Where I come from

I quit gaming completely. The energy trapped there had to go somewhere honest. There is grief in leaving a place where you are competent. Competence is a kind of home.

I tried design. I entered school. I studied psychology alone for years because I felt awkward with people and did not know another way to change. Much of what I first read was empty. I kept going. One idea stayed:

I went to Turkey with almost nothing and lived simply in nature.

I read. I wrote. I met people. I tried to begin each day as if the day itself were the work. Outwardly I lived with very little. Inwardly I placed a demand on ordinary hours — a discipline I often failed when no one was watching.

The old books moved me. They also felt unfinished. Philosophy on the page was not enough. It had to be tested in the body, in solitude, in friendship, and in actual days.

So I wrote. Not first to publish. To see.

Then life did something school had never done. It opened.

Friendship became real. Love became real. I began to feel like one person instead of scattered parts. What mattered was not the postcard of the forest. What mattered was the shape of the days. Modern life is very good at hiding drift inside busyness.

There the core of what I still practice took shape:

One night I became stuck on a cliff.

For hours I could not move without falling. A man came to help. He fell first. My first instinct was to reach for him. That movement cost me my hold. I fell too.

We fell in the dark.

I could see almost nothing. I did not know whether the drop was short or endless. Then I understood I was falling head first. Old childhood movement returned without thought. I turned so my legs would meet the ground. Then I waited.

The impact was violent enough that I was certain I had died. I had not. I tumbled further, lost consciousness, and was stopped only by branches at the edge of a second drop that would have killed me.

I survived.

Near-death stories are cheap when they become personal branding. I have no tidy lesson. I have a subtraction. Before the fall, I was searching. Searching has a glamour. After the fall, I could no longer postpone meaning. If a life can end on stone in the dark, what matters has to be livable now — for the people you are actually with.

Romantic philosophy died on that rock.

I returned to the Netherlands and painted — abstract work that carried what I had learned about attention. Paint, body, mind, canvas: immersion rather than decoration. That series still matters to me as a record of trying, not as a peak.

In that period I also passed through violence and loss I will not turn into spectacle. What I took was not an identity of damage, but a sharper loyalty to a life that means something while it is being lived.

Then I went back to Turkey to continue what I had begun. Continuation after rupture is a different act than beginning. Beginning is hope. Continuation is vow.

There I met the woman who became my wife. We had two children. That was the real test. A philosophy that only works for a young man alone is not finished.

Under those conditions I finished writing The Bloom System: begun in the forest, continued after the cliff, carried through painting, and tested at the kitchen table. Its heart is simple: be present enough to contribute more to life as a whole — and when you have children, be present with them as your first duty.

Later we returned to the Netherlands, and money became hard. For a time the household was split: my family in Turkey while I stayed to repair our situation. I put everything I had into it — long hours, ordinary work climbed as far and as fast as I could — because stability for my children was the only measure that mattered. We regained ground.

I do not romanticize that season. Provision under fire is not a spiritual aesthetic. It is often ugly, narrow, and necessary.

With the money crisis no longer the whole story, what remained between us became clearer. The relationship itself could not give the children the loving climate they deserved. So we chose to divorce — a hard choice made for the same reason as the years of work: their wellbeing first.

Staying can be vanity disguised as loyalty. Leaving can be integrity.

Today we both live in Winterswijk, a place that is genuinely good for raising children. That breathing room is not a victory lap. It is what lets me turn, carefully, toward work that might serve others — without abandoning the duties that already hold me.

In those years I also became a donor. I am not listed on my own platform. I want the path toward parenthood, when it involves donation, to be simpler and more respectful than it often is.

The system was not invented to make better parents. It was invented so a person with energy and no assembled life could sit down, see clearly, and change direction until life began to compound. Parenting became the hardest laboratory. BloeiWens.nl is one applied form.

I am thirty-two. I raise my children. I still come from a young man who did not know where to put his energy, and who refused to wait forever for a life that never arrived on its own. I am not an example of arrival.

I have lost touch with nature and with the body under the weight of work. I still drift from my own practice and have to find my way back.

What I stand behind is simple, because life forced it to become simple.