right now is let me me know that I am not alone, that I am not abandoned, but in reality, it’s often been one big attention-seeking exercise in the past and as the woman who was there for me spontaneously remarked back then one day, his sense of reality is off and his assessment of my situation and capabilities has therefore also often been off. He’s making clear that he’s trying to back off and give me space.

(Why the stupid stealth all the time? I think that it’s probably pretty English. It’s happened to me too that a police man in Portsmouth rode his bike up to me and then stood looking in the other direction, really really weird. It’s called “hinting”, I think. He may have been trying to signal that the police didn’t believe my complaints and that they were looking in the other direction. I find it very exhausting, and not that helpful, but it’s part of life in the UK. Maybe I should say “southern England”.)

(I need real people in my life, not the ghosts of hackers and pranksters.)

My situation is obviously pretty problematic right now. I’m in a country that’s choking in overregulation that’s gone beyond the point of sanity now. Rules have always had a habit of not serving people but the other way around here, but some of this has now gone into the realm of the completely crazy.

Some of this – granted, sorry, sorry, sorry about all my moaning – is much better in the UK. Of course, the Conservatives haven’t made things better.

Some years ago (2018), I looked into what help was available for women fleeing from domestic violence in the country that I am currently in and this too was so bogged down by rules that it made it useless. Such women could only get assistance in the towns in which the abuse was taking place.

You need to officially register and have accepted every cough, fart and sneeze here. (I can’t even change the address on some of the services that I use, such as my healthcare insurance for that reason!!! It’s tied to so much other stuff.) (I confused the hell out of the Americans when I kept doing what I was used to, after I moved to the US in the 1990s. Got a phone call one day asking me why on earth I was writing to them about my change of address; I think it was social security. “You don’t need to let us know.”)

The entire system of providing assistance now seems to revolve around denigrating accusations or suggestions and forms of coercive control, not at all around what people really need.

There currently is also a shift toward the downright inhumane treatment of refugees. Words fail me. In, I think it’s Rotterdam, even the left signed up for cutting off assistance if the government would stop providing funds. The apparent reasoning behind that was that the government never would. 🙄😠😡🤬😞😓😟

Well, guess what. Geert Wilders made headway.

An Englishman who hadn’t lived in the UK for three decades once told me, back then, that UKIP would never amount to anything and discounted all sorts of things that I said about England. He’s had to change his mind about most of them.

Guess what? I guess that I too have been discounting things others have written to me about developments in the Netherlands.

A few weeks ago, I told an English Amazon delivery driver that I never miss the Netherlands when I am abroad. He considered that a very good pointer as to where I need to be.

Today is going to be a day of quiet rest, contemplation and planning. Replenishment. Nourishment.

I need a good way forward, clearly. A goal. A purpose. A heading. Possibilities! Opportunities! Options! Not restrictions and strangleholds and biased opinions.

I didn’t need to be inundated with expectations of dementia and god knows what else. I didn’t want to be expected and/or told to stay put and patiently wait for my death. That’s not helpful in any way.

(I didn’t need to be surrounded by misery either. It gets under my skin.)