Why I still do not care one bit for the Netherlands

For the past few days I had my mother and brothers visiting me here in Germany. I guess it was both a weird experience to speak so much Dutch again, and also very normal. It also made me aware of just how much I have been trying to forget about the Netherlands.

Over here in Germany I have been trying to rebuild my life, starting off with almost zero possessions and zero money just a few years ago. I have been painfully aware of just how traumatic my life back in the Netherlands has been.

Aside from the brief interlude of my youth, the confusion and loneliness of trying to understand who I was led up to figuring out that I was intersexed. Instead of a solution and end of confusion the next decade would bring only pain and suffering. From psychological to physical and sexual abuse, psychologists, doctors and others all seemed to conspire against me to make my life a living hell.

This all against the uselessness of the Dutch legal system which failed to protect me when it should have, or understand the plight of intersex and similar minorities. I'm still frankly amazed that I got my official gender changed, even if it was all thanks to German medical results.

While my time here in Germany hasn't been and still isn't easy, it's laughably easy compared to the horror that were the past two decades or so in the Netherlands. I have nothing to thank the Netherlands for. It didn't shelter or protect me. It wasn't there when I needed it the most. Its people may not be mean-spirited, but I can feel nothing but bitter hatred for the country as a whole.

All the help I received inside the Netherlands and outside ultimately only led me to the inevitable conclusion that I had to somehow escape.

Even though I did escape, I clearly did not escape the traumas these experiences left me with. How to trust people again? How to like and love oneself? How to not view life as an endless treadmill of misery and pain until one's inevitable death? My experiences in my country of birth never taught me any of that.

It just taught me how to survive. How to be mean, how to bite back, hide, deaden one's emotions, suppress memories and feelings, and accept being just an unworthy scrap of life in a cold, uncaring society. Thanks to this I still cannot ask for help, nor do I expect that anyone will help me. I expect betrayal and a cold shoulder. To me that's all normal. Just the way life works.

Thus I left. Thus I won't ever go back or forgive the Netherlands for what it did to me. Thus I keep hoping that maybe things can be different as well. That maybe I can be different.


Maya