TIP: Download Ray Dalio’s book “Principles for success”, dear sis. Maybe reading that will help.
On LinkedIn, as I just discovered, my youngest sibling wrote something very interesting last year. It was in Dutch, so I asked ChatGPT to translate it for me, which it does in less than a minute, but might take me half an hour. I’m posting the original at the bottom.
I’d like to forget about her existence but my mother saddled me with responsibility for my two now really bitchy and miserable younger siblings and I’ve known them all my life. The middle one is obsessed with appearances and status and material possessions, on the negative side, but is highly capable and creative and can be really enjoyable, just like my other sibling. Unfortunately, she seems to have become immensely controlling and possibly quite unhinged, and she may have become a bad influence on my other sibling.
I cut off contact with them decades ago because they wanted me to be their serving doormat and nothing else. They then pushed me into the scapegoat role. “Everything negative in their lives is my fault.” Screw that.
Open Sesame / Alohomora / my search for an open door
And so I look at it this way: I am being prepared for what truly suits me.
For months now, I’ve been applying for jobs.
“You’ll have a job in no time,” everyone said when I closed my own business. After all, the market was desperate for people. And yet, for now, the door remains closed.
In the meantime, I haven’t stood still.
I take courses, refresh my knowledge, attend workshops, and take an honest look at myself. Because rejection does something to you. It hurts. You start to doubt the qualities you were once so proud of. Years of entrepreneurial experience sometimes seem to count less than diplomas, perseverance is mistaken for being “hard” — while communication, empathy, and truly listening are actually at my core.
So what am I learning from this?
That closed doors sometimes mean something better is on its way.
And I am ready for that.
I am an energetic, versatile woman with many years of experience as an entrepreneur. A hands-on professional with a strong sense for people, language, and atmosphere. Someone who takes responsibility, shows initiative, and enjoys working together. With a solid organizational and communication profile, commercial insight, and a warm heart.
What I’m looking for:
A role where my experience, people skills, and creativity come together. With a healthy work–life balance (no weekend work), and room to contribute as well as grow.
Would you like to know more, or are you thinking: she would be a great fit here?
👉 Please feel free to reach out.
PS
If you know me and would like to share below how you experience working with me, I would truly appreciate it. It helps both me and my future employer.
Tips, ideas, and sharing are very welcome 💛
You don’t get it.
Let me mope and moan a little to start with.
First of all, once you’re past 45 or 55 in the Netherlands, you’re as good as dead in the eyes of many. That’s where it starts. It’s no different in the States these days, so I understand, but it once was. Very.
Second, the world has changed profoundly since you started your business, certainly in the Netherlands.
You are not an “a dime a dozen” person but are trying to be. You are much more like the Musks and the Karps of the world.
You’re being hampered by your own insecurity that stems from your childhood and you want people to pat you on the back for being such a successful person, as if they are the parents that you never had. They aren’t your parents and they couldn’t care less about your childhood.
Diplomas, sweet sis, and everything that you are good at – and that I am good at too – such as getting things done, resolving problems and making the world go round, they no longer matter.
Do not take that personally. It is just the way it is. It means that you are banging on the wrong doors!
In the Netherlands, you now need to be supa cute, instead of capable, and you need to come across as “authentic”, not as a powerhouse.
The bullshit about the Dutch labour market – now shrinking – underlines that. People weren’t hiring. They were REJECTING. That is why there were so many vacancies.
You also need to be like everyone else because that has always been the way of the Dutch anyway.
“Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je gek genoeg.”
“Wie in Nederland met zijn kop boven het maaiveld uitsteekt, wordt genadeloos afgehakt.” Dat was een kop in Intermediair, toen ik in de 30 was, van een Nederlandse academicus in de VS. Ik moest naar Amerika want in Nederland mocht ik niet ambitieus zijn – let alone simply enjoy excelling at something – en moest ik liefst tussen pakweg de 20 en 25 zijn. Amerika, dat was mijn land, ontdekte ik toen tot mijn stomme verbazing. Daar mocht ik mezelf zijn. In Nederland moest ik altijd het strakke calvinistische keurslijf in en vooral ook niet enthousiast zijn.
That it now takes an organization over six months to replace some of its faucets and that almost nothing in the Netherlands is actually still working, well, people shrug and accept it, and it drives people like you and me crazy. There is no way that I would still want a job in this now so dysfunctional country. Why would you?
