Oooh, it’s like a chain post. How cool is that. I hope some people will join. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Q&A is here and it’s lovely, and here is mine. (Yes, I am bored. How did you know?)

When were you happiest?
When I was 22, and I broke up with someone, and it was summer, and a gorgeous sunny day, and I felt beautiful, young and free. Just as Meryl Streep in The Hours, I thought this was just the beginning of happiness and there would always be more; I didn’t realize that was happiness, just there and then. I never felt like that again.

What is your greatest fear?
Long, debilitating, painful illness killing me before I’m quite ready to go.

What is your earliest memory?
Drinking mulled beer with my grandfather when electricity and heating were off, and thinking it tastes absolutely gross. I was five or six, I think.

Which living person do you most admire?
Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Trying too hard.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Pretentiousness.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
Forgetting lyrics of a very well known song while performing on the stage at a charity benefit. That song was meant to be the centerpiece of my performance, and in a way it was.

What is your most treasured possession?
I don’t really have any material things that I would feel like that about. Data on my hard disk is the most important thing I have. I started making backups a while ago, and I can recommend that to everyone.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My hairline.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
My youth. (Hello, Charlotte. Didn’t know you were as vain as me.)

What is your favourite smell?
Burning wood. It makes me feel 13. I would be perfectly happy to spend all evenings sitting in front of a fire on my own and doing nothing else, just staring into the fire and smelling it.

Cat or dog?
Cat.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Beer. I am an evangelist for healthy living and strict nutritional values, but I never met a Belgian beer I didn’t like.

What do you owe your parents?
Everything and nothing. I could write a book as a reply to this one and it still wouldn’t be enough.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?
To my grandmother, who died years ago, and I never told her I was gay, because I was scared she’d either have a stroke or just reject me. So as a result I never gave her a chance, and that lowered her chances considerably.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
is tempted to say Kele Okereke Arnold Schwarzenegger, Madonna and Mike Oldfield. People, who had a dream, and then made it come true, without letting their lizard brains stop them.

What is the worst job you’ve done?
Writing a book. I swear there wasn’t a point of my life since I turned 15 that I wasn’t working on a book, yet I never managed to finish one.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?
I would have moved to Amsterdam waaaaaaaaaay earlier.

When did you last cry, and why?
Two weeks ago, while watching “Rachel Getting Married”, I cried because her husband loved her for exactly who she was, rather for who she could become once he’s finished improving her.

What is the closest you’ve come to death?
I was in the hospital with hepatitis and apparently my liver marker values were twice as high as those of people who actually died because of it.

What keeps you awake at night?
Having too many thoughts in my head at once. Oh shit, I just finished having a coffee! Well, now I know what will keep me awake at night tonight.

What song would you like played at your funeral?
I used to have a whole playlist, morbidly enough, and now I can’t remember any of it. Let’s say “Together Again” by Janet Jackson for the time being. I like the idea of having a joyful song about death.

How would you like to be remembered?
As a very happy person.

Your turn, my lovelies, and please don’t disappoint me — I love you all dearly and can’t wait to read your answers!

• Miss Bartender
• Hannah
• Good Pup
• Shoebox Dweller (you expected this one dear, didn’tcha)
• A1 (you didn’t expect this one dear, didya)

(I wrote this post on Thursday evening, but due to internet problems didn’t quite manage to post it until now. ‘Apols.’)

*

What an odd week this was. Well, still is. But the remaining bit will, luckily, be more normal.

On Monday, a national holiday here in Holland, I travelled to a town called Deventer, where on Tuesday I attended a Social Media Crash Course with Thomas Power. It was a very interesting experience; in fact, while during the course itself I rated the experience 7/10, after thinking about it for a while I would now score it at least 9/10. It has changed my viewpoints of social media — and it has given me completely unexpected food for thought in form of the discovery of my core process, which proved to be “building independence”.

It is a very fascinating experience to work with a person you have never met before and you might never meet again and discuss the most personal experiences of your life, then have them assess those experiences in front of you, and refining your driving force to those two words — building independence — and then all of a sudden you feel: yes. That’s what it is, and that’s what it always was.

All of a sudden I felt a stronger person; suddenly put in contact with what is my driving force and what has always been it, even if I didn’t know it or actively denied it. The choice of the word “building” rather than “creating” is not accidental; building is a tough physical job, which gives you bleeding fingers and a high risk of injury, and sometimes you have to destroy what you have built and start again. But at the end of that process is a house. And there is hardly anything more substantial than a person can own or create than a house.

On Wednesday I travelled, for a change, to London to take part in a Networking Masterclass course. While the approach to networking as a process that takes place mostly at specially held networking events was, to me, a bit… unrealistic (perhaps it depends on the job — a graphic designer can network anywhere and everywhere, which I have proved by handing out a card to someone who might become a business contact later) the course has showed me something — again — very unexpected: it has showed me how people see me.

