So! Here I am. And I think I'm going to love being here.
To #introducemyself I could go back 30 years ago when I was born. But my current life is best explained by more recent events. Here's the story:
In 2014 I started working as a freelancer after 10 months of excruciating headaches, which made me decide keeping an office job was 'not for me'. I worked on some (Dutch) websites on the subject of autism while having the chance to decide on my own hours and be able to recover from the headaches. In the meanwhile I started to build on my career as a photographer as well.
In the summer of 2015 my boyfriend and I decided to go on a sabbatical - we'd saved up, emptied out our rented apartment, and left from the Netherlands to Moscow where our 9 month travels would start. I couldn't wait to explore the world and take pictures with my beloved camera!
But that's where the saying 'life happens while you're making plans' came looking around the corner. I made a misstep on day 3 of the journey, felt the pain, ignored it (after 15 years of 'bad luck' with my feet I didn't think these pains were really special), and travelled on.
We took trains from Moscow via multiple cities in Russia to Mongolia. Sleeping on the Mongolian countryside under a thick woolen blanket I knew the pain in 'the foot' was different from my experiences the past few years. The weight of the woolen blanket alone (and mind you, you need the blanket when it's around zero degrees Celsius and you're sleeping in a Ger, or Mongolian tent!) caused me so much pain I couldn't sleep at all. Walking was only possible for 5 painful minutes and 20 minutes of rest in between the 5.
But what do you do when you're in the countryside of Mongolia? It's a great, beautiful and big country, but there's only one city in the whole country to speak of, and healthcare is not yet up to 'developed' standards. I reminded myself of the one little sentence I read in a guidebook: "If in need of a hospital while in Mongolia, you should leave the country first".
We decided to book train tickets to Beijing while I made an appointment in an international hospital. This experience is one I might write a separate blog about, but for this first post the summary will have to do: it appeared I had 'necrotic bone' in my left foot, all weight was to be kept off this foot (because, as the doctor said, the bone might collapse! Doesn't sound scary at all, right?), and I had to quit travelling and return to my home country, the Netherlands.
And well, here I am. After one year of recovery, a new diagnosis (no necrotic bone, but permanent bone damage that can't be operated on) and a lot of challenges to overcome I'm ready to start building up my life again.
You have to understand: the mourning alone of not getting to finish a dream journey and saying goodbye to being a fully physically fit woman took me months and months, if not a full year. Then there was the physical recovery itself, which was spent on the couch, thinking about how to eat healthy if you can't cook or do groceries. Once you solved these initial challenges there's the rest of the puzzle: what to do for a job if you're not being able to get to work on a daily basis? To walk the streets for great pictures?
My plans for Steemit: create great content! These will be both in words and with or about pictures. Creating is in my bones and I love to share this with people who will take the time and effort to really understand and appreciate it.
I might share insights about my challenges as a young woman with an invisible disability, about my travels (because I'm finding new ways to do this!), my photography (I did an amazing project recently!) and well, about life and it's wonders in general.
Nice to meet you!