A note of thanks to the city that saved me
Ten years ago today, I arrived in Amsterdam. Depleted, addicted, depressed — recently divorced and with a desperate urge to run away from London. The feelings were loud and clear: everything has gone wrong. I have f*cked up any chance of happiness. How have I, aged 33, managed to create such an almighty mess?
So on day one in Amsterdam, I found myself with zero job, one friend, two suitcases, and a plan to stay for three months. I scuttled up the stairs of the Airbnb I had rented, double-locked the door (after all, Amsterdam — right? Probably being followed by a drug lord). I braved the five-minute trot to the supermarket where I was completely confused by all the beige sandwich fillers and the fact that Visa wasn’t accepted. I went home, unpacked, looked around the sparse apartment, the faint shadow of the owner’s penchant for shells and sheepskin suddenly apparent. Was this just another massive mistake?
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The next week was spent cycling around Westerpark on my trusty new steed (Spartacus — long since stolen, RIP) under the goldening trees, feeling the air in my lungs, listening to Tom Misch’s Beat Tape 2 on repeat. Getting rained on and getting dry, navigating the very un-English Dutch brusqueness (I'm getting there guys), looking for a job, drinking coffee from Bagels & Beans so I could get free dolly mix (those glory days are sadly over), calling home, doing Zumba (yes, really) and realising, slowly, that I was breathing again. That through these winding canals, within this watery city, under these elms and oaks and cherry trees, something was opening up again — some crack of light and, though I hardly dared acknowledge it, hope for my future.
Photos from my first week in Amsterdam
I won’t go into the ten-year detail — but the quick version is: I stayed. I somehow, through a new (and now dear) friend, managed to land a freelancing gig at Nike. Took a sabbatical to ‘become a writer’ which totally backfired (erupting volcanoes, gluten intolerances — a story for another time). Went back to Nike for a full-time job as Head of Copy (slightly crestfallen, since by that point I was meant to be an enlightened, tanned poet), where I began working on a project with a nice man called Koji, who (spoiler alert) is now my husband. Had two wonderful, spirited daughters, one just before global lockdown, one just after. Bought an apartment, went freelance, trained to become a coach, wrote poems, started a Masters in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. Lived my life, full of ups and downs and anxieties and difficulties and moments of light and wonder and immense, mind-bending gratitude for all that this city had given me, for how much of me it had salvaged, for how much of me it slowly uncovered. And none of it — none of it — could I have predicted.
We never know what’s ahead, because we are living the story as it unfolds. However much we (ahem, I) love to catastrophise and control and compartmentalise life, it will just keep happening anyway. And somehow, through all the mayhem and moments of ‘well now I’ve REALLY made a mess’ — there runs a path and a pattern that does, in retrospect, make sense.
That’s really what my debut chapbook Sunlight Later centres on, and the title comes from one of my favourite poetry quotes from Louis MacNeice:
‘There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.’
— Autumn Journal [Part XXIV]
As long as we are alive, paying attention and willing to keep growing, there can and will be second and third and fifteenth chances. As Francis Weller wrote, ‘the work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them.’ And so we are stretched by our griefs and our gratitudes beyond our safe confines — into noticing, into remembering, into becoming. These are the themes that run through my poems Sunlight Later, which I will be posting on this Substack over the coming months.
We may not understand events as they unfold, but someday — in this life or beyond — the equation balances out. We stumble across unpredicted light, stop in our tracks, and bask, just for a moment.
So here I am, a decade on. On my tenth anniversary in Amsterdam — the city that salvaged me, stretched me, and illuminated more than I ever thought possible ✨.