A part of the course involved describing other people (after having known them for whole two hours) and having them describe you — the first impressions they got from seeing you and listening to you talk. And describe they did. Two out of three deemed me extrovert; they added cheerful, powerful, witty and intelligent. A connected task was marking the character traits that you believe you possess; I marked introvert and shy.

It got me thinking: am I really introvert and shy? Or do I just create a fake limitation for myself by telling myself that I am? I have approached Michael Franti at a concert, got his autographs, got myself introduced to his band members and his son, and at the end of the show Michael jumped off the stage and gave me a very sweaty, very exhilarating hug. Was I being shy when I went to talk to him? I made Thomas Power do the core process exercise which he asked others to do; I insisted until he did it, and after the course ended he said to me I was the first person in twelve years to have even dared to ASK him to do it. Was I being shy then? Last weekend, when the sun was shining, I called a friend and invited him out for drinks, and we had a lovely time, and at the end of the day he thanked me for that because, he said, otherwise he would spend the whole day hidden in his room. Was I being introvert when I asked him out?

Perhaps I had a skewed image of myself all the time. Perhaps I limited my life for years with no other reason or purpose than to prove to myself that I am a shy person. Perhaps I have gone very, very far in creating an image of myself that wasn’t true. At the course today, at the very beginning, I thought: those people don’t know I am a shyster who at parties stands on his own staring into his wine glass. For what they know I am a short-haired bloke dressed in black. That’s about all they know. I can try and be a cheerful, friendly soul of the party kind of person during this course. And I was. And the person that would in all other circumstances be the one I would never dare to speak of? He asked my card at the end of the course, and he’s the one that I might end up working with.

I think I built some more independence — from my own assumptions, expectations and fake boundaries — today. And my fingers didn’t bleed for a second.

At any given time in my life, except when I stop navelgazing for 30 seconds, two parts of me are in a struggle: my male part and my female part, and that makes it very difficult to dress.

Thing is, my male part, whom we shall call Hugh, is rather macho. Hugh likes to dress in black tops with aggressive prints, baggy khaki pants, big ass Martens boots, leather with metal bits here and there and be all tattooed and muscled and grunt while working out. Hugh normally pops up when it’s colder outside, when I am unhappy about something or when I want to numb myself emotionally a bit about something. Hugh also tends to listen to calming music along the lines of Slayer or Sepultura, drink too much and do stupid things. He likes to shave his head, either leaving a mohawk or not.

My female part we shall call Kylie, which I suppose kind of explains things immediately: soft fabrics, nice colours, big hooded sweaters, big hats, long hair, cotton, fleece or even linen rather than leather, etc. Kylie likes to dance, and she doesn’t grunt while that is happening, she normally goes “la, la, la”. (Unexpected, I know.) She likes to read Glamour and salivate a bit over the fashion choices (that for some reason tend to be hard to find in my size), do a facial and, oh, oh, she loved Marian Keyes’ latest book SO MUCH. And, which is a bit of a bummer, she isn’t really that much into tattoos, but she would quite like to be blonde again.

As you can probably imagine having a fashion personality split is not making one’s life easier AT ALL. Nowadays Kylie wins hands down, largely due to the fact I have been immaculately happy for the last 4 months or so; my hair is growing as there are no emotional turmoils to make me shave it off, and Muscle & Fitness gets much less love than Glamour. Thing is, my last few winters were rather on the Hugh side of life, and I have bodybuilder thighs (not like the real Kylie, I believe) and you wouldn’t believe how hard that makes dressing up in the morning. Hardly any pants other than baggy cargo khaki stuff fit me; boot-wise, the situation is even worse, as my autumn/winter footwear is firmly on the Doc Martens size of things. My autumn jacket is a rock jacket, and while I saw a LOVELY soft coat at C&A last weekend, I haven’t got 80 euro to spend right now due to kitchen cupboards.

Hair situation isn’t that easy either. It’s quite hard to find a middle ground between long blonde luscious locks and a one-inch red mohawk. I thought of Madonna’s 80s cut — the Like A Virgin era — but first, I am not COMPLETELY sure it would fit me, and second, I really want to grow out my hair again.

Plus, there is this tiny little factor of me being a man. It is relatively easy to find cargo pants and Martens boots my size. It is somewhat harder to take the latest fashion shoot from Glamour and translate it into something that 1) fits a 6ft2 man with big legs, and 2) doesn’t make him look like a failed drag queen. Of course I don’t mind looking a bit girly (or, in fact, wearing ladies’ clothes, provided they are available in my size), but I really, really don’t have tits to write home about.

Any stylists around, wanting to dispense free professional advice?