Don’t make yourself dependent on others’ approval. It will get you nowhere. You are LOST and you are SCARED and you do not know what you want next and now believe that your business was a big mistake. “ik word klaargestoomd voor hetgeen echt bij me past.” (I am being prepared for what truly suits me.) That sentence is complete BS! All it does is underline your confusion and insecurity. People don’t care about that, sweetheart.
That is the good stuff, in a nutshell.
Now the bad stuff
- The photo. It shows you as a nasty monster. What the fuck? It doesn’t show a nice person who anyone would love to work with in a fairly low-level job. Can’t you see that? I think I recognize this, however, from when I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth and got showered with hate, ridicule and contempt.
- You mentioned EMPATHY. That people said you lack it. You disagree. I agree.
Yes, YOU SUCK AT IT. You totally suck at it! Reading poems at other people’s events and so on, that is all about you. You want to be SEEN as empathetic but have totally lost the ability to be empathetic.
That’s partly my fault. I shielded you too much a long time ago and forgave you everything. I gave you the idea that the world revolved around you and I should have been much firmer.
When you posted a cuddly photo of yourself with some old man on Facebook and mentioned your own dad, I reminded you not to judge your dad too harshly because he was self-employed too and we were very well taken care of when he had his business. You didn’t get that entrepreneurial drive from a stranger.
Then you apparently wrote to an autistic geologist in his 80s, with cognitive challenges/memory gaps, that this meant that I had a borderline personality disorder.
You and M stuck around dad because it benefited you financially. I cut off all contact with him when I was around 20 because he would have broken me. Everything in his life including his childhood was always MY FAULT and he was furious with me for not being able to fix him, heal him. He’d have destroyed me.
You and M stuck around and suffered his destructive influences for far longer but according to you, he gave both of you a fat chunk of money in 2010. I wanted healing and health and happiness and joy. You wanted money and material possessions. Both of you cut off contact with him after you’d gotten that fat chunk of money. A coincidence? I think not. After I got back from the US, M told me how whenever she was short, she’d drive to Bingelrade, put on a sad face and would leave with a number of banknotes in her pocket.
I did get empathy from you is when you told me “oh, you can get a bag of chips for a few cents” and that may sound horrible, the way I am putting it, but you meant it as encouragement. You were telling me that I would survive after I got back from the US and had next to nothing.
In 2010, you were still capable of a normal conversation.
By then, Marga had ceased to be able to have empathy and became immensely controlling and egocentric with little sense for reality left. I had a conversation with her in 2017 in which she sounded like she was high on a drugs cocktail. She wasn’t making any sense and I just let her talk. I am reminded of what that chiropractor told her when she was in her 20s.
When M moved to Norway, you told me that I had to step into M’s shoes now and try to replace her, to serve you, but you didn’t think that I could (because I am such a scrawny scharminkel with nothing but duties toward you and no right to any wishes, needs or desires of my own). You also told me that it would be far worse if M didn’t like it in Norway than anything that happened to me or would ever happen to me.
When we spotted each other at Jaarbeurs Utrecht, because you had a stand there and I had just had a board meeting there because or regular venue wasn’t available, you ridiculed me and mocked me in front of whoever the people were that you were with. WTF?! Thats narcissism, Renate. It is the kind of stuff that Donald Trump does, ffs.
When you threw your utterly bizarre hissyfit on the phone a few years ago, decades after we last spoke, you know what I thought?
That M had had a stroke, you bitch!
She had a TIA in her 30s, didn’t she? Yes, it was likely due to the hormone therapy or whatever, something to do with pregnancy, but mom’s cousin Céleste also had a stroke at 48, so who knows. And your despair was through the roof!
You refused to say what the fuck was going on so I searched the web, also for her poor super-controlled and now totally lost TikTok brats, but couldn’t find a damn thing as to what the fuck was going on that made you so bizarrely theatrical and, to boot, spit bizarre lies about me in my face.
The next explanation I could come up with was that the sadistic hackers who had been targeting me were making your life a living hell too. They did leave nasty Google comments on your business too, after all.
When I was in my early 20s, I went to a career advice agency, paid for it myself, and had myself assessed very thoroughly in the course of a week. I particularly wanted to know about weaknesses. They told me that I was not the social worker type – no surprise there – but apart from that could do just about anything that I wanted, so they went with my interests and with multidisciplinarity and suggested enrolling in environmental sciences at WUR.
You may need to do that too.
I used to believe in you, but I’ve become too scared of you – not for you but of you; you are too much like the obsessed nutcase(s) on my tail now – to still be able to say what might be best for you.
