Hey curious reader,

Greetings from Amsterdam!

I just frothed some pistachio-flavored oat milk for my coffee. This milk was in the bonus section at the Jumbo supermarket last night, so I had to try it. The Dutchies love a “korting” (discount). So far so good. Super lekker (tasty).

I’m not sure how this banana bread loaf that’s in the oven right now will turn out. I added lemon to it because I don’t have any baking powder, only baking soda. AI just told me that lemon was an acid that would still allow it to rise.

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m already taking advice from artificial intelligence. As if they’ll have to live with the consequence of this output at the potluck picnic this afternoon in Westerpark. *facepalm* I’m kind of embarrassed by it.

But I keep my phone shut down on a timeout space in my closet until past 10 am each day, and besides, most everyone I know who loves baking is in EST and is unconscious right now, so yes, I looked to artificial advice. I needed their help on converting Aroma’s “Banana Bread Made Easy” recipe from cups to grams, so here I am using artificial intelligence to bake bread on a Saturday morning.

A few Sundays ago was the last time that I baked a banana bread. I did something sOoOo silly. I’m back at the Jumbo, under luminescent lights, lost in the Dutch aisles looking for baking soda, and somehow I found a light pink bag of M&M’s instead. A new flavor came out. Cookie dough M&M’s. My inner child had to try them. Then, as I gobbled a couple into my piehole while making my loaf, one fell in in the batter. Then I figured, why not a few more? What could go wrong?

I ended up eating what tasted like cake for breakfast, and it was a spectacular decision.

This was such a goofy thing I did in July. July was just a beautiful month. So many jolly times. Two years ago in July was a jolly time in Hawaii, too. Reading my 2024 July reflection brought tears dribbling down my face to my jawline. So here I am celebrating with a pinch of sentimentality.

I know it’s precisely halfway through August now. But today is dewey from some evening cloudy sprinkles, and I’m a bit sad that summer is sizzling past its peak. My drawers need to start stocking up with some woolen items for autumn. But before looking forward, I still want to look backward. There are so many moments I could capture and take note of here, but it’s overwhelming.

This past July, I’ve felt things I didn’t know I could feel. Bliss, contentment, capable. It was such a beautiful unfoldment, the way it flowed without any pre-scheduled plans for July. So I want to immortalize some experiences even more than I did in July’s Dear Domino Effect letter, where I wrote about how a Thai massage school friend, a carpool stranger, a banned tandem bike, and how one small yes became a 550-kilometer European cycling holiday across eighteen days in July.

So, here I go highlighting and helping future me remember a handful of things in particular:

Five noteworthy experiences from July

(1) Create and feel the bliss.

This happened while I was cycling the rolling hills somewhere, going back and forth on the border of Poland and Germany.

That moment of absolute confidence from feeling such bliss that I am exactly where I am meant to be in this moment to be able to feel what I was feeling. It was happiness. Deer at dusk galloping across the field. The sky transformed from the shade of apricot orange to a jazzberry-jam pinkish red, then transitioned to a blend of purple mountains’ majesty, wisteria, and cerulean. This whole eighteen-day holiday, I kept my eyes and ears more open to omens of my life. It could be as simple as strangers initiating a smile at me or free pretzel buns at a dream cafe or a nice Spanish man talking pleasantries with me in a queue. This was one of the best omens yet to be able to experience something that feels like light in the cave of this unconventional life I have chosen to walk.

(2) Outsource the things you don’t enjoy.

The dishwasher is running, the washing machine is spinning. In a way, these modern technologies are ways that I outsource my own efforts to them. Why don’t I do that more often?

While camping with the fellowship of the wiel across four European countries, I kept feeling bad that I was never cooking. But when I cook for others, I get scared of screwing up. On one of my Zen Buddhist silent sesshins two Mays ago on the Big Island of Hawaii, I was assigned the role of breakfast cook. Each morning after 5 AM zazen, one of my bigger challenges each of the five days was staying at ease while making oats for 12 others.

On the other hand, during this cycling vacation, I didn’t end up making a single meal. I felt like a freeloader. It made me so uncomfortable to not be adding value to teh group in some way. But it also seemed to bring the others joy I didn’t want to deprive them of, and so I stuck to dishwashing. And smiling and boosting the group morale a tinge when it seemed a bit low.

(3) You don’t have to use modern tech.

… But you can if you want to.

It was incredible to use road signs, strangers, an index card of city names, and a compass to navigate on this cycling trip. No Google Maps necessary. My cycling companions were Dutch, read German, and had navigated European roads way more than I ever had, so they had confidence I borrowed. If we took a detour, we never really knew since there was no direct path we expected to take anyway. The whole path was co-created from the collective, and that was beautiful.

And now onto the other piece of modern tech apart from Google Maps…. my confession time: ever since March, I have been using a large language model (LLM) tool I call Claudia practically every day, Monday through Friday. For over four months, I’ve been opening the tool to understand how to use this newer technology for the education technology company I work for and what to share from my own experiences.

