Welcome to the Netherlands

Reprinted from "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone" by Lori Gottlieb.

When Julie learned that she was terminally ill, her best friend Darla wanted to help, so she sent Julie the famous essay "Welcome to Holland." The author of the essay is Emily Pearl Kingsley, a mother of a child with Down syndrome. The essay describes what it is like when life's expectations are subverted by reality -

When you are carrying a baby in your body, it is like planning a wonderful Italian trip During the trip, you bought a lot of travel guides, but fortunately you made wonderful guides about the Colosseum, Michelangelo's David, Gondolas like Venice...you may even learn a few words. Simple Italian, all so exciting. After months of anticipation, the day finally arrives, you pack your bags and hit the road, and a few hours later the plane lands and the crew comes up to you and says, “Welcome to the Netherlands.” “Holland? !" You were shocked. "Why the Netherlands? I'm going to Italy! I should have arrived in Italy. I have dreamed of going to Italy all my life." But the flight plan suddenly changed. They decide to stop in Holland and you just have to take things as they come. But the point is, they're not taking you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of plague, famine, and disease. It's just a different place than expected.

So you have to get off the plane, buy a new travel guide, go there, learn a new language, and meet a group of people you would never have met otherwise. .

This is just another country. The pace here is slower and less flashy than Italy. After you stay here for a while, you calm down and look around, you will find the Netherlands. There are windmills, there are tulips in the Netherlands, there are even Rembrandts in the Netherlands.

But everyone you know is traveling to and from Italy and bragging about how great they are there. For the rest of your life, all you can say is: "Yes, I was meant to be there. I planned it all."

And this pain will never go away... Because losing a dream is a very, very significant loss.

But if you waste your life lamenting that you didn’t go to Italy, you will never be free to enjoy all the very special and beautiful aspects of the Netherlands.

The article "Welcome to Holland" made Julie angry because there was nothing "special" or "wonderful" about her cancer. As the mother of an autistic child, Darla said that Julie missed the point of the article. She also admitted that the doctor's prognosis of Julie's condition was devastating and unfair to Julie, which made it completely out of touch. She has lost her original life track, but she doesn’t want Julie to miss out on everything she could have while alive: her marriage, family, and job for the rest of her life—which may last as long as ten years. Even in "The Netherlands" she can still have it all.

Julie’s reaction was: Fuck you!

But at the same time, he also knew that Dara was right, because Dara had been there.

I heard about Darla from Julie—all the visitors mentioned their closest friends. Julie told me that Darla’s son would sometimes beat his hair endlessly and get angry. At the age of four, he could not hold normal conversations or feed himself. He had to go to therapy several times a week, which occupied a lot of Darla’s attention. time, but still no effect. Each time these situations made Dara feel worried and sad almost to the point of losing her mind. He would call Julie in frustration.

"There is a thought that makes me feel very embarrassed." After explaining why she was angry with Darla, Julie said, "When I see what Darla and his son have gone through, the thing I worry about most is myself. It ends up in his situation. I love her very much, but I can also feel that all his expectations for life have disappeared."

"Just like how you feel now." I said.

Julie nodded.

She told me that there was a long time when Darla would say, "I didn't choose this!" and then she would list all the irreversible changes in her life. She and her husband would never be able to sleep peacefully in each other's arms, go out for carpool rides, or read bedtime stories to their children, who would never grow up to be independent adults. Darla would look at her husband and think, what a wonderful father he is to our children, but she could not help but imagine what a wonderful father he would be if our children could interact with him without barriers. Awesome dad. An overwhelming sadness washed over her as he imagined the experiences they would never have the chance to experience with their son.

Darla felt that she was selfish, and she blamed herself for her sadness, because her greatest wish was that her son's life would be better, that he could live a fulfilling life, with friends, a lover, and own work. When she saw other mothers playing with their four-year-olds in the park, Darla was bitter and jealous because he knew that if his son were there, he would probably lose control and be asked to leave.

She also knew that as her son grew older, both he and she would be more ostracized. Other mothers had ordinary children, and those children had ordinary problems, but the expressions on those mothers' faces made Dara feel isolated. Feel.

Dara called Julie frequently that year, and each call was more desperate than the last. With money, emotions and energy almost exhausted, Darla and her husband decided not to have another child because the situation was more complicated - they did not have the financial resources and time to support another child if the second child also had his own life. What to do about autism? She had given up her job for her son, and her husband had to work another job. She didn't know how to cope with it all. Until one day, she read the article Welcome to Helan, and he realized that she not only had to survive tenaciously in this strange land, but also did her best to find happiness there. If she can open her arms, she will definitely still be happy.

In "The Netherlands" Dara found friends who could understand her family situation. She found a way to communicate with her son. She enjoyed getting along with her son and loved him as he was, instead of getting entangled. For who he cannot be. She also found a way out, no longer obsessing over whether she had done something during her pregnancy, or whether she had harmed the developing fetus because of her lack of understanding of chemicals in tuna, soy, and cosmetics. She found someone to help look after her son, so that she could also have time to take care of herself, do some meaningful part-time work, and have ample rest. Although they still had to deal with many inevitable challenges, she and her husband also rediscovered the way they were when they first met each other and saved their marriage. During this journey, they no longer just sat in the hotel the whole time, they decided to Venture outside and see what the country is like.

Now Darla invites Julie to do the same, look at the tulips and Rembrandt. After Julie's anger about "Welcome to Holland" subsided, she suddenly realized that there are always let-downs in the world. Even if you envy the good luck people, there will always be people who are worse off than you. If possible, would Julie swap lives with Darla? Her first reaction was: change without thinking. But think again: probably not. She imagined various scenarios. If she could live a good ten years with a healthy child, would she rather shorten her life by a few years? Is it more difficult for you to be sick yourself, or is it more difficult to take care of a sick child? These thoughts made her feel terrible, but she couldn't deny her thoughts.

