Episode 1 — The Quiet Week in Which Responsibility Felt Different
One of the strongest feelings this week did not arrive through something dramatic, but through numbers.
Receipts, invoices, bank lines, forgotten entries, small details that needed to match before anything could move forward.
For years, my quarterly bookkeeping has carried a certain weight for me. Not because I do not understand what needs to happen, but because it asks for a kind of sustained focus that can easily become heavier than the task itself. Gathering invoices from different places, checking amounts against the bank account, entering everything correctly into the accounting system so the bookkeeper can do the final check and submit it for the taxes of Goddess Creations — none of it is difficult in theory, but it asks for steadiness.
And steadiness is not always glamorous.
This time, something was different.
I had been working on it seriously during the final days before the deadline, especially those first days of April when I knew it simply had to be finished. I put everything else aside more deliberately than usual. Quiet music on. No extra tasks. No mental wandering into five other things that also felt urgent. Just one thing at a time: numbers, dates, invoices, matching, checking again.
And somewhere in that process, I slipped into flow.
Not resistance. Not dread. Flow.
That surprised me.
I remember sending the message to my bookkeeper on the evening of the second of April: it is complete. Then I looked again at his reminder email — the standard friendly line saying it should ideally be delivered on the morning of the second.
Technically I was a few hours late.
But emotionally, it felt like a milestone.
Because for the first time, I had not drifted days or weeks beyond what was required, carrying that low-grade tension in the background. I had actually brought myself to the finish line almost exactly when needed.
And the feeling that came was unexpectedly strong: pride.
Not loud pride. Not performative pride. Something much quieter and more satisfying — the feeling of seeing evidence that you are becoming someone you have been trying to grow into for a long time.
It felt like leadership, but not the kind people usually imagine when they hear that word. Not big decisions, not visible authority, not impressive declarations. Softer than that.
Leadership as meeting what needs to be met without turning it into inner drama.
That mattered to me more than I expected.
Perhaps because elsewhere in the week, other things were asking for emotional steadiness too.
My great-aunt passed away just over a week ago, and when her daughters called, it was not only to tell us, but already with that immediate instinct of family inside grief: you will come when the service is there, we will let you know. Something in that touched me deeply. It made family feel very present this week — not abstractly, but almost physically.
At the same time, another part of family sat in contrast to that feeling.
In a little under two weeks it will be my birthday. The day before mine, my younger sister turns fifty.
A threshold year.
A visible year.
And I will not be there.
We are estranged, and I am not invited to her celebration. I knew that already. I had told myself some time ago that I was fine with it. But as the date draws closer, truth becomes less theoretical.
An aunt travelling to the Netherlands for that birthday told me she would love to see me. I had to explain plainly that she would not see me there, and we made another plan instead. After that conversation, something landed more deeply than before.
A sadness, yes — but also an awareness of how absence works.
Even when someone is excluded, absence still enters a room.
People notice what is missing, even if nobody names it.
And I noticed how easily another person’s choice can begin to live inside your own body if you do not consciously separate yourself from it.
Earlier in the week I had already felt low in a way that did not fully belong to me. Heavy, slightly lowered, almost emotionally borrowed.
That is the only way I can describe it.
And there came a moment where I had to tell myself clearly: this is moving through me, but it is not me.
That distinction changed the week.
I reminded myself that empathy does not require emotional surrender. I can feel something without becoming shaped by it. So inwardly I created what I often experience as a soft golden field around myself — not a wall, not a defence, simply enough space to remain clearly myself.
That gave me back my own centre.
And once I felt centred again, I could also feel what else was quietly alive this week: movement, ritual, care, ordinary abundance.
I signed up for a year of online movement and dance — body-based work that for me is not just exercise, but another language. A way to reconnect with rhythm, mobility, expression, and perhaps also with something I know I want to bring more consciously into future retreats: spaces where the body speaks before explanation arrives.
Then Easter came.
Each year I watch The Passion on Dutch television, and each year it still touches something in me — the retelling through song, the familiar figures, the yearly passage through Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Not obligation. More a yearly inner rhythm I recognise.
Saturday became unexpectedly full in a simple way: cooking for nearly two hours, preparing a meal slowly enough to enjoy it, while practical things were quietly fixed in the house — a key rack hung, a cupboard installed, little changes that make daily life calmer.
And on Sunday we went to Scheveningen Pier, sat by the sea, looked out over the water, and for a few hours it felt as though we had stepped outside ordinary life without leaving our own region.
There was no spectacle in it.
Only that unmistakable feeling that life can suddenly feel rich without becoming expensive, and peaceful without everything being solved.
Perhaps that is what this first episode gave me most clearly: responsibility, grief, absence, movement, food, sea, family, all existing together without cancelling each other out.
And somewhere inside all of that, a quieter truth appeared:
sometimes growth does not announce itself through major breakthroughs.
Sometimes it appears because you notice that what once felt heavy now asks less struggle from you than before.
That too deserves to be recognised.