And when I went on my cycling trip, I was so relieved to no longer need it.*

*We missed a ferry to go from Germany to Sweden, and then I did quickly use Claudia to find any discounts to make the trip not fall apart while breaking the piggy bank to repurchase ferry tickets. The price was still steep. Steeper than a plane ticket but we needed to take our bikes so three ferry tickets were bought on my Amex for 655€.

(4) Smile at strangers.

It inspires me by how many joyous encounters I had with humans I’d never met before. The ones who pulled over at a fork in the road and asked where we were heading.

And so I’m going to continue to smile at strangers. Humans yearn to connect.

(5) To bake is a blessing.

After weeks of living on the road and cycling my house bungeyed on the back of a bike, I am still so apprecaitive to own a water cooker and stove top that turns on with the press of my finger.

So keep making pancakes. They’re delicious.

And to close out, one of my biggest regrets:

Not packing a film camera on the cycling trip in fear of taking up too much space or water damage. Next time I will pack my film camera. I love how it lets me capture everyday moments and make them special. Like the girl about to jump into the river at the top of this letter.

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~~~

So this is my invitation to follow your bliss, outsource, use your first brain first, smile at strangers, and bake a pancake.

Until next time, keep on learning by noticing life : )

Jen

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PS - in case you missed last letter, I wrote about renegotiating my weekly publishing rule my 24-year-old self made me keep for 325 letters on grace, disciline and integrity

PPS- the banana bread just popped out, and I should’ve added the yogurt or apple mousse in. It’s quite dry. Alas next time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good morning from a “Shut Up & Write” meetup on the top floor of the Oba library in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Below is a touristic photo on the Keizersgracht that my dad’s friend’s wife took of me after a cozy, curious dinner together. This is my first touristic photo taken in 2026. Here’s proof I’ve lived in Amsterdam for the past four months already(!) That’s something worth celebrating.

Let’s dive straight into this week’s letter 325 because I have some things I need to get off my chest…

It has been ten days since I last wrote you.

Needless to say, I feel like a slackasaurus1 who has been dropping the ball. And it’s a bit ironic because the last letter I wrote was on the pressure to be smart. And now I have been thinking about the pressure to have integrity with my twenty-four- year-old self and her promise of a weekly publishing rule.

When I first started this publication in April 2020 after pivoting away from my first ‘failed’ book project2, I wanted a project that could make me feel creative and courageous. Something that could bring me purpose week after week during COVID and my time of sulking in bed sad about the uncertainty of my life. About a week into unemployment.

So, this creation of weekly letters came out of a desire for certainty in a time of uncertainty. And when I blew up my life with my quarterlife crisis at age twenty-five with a plane ticket to Hawaii, this creative ritual was one of the rocks in my life. I gripped onto this practice because it grounded me in my creative rhythm.

Many people said that making these letters a weekly thing was not sustainable. That it was a recipe for disaster. But I like challenge. Typically, I thrive on it. When people say I can’t do something, I get even more curious and want to rebel and do it anyway. At age twenty-four, I especially got pushback from one of my mentors at the time who kept saying weekly was too ambitious. I really, really loved proving her wrong.

It also helped that I would read from other writers week after week the past half decade like Charlie’s Call Me Charlie, Katelyn’s Declarative Statements, James’ 3-2-1 Thursdays, Kai’s Dense Discovery. They’ve got super duper busy lives too, more so than me presumably as a youngish single lady where responsibility is comparatively less than the majority of these adults in the western world.

~

I was talking to my friend Tamara about my shame of not publishing my letter last week a couple of nights ago after a mic night. A year ago, I borrowed her book on Stephen King’s advice On Writing. We both enjoyed it. My biggest takeaway was to close the door and get my writing done each morning no matter what.

I had already been disciplined with this, doing Julia Cameron’s three pages, but getting this affirmation from King meant again that I was on the ‘right path’. I’ve been writing every day since April 2019. It’s become a non-negotiable to have roughly three pages streaming off my magenta pink fountain pen onto the page like a boisterous waterfall. That’s been over seven years now. Wild right? Seems like a long time, and at the same time, I’m devoted to some form of a writing practice for the rest of my days that I breathe air, so it’s not really that long in the grand scheme of my potential existence.

For 325 weeks, I’ve followed this self-imposed rule of weekly publishing. That’s from almost six and a half years. That’s over half a decade. I can’t really process that chunk of change either. I just know this publication is one of the most proud creative creations of my life.

When I declare I am a writer, I truly feel it in my bones.

There’s no flinching or reservations. Nobody can call me a fraud with this identity, since I have this whole entire house of 325 bricks of what I’ve been building a sturdy house with. This rule has gifted me creative confidence.

At the same time, this rule feels stale, and I want to freshen it up. It needs a glow-up.

This refresh doesn’t mean I am going to wait for inspiration to arrive. I still write every day. The blocker is more about answering the question of: how can I publish in a way that makes me enthusiastic?