"Do you think I'm a terrible person?" she asked me. I told her that almost everyone who comes to psychotherapy worries about whether their thoughts and feelings are "abnormal" or "bad", but it is this honesty we have with ourselves that helps us understand life. With all the nuances and complexities in it, suppressing these thoughts can really lead to “bad” performance. Face them and you will grow.

From this perspective, Julie begins to realize that everyone is in "Holland" because most people's lives don't unfold exactly as planned. Even if you're lucky enough to make it to Italy, you may encounter flight cancellations, bad weather, or you and your partner may be enjoying an anniversary trip and just made love in a luxury hotel room in Rome. Minutes later, your partner suffers a fatal heart attack in the shower—something that happened to an acquaintance of mine.

So Julie decided to go to "The Netherlands". She doesn’t know how long she will stay there, but we are planning a ten-year journey for her, and the specific itinerary can be modified as needed.

In the meantime, let's figure out what she can do there.

Julie has only one request.

"If I do something crazy, can you promise to tell me the truth? I mean...since I'm going to die much sooner than I thought, I don't have to be too ...Sense, right? If I cross a line and maybe things go a little too far, you'll remind me, right?"

I said I would. Julie has always been a meticulous and conscientious person, and she does everything by the rules. I can't imagine what it would be like for her to go too far. I think at best, she is just like a good student who was a little petty at a certain party. I just drank one more beer because I was crazy.

But I forgot that people tend to be their funniest when they have an invisible gun to their head.

“Bucket list,” Julie mentioned once when we were looking at her vision for Holland, “that’s a funny word, don’t you think?”

< p> I admit that this is indeed the case. What "wishes" can be fulfilled so that we will not leave any "regrets"? People often think about their bucket list when someone close to them dies. Just like the artist Candy Chang. In 2009, she transformed the exterior wall of a New Orleans mansion into a blackboard and left a fill-in-the-blank question: "Before I die, I want to _____." A few days The entire wall was covered with writing.

People wrote various answers: before I die, I want to cross the International Date Line; I want to sing for millions of people; I want to be 100% myself... Soon, this idea spread all over the world, with derivatives everywhere. There are thousands of similar walls: before I die, I want to get along well with my sister; I want to be a good father; I want to go skydiving; I want to make a difference in other people's lives... I don't know that people have They did not act according to their wishes, but based on my observations at work, a large number of people only maintained a brief awakening, explored their souls, added a few more wishes to the list, and then did not think about paying them. In practice, people often think more and do less, and death is only an imaginary subject.

We think we make bucket lists to avoid regrets, but in fact, we use them to avoid death. The longer the bucket list, the more we imagine we have a long time to complete it. However, if we want to reduce the wishes on the list, our denial mechanism will be subtly damaged, because it means that we have to Recognize a grim reality: the mortality rate of life is 100%. Everyone dies, and most people have no idea when or how death will occur. In fact, with every second that passes, we get closer to the end of death. As the saying goes, no one will get out of here alive.

I bet you're glad your therapist isn't me right now. Who wants to think about this? How much better to be a procrastinator when it comes to death! Most of us take the people we love and the things we find meaningful for granted, and it’s not until we’re sentenced to death that we realize the prerequisite for everything is that we’re still alive.

But what Julie needed now was to grieve for a while about the wishes she had to check off her list. It’s not like an older person is grieving over what they’re going to lose and can’t take with them, Jolie is grieving over what she won’t have the chance to have—all the milestones that people envisioned happening when they were 30. events and new experiences in life. In Julie's words, she has a specific "dead limit" (the word "dead" is the emphasis of the word, she said), a ruthless "dead limit" because most of her expectations will be blocked. Beyond the limit.

One day Julie told me that she started to notice that people often mentioned future events in casual conversation: I am going to lose weight; I am going to start exercising; I am going to take a vacation this year. ; I want to get promoted within three years; I want to save money to buy a house; we are considering having a second child within a few years; we want to get together again in five years.

They are always planning.

But it’s hard for Julie to plan because she doesn’t know how much time she has. What would you do if there was such a big difference between one year and ten years?

Then a miracle happened. The experimental treatment seemed to be shrinking Jolie's tumors, and after just a few weeks, they were almost gone. Her doctors are also optimistic - maybe she'll live longer than they previously thought. Perhaps these drugs are not just effective now, but perhaps they will remain effective for several years or even longer. There were a lot of "maybes". When the tumor completely disappeared, the many possibilities even made Julie and Matt try to become the kind of people with plans.

As Julie looked over her bucket list, she talked to Matt about having kids. But if Jolie is gone by the time the kids reach middle school, should they still have kids? What if the situation suddenly worsens and Julie disappears before preschool? Would Matt be willing? Is the child willing? Was it a wise choice for Jolie to become a mother in such a situation? Or will Jolie's great motherhood lead her to decide to give up on becoming a mother, even though it would be the greatest sacrifice she has ever made?

Julie and Matt finally decided that even in the face of such uncertainty, they still had to live according to their own wishes. Because the most important thing they learn is that life is synonymous with uncertainty. If Jolie is still too scared to have children because she's afraid the cancer will come back to them, what if it doesn't come back in the end? Matt promised Julie that he would be a devoted father and would always watch over their child no matter what Julie's health was.

So the matter was decided. Confronting death forces them to live more engaged—not making long lists of goals for the future, but living in the present.

Julie's last wish was simple: to start a family of her own.

They don’t care whether they end up in Italy or the Netherlands, or somewhere else. What matters is that they decided to get on the plane and see where they would land.