I could die.

Those words reverb and echo in my head. It’s not that the accident I had was so major. It’s that I still believe I am immortal; that things like those (or like cancer, or like fire… etc.) happen to Other People. Yet there I was, flying through the air, hitting the ground, being shit scared of the speed with which my body, suddenly bike-less, moved over the pavement. And now here I am, with my palm bandaged, aching knee, leg and shoulder, and the words “I could die” in my head.

It’s not “I could have died”, because, well, I couldn’t, not really. Perhaps if I hit a tree or a car with my head, or if I broke my neck, but I wasn’t even close to doing that. There are relatively few bikers that actually die in accidents like this, and when they do it makes the papers; on the other side, accidents like mine are a daily occurence. No broken bones, nobody famous involved, not much blood other than my surface wound. It’s just the realisation, once again, that I go through life making plans, putting things away to do somewhere in the future, but really, next time I could be less lucky. There could not be much future to speak of. Maybe I have 50 years left. Maybe I have two weeks. And as for my plans, trust me, that accident wasn’t among them.

I have those plans to write books, to learn to draw, to go to dance classes. One day. Sometime in the future. When I’m better, smarter, when I have more time. Because I can wait. Right? Wrong. The bandage on my hand reminds me about it. Because I could have perhaps not died, but I could have broken my wrist in a way that would make sure I would never use that hand again. That wouldn’t make my drawing better. I could have also broken that leg, not bruised it, and that could have somewhat influenced my future dancing.

It was really hard to make myself step on the bike in the last two days. I looked at it, and I stepped away, and I stepped back towards it. I thought “I could take a tram”. Then I thought “But if I don’t bike today… will I do it tomorrow?” I had an easy excuse — I was all sore. But I knew, deep inside, it was an excuse. I had to do it. Not because a tram costs money, because I have to wait for it or for any other reasons. I had to jump into the future. And I have to do it again, be it my future in writing, dancing or drawing. And I have to do it soon; perhaps as soon as the bandage goes away.

Because that future thing, you know? Who knows how much there is left of it.

I have touched on the subject already but if The Frisky can post a similar article six weeks after the original, surely I can expand on it…

The advice that DivineCaroline.com give (The Frisky article is a repost) is not completely applicable to me. First, as a 20 year old I wore giant spectacles, had absolutely no self confidence fake or real, and I definitely was neither beautiful nor felt free. But I still wish I knew what I know now, because it would have made my life much much easier when I was 20, 15 or even 27:

1. Depression can be cured. Therapy works. Pills work. And you, young Ray, will completely recover. So move that ass and go to therapy as soon as possible instead of wasting time hoping pills will solve problems. They don’t. They take away the awful feelings that keep you down, but they don’t take away the source of those feelings.

2. Speaking of moving that ass, you will totally love going to the gym. So stop thinking everybody will stare at you (they won’t, they’re busy with their own workouts), fearing people’s comments (there will be none) or feeling that you don’t belong there (nobody looked like Usain Bolt the day they had their first workout). Just go.

3. Alcohol won’t make you spill your secrets. Honestly. And anyway, do you really have any secrets? I thought so. Honey, you’ll have a blog and secretly wish for thousands of people to come over and read your secrets. So don’t wait until you’re 24 before you have your first drink.

4. Speaking of waiting, you will have sex for the first time when you are 21. You will hate it. But trust me, you would hate it much more if you did it earlier than that. And you will eventually have goooooooood sex. Did I say gooooood? I meant amazing, fantastic, borderline illegal sex. You will wait for it a few years. No hurry, really.

5. Lenses are good. When your mom tells you there is nothing wrong with wearing glasses, ask yourself if you approve of her music taste or fashion choices. She loves you, but she’s wrong. Get those lenses and drop the saucers you wear on your face.

6. You don’t look good in blue. I know all family members believe you hate all other colours. Just tell them “I hate blue” instead of “thank you grandma, the 17th blue shirt made me SO HAPPY”.

7. You will never be happy in Warsaw. So don’t delude yourself that things will change, people will accept you, your family will realise their mistakes. Just move away. You will be soooooo much better off once that happens.

8. You can actually be friends with an ex. More, you can truly rediscover the love for your ex in a completely different way — as your BFF. The people who say you can’t be friends with your ex are the same people who say you can lose weight through eating nothing but cabbage for a week.

9. Coincidentally, do NOT eat nothing but cabbage for a week.

10. You will become good looking once you drop the giant glasses, hit the gym and stop wearing blue shirts. And the self confidence will also come. Because, you know, you’re actually fucking amazing. You’ll be strong enough to go through lots of shit, change your life completely, handle things that you fear the most and survive — and become stronger in the process. Remember that every time you doubt yourself.

What ten things would you like to tell your younger self?