Welcome to Holland
It didn’t matter if we ended up in Italy or Holland or someplace else entirely. Instead of crying, hop on a plane and explore where we landed.
Have you ever heard about a well-known essay “Welcome to Holland” by Emily Perl Kingsley? Or have you ever read or even heard about a book “Maybe you should talk to someone”?
Recently, I came across the book – “Maybe you should talk to someone” written by Lori Gottlieb, an American writer and psychotherapist. The book is a collection of human condition through the lives of four of her patients—and a fifth one, herself. However, to protect patients’ privacy, Lori disguises identities and any recognizable details.
Among all of those chapters, there is a chapter which really touched my heart and made me read again and again whenever I feel down. The chapter called “Welcome to Holland”. It is about the life of a patient named Jolie. Jolie was a woman in her thirties with a great life. She had a successful job and married a good man whom she loved. Everything seems to be perfect for her. While she expected to get a baby, she unexpectedly discovered that she had a breast cancer. After Julie learned that she was dying, she was depressed, despondent and furious why life treated her that way? Dara was her close friend. Dara was a mother of a son with severe autism. She used to be in a similar situation as Jolie when she discovered her son had autism. However, after she came a cross a well-known essay “Welcome to Holland” written by Emily Perl Kingsley, the parent of a child with down syndrome as well, that would change her life. That’s why she hoped that the essay would help Jolie too, so she sent the essay to Jolie.
The essay is about the experience of raising a child with a disability. It’s about the experience of having your life’s expectations turned upside down. Let me summarize the essay:
The feeling when you’re going to have a baby is like the feeling when you’re planning to have trip to Italy – a modern, beautiful and dreamt place for everyone. You are excited, happy and prepare many things as much as you can, You will buy a bunch of guide books, find list of places to visit. Prepare clothes to suit with weather at Italy. Or try to learn some useful Italian phrase. It’s all very exciting. When the time finally arrive after months of eager anticipation. You pack your bags. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland”. It is not Italy but Holland. It is not the place you want to go. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy.
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay and couldn’t go back.
The pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. Also, everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
But what? Now you already in Holland. There are two choices for you:
– Sitting in hotel room, crying, furious, complaining, sad …., etc
– Or deciding to step out of the hotel room, go out to buy a new guide book, finding new places to visit, learning a new language and meeting new people in Holland. You know what? The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. If you take breath and look around, you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
If you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.
Now back to Jolie, after reading the essay, she’s more furious and said, how come this can compare to her problem. At least, we can find beautiful things in Holland. but there was nothing special or lovely about her illness. Of course, Julie’s prognosis was devastating and unfair and a complete departure from how her life was supposed to go. But is it more difficult to be sick yourself or to have a child who is?
Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will
happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.
Julie was grieving for what she would never have. Unlike older people, who grieve for what they’ll be losing and leaving behind after they die.
Julie started to see that we’re all in Holland, because most people don’t have lives that go exactly as planned. Even if you’re lucky enough to be traveling to Italy, you might experience canceled flights and horrible weather.
Now Jolie was going to Holland. She didn’t know how long her stay would be, but we were booking her trip for ten years and would change the itinerary as needed.
In Holland, Jolie found way to live more fully—not in the future with some long list of goals, but right now. She understand the value of time , not just focus on the high-paid job as Julie had spent her entire life being conscientious and responsible, doing everything by the book. She found that life is full of uncertainty but she and her husband decided to live their lives, even in the face of such uncertainty.
In Holland, Dara found friends who understood her family’s situation. She found ways to connect with her son, to enjoy him and love him for who he was and not focus on who he wasn’t. She found ways to stop obsessing about what she did and did not know about tuna and soy and chemicals in cosmetics during her pregnancy that might have harmed her developing baby. She got care for her son so that she could care for herself and do meaningful part-time work and have meaningful downtime too. She and her husband found each other and their marriage again while also struggling with the challenges they couldn’t change. Instead of sitting in their hotel room the whole trip, they decided to venture out and see the country.
I agree with Jolie that we’re all in Holland. We experienced the unexpected things happen in life, no matter how much you planed, prepared and tried to escape from it. Some people might stay longer. Some might stay shorter. But as long as you decide to step out of hotel room and explore the country, I’m sure that you will discover many beautiful and lovely things there. Some may discover the beautiful field full of tulips in Holland. Some may enjoy the view of canals of Amsterdam. Some may love the thousand of windmills in Holland. And some may enjoy cycling through a beautiful polder landscape.
Flashback to my life, there have been many life’s expectations turned upside down and disappointed, unexpected things happen to me. Why does this happened to me? Why life is so unfair to me? Why no one understand me and all the hard work I did so far? Why I cannot be lucky like others? Why did it only happen to me? Why this and why that? Those “why” questions often come up in my mind when I met disappointment. Slowly from time to time, I started to change from “Why” to “What” question. What can I learn from this problem? What is life going to teach me this time? What are the beautiful things I can find from here? What is the gift that god going to give me this time? What are the experiences I got from this issue while other doesn’t get the chance?
Similar to Jolie and Dara, in Holland, I learned to appreciate little thing around me. Enjoyed the moment, learned to slow down. I gotta stop being hard on myself. I learned that there is always beauty in everything even in the hardest day.
It didn’t matter if we ended up in Italy or Holland or someplace else entirely. Instead of crying, hop on a plane and explore where we landed.