Where I come from

I quit gaming completely. The energy trapped there had to go somewhere honest.

I tried design. I entered school. I studied psychology on my own for years because I could feel how awkward I was with people and did not know another way to change. Much of what I first read was empty. I kept going anyway. One idea stayed:

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

Reading. Writing. Meeting people. Beginning each day as if the day itself were the work. Living outwardly with very little, and inwardly with a demand I placed on ordinary hours — not as a title, as a discipline I often failed at.

I read the old books with real hunger. They 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, in actual days.

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

And 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. The system had not led me to flourish. Beginning from almost nothing, among other people and the open air, did.

There the core of what I still try to 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.

I do not tell this as a legend, and I do not tell it to make myself special. I tell it because it stripped philosophy of its romance. Before the fall, I was searching. After it, 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, not only for the self you are trying to improve.

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. They left their mark. What I took from them was not an identity of damage, but a sharper loyalty to a life that means something while it is being lived — and to not wasting other people’s time with my unfinishedness.

Then I went back to Turkey to continue what I had begun.

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. If it can hold inside family life — tired, responsible, ordinary, full of love and pressure — then it is real.

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. That presence with my children is still the daily practice. Everything professional is allowed only inside that frame. A second edition is coming.

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, almost no life left for myself — because stability for my children was the only measure that mattered. When something is truly first, I try to give it full attention. We regained ground. A solid base returned under their lives, and eventually under my own.

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. I also found a good home for myself.

Today we both live in Winterswijk, a place that is genuinely good for raising children. There is peace and stability here at last. That breathing room is not a victory lap. It is what lets me turn, carefully, toward work that might serve others — platforms, building, craft — without abandoning the duties that already hold me. Presence with my children remains the anchor; professional work comes second.

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.

After that ground was stable enough, the medium of the work changed again.

The Bloom System remains the spine: how to be in the bloom of life, and how to return to it. BloeiWens.nl is one applied form of that spine — a free Dutch platform for intended parents and known donors, built with more clarity and more respect. The tools changed. The demand did not: fewer people stuck in cold or opaque systems when they are trying to build a family.

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. I am no better than anyone else.

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