I’ll tell you this too. I am not the good friend to other people I wish I had been and now sometimes go around apologizing to people because I can see that I have been hurting people too at times. Mom kept me on a terribly short leash – truly awful – and I think I wasn’t socialized properly, but she did also totally believe in me and support me and my interests. I was her stupid, dutiful little soldier, too. She was not perfect, just like dad wasn’t a total monster. She filled my head with a lot of nonsense, some of it quite destructive, and that – the effects of it – is what you and M have always hated about me. You don’t want to know. Fine. I wasn’t TikTok-cute enough for you, anyway.
You and M basically were subjected to the opposite. You could do whatever you wanted and got a lot of hate and drama and in hindsight pretty pathetic manipulation attempts from dad. I can only acknowledge my own role. I pampered and shielded you too much and had too little affinity with M to be able to support her well enough.
And for anyone who wants to try fucking with my mind again – which just happened on my screen, and then happened again – as I have stated before, this website was no more than a front, for years, me trying to look busy while I planned my umpteen escape attempts. Climbing the walls with boredom, with absolutely nothing to do, I started signing petitions and picking up litter and all that because THEY WERE THE ONLY THINGS I COULD STILL DO IN MY EFFING SADISTIC SLAVERY SITUATION! Nobody ever even visits this website.
I hate the sadistic monsters on my tail. I hate them. I try not to because hate destroys the soul. There is not a grain of kindness in these folks. They’re all about control, contempt and destruction. I’m still terrified of them. I wish they’d all drop dead. I really want them dead. I want them out of my life.
Sesam open u / Alohomora / mijn zoektocht naar een open deur:
Gepubliceerd op 10 sep. 2025
En zo kijk ik er dan maar naar… ik word klaargestoomd voor hetgeen echt bij me past.
Al maanden aan het solliciteren maar geen deur open te krijgen.
Solliciteren. Ze zeiden allemaal: “Jij hebt zo een baan’, toen ik stopte met mijn eigen onderneming. En daar vertrouwde ik op, de markt snakte naar medewerkers, ‘banen te over’ stond er overal te lezen.
Waarom dan nog steeds als Bob de Bouwer (of Bep, ben tenslotte vrouw) in mijn eigen huis aan het klussen? Leg ik de tuin van een vriendin aan in ruil voor een kop koffie en help ik met verhuizen van oma omdat ik nog steeds sterk (ik had een interieurzaak hè) en in het bezit van een bedrijfsbus ben? Dit is leuk als hobby en als vriendendienst maar niet de dagdagelijkse invulling die ik voor ogen had.
Ik volg cursussen, verfris mijn kennis, doe workshops en verdiep me in mijn eigen psyche. Want wat raakt dat je diep: die afwijzing, die teleurstelling na elke zorgvuldig opgestelde sollicitatie die ik verstuur. Het doet pijn en je gaat twijfelen: daar waar je juist zo trots op was, wordt niet eens bekeken. Je jarenlange ervaring als ondernemer wordt weggeduwd met de vraag naar diploma’s. Je commerciële inzicht wordt neergezet als hard en zelfs: te weinig empathie. Ja het raakt omdat doorzetten voor mij gold als kwaliteit. En communicatie en empathie zijn juist mijn ding, taal en praten, luisteren, mensen in de ogen kijken en hun expressie zien. Ja ik luister. Maar wat leer ik nu hiervan?
Oh ja, dát! Dat deuren nu nog gesloten blijven omdat er iets beters voor mij komt!
En daar wacht ik ongeduldig op!
Vrouw, energiek, veelzijdig, aanpakker, communicatief, computervaardig, slim, leergierig, zorgzaam, serieus, verantwoordelijk, empathisch, kordaat, initiatiefrijk, leider, teamworker, inspirator, grappenmaker, interieur-stylist en -adviseur, verkoper, gastvrouw, pr en communicatie ervaring, sterk, groot, klein hart, grote interesse, secretarieel opgeleid, betrouwbaar, fervent motorrijder, Pippi Langkous in doen, inventief, roeien met de riemen die ik heb, werk zien, balans werk-privé dus geen weekendwerk, wandelaar, interieur en kunst liefhebber, lief, etc… zie mijn gegevens alhier.
Nog meer weten: Benader me gewoon! Ik ben er klaar voor!
PS
- Willen mensen die mij kennen dit s.v.p. onderschrijven met hoe zij mij kennen? Dat steunt zowel mij zowel als mijn toekomstige werkgever. Bij voorbaat dank!
- Tips voor banen, beroepsoriëntatie en meer zijn van harte welkom
- Delen is top!