Lately, publishing has felt like preparing for a surgery to get my wisdom teeth pulled.

Back in 2024, I wrote on feeling guilt and on Discipline or Grace, and I shared about having more grace with myself by varying the style and format of my weekly letter saying:

I’m going to stop feeling like I need to apologize for my handwriting or something being less thoughtful than perfection. I’m still going to keep going and will share each week, but with that grace, I might be sharing in shorter lengths. And it might be a wider variety of things that I’d like to “show and tell” from my life and what I’ve been pondering, feeling, or experiencing.

But something bigger needs to shift this time around than merely that.

So where does that leave me?

Will I keep this weekly publishing thing going?!

I started this project a month and a half after I turned 24 years old. Do I, today as a thirty-year-old, believe that my 24-year-old self is wiser than me today? Do I really need to continue to honor the promise she set for weekly publishing?

I’ve since learned so much more about the world and creativity and my energy levels. Right now, as a woman, it is my time of the month, and this masculine weekly publishing regime to produce and force something out each week doesn’t align with me anymore. I already grant myself grace in my entrepreneurial and social schedule to rest more during certain phases of my month’s cycle. And yet, do I really still expect my creativity to be linear when it’s more of a cyclical nature? Where’s the grace and kindness in that?

As I sit here during my time of the month, coming out of a weekend where I woke with migraines that made me feel too nauseous to eat breakfast, I sulked in bed in darkness, hiding from the sun. Dread filled me with any thought of opening a computer screen to write this publication.

My past self inspires me in how, no matter what, she’d been regular with this weekly cadence, but lately, it doesn’t honor me or fit my creative process.

I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I know it’s time to tinker. It’s time to try something anew. To apply some beginner’s mindset to what this could look like.

My past self also is a thief of my present-day joy because she made weekly publishing look easy. Like what the heck?! She’s making me look bad now that I need to drop off, simmer, and stew over my ideas more and how my writing can evolve to have more depth.

But at the same time, I want my publishing to nourish me.

Weekly publishing doesn’t feel sustainable to keep up. Sure, past me might be embarrassed, but this is what’s real for me, and that’s the bravest thing I can do to meet my needs.

This publication needs to flow into a new mold where sharing feels fulfilling. I’m not sure what that shape will look like, but I do know I want to feel energized by this again. I want to feel excitement and zest and like this outlet is something I look forward to rather than socks I need to sort from the dryer each week.

I want to balance grace and discipline while still having integrity. And to stop thinking dualistically and allow myself to coexist with being consistent and adapt to where I am.

I want to keep going without writing superfluously merely to be in service of some weekly deadline.

I want this creative outlet to be fun again!

So I’m setting a basement intention of publishing at least two times a month. And maybe this isn’t forever. Who knows, maybe I’ll miss the weekly outlet for creative expression that this has served the past 325 weeks. But for now it is time to tinker and see what shoe fits me best now.

Rather than gritting my teeth through a promise my 24-year-old self made without knowing my cycle, my body, or how my thirty-year-old life would feel, it is time to update my creative contract. And to update the terms honestly, instead of quietly resenting a rule I never renegotiated.

That’s what integrity looks like now.

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~~~

🎧Listening

Ready for a New Thing by Bahamas

Just rediscovered Bahamas last night and loving this newer album. When I was tired of listening to Jack Johnson on repeat while living in Hawaii, The Bahamas would enter the scene.

🔍Word to define

In Eastern philosophy, there is a Sanskrit word “citta,” which translates to “heart-mind,”. This means the union of logic and emotion, which can then lead to wiser actions and more embodied life experiences.

How could I have more citta in my days?

🌟Quote to Inspire

“First forget inspiration.
Habit is more dependable.
Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.
Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t.
Habit is persistence in practice.”

– Octavia Butler

📸Photos of the Week

🙏Shoutouts

• to and for exchanging ideas with me and inviting me to rethink what my publishing schedule could look and feel like

• to my friends Laurie and Isha for our divergent conversations about how to keep writing even when we’re blocked

• to for sharing with me about this Shut Up & Write meetup. I really enjoy the energy of spaces like this where I can feel less alone while writing.

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I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I coach writers. I guide them to build a writing routine and have fun hitting “publish.” If you’re curious to learn more, email me or check out workwithjen.ink

P.S. #2 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

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To attempt to defend my noggin, I’m dogsitting at a friend’s, and there was a little pot of salt on the countertop, so I figured the other little pot was sugar. So I did what any logical person would do: I reasoned that the other little pot must be sugar. Two little pots, two different things, and so I was confident that the other bowl was sugar. And yet, I ended up pouring a perfectly good cup of coffee down the drain after I salted it.

Plain out dumb, I told myself. But it wasn’t dumb, exactly. It was logical. I reasoned my way into a mistake with total confidence, and that’s the part that unsettled me more than the ruined coffee. I want to look smart. I want to appear logical. After all, my favorite board games growing up were the strategy ones, like Stratego and Monopoly. The games that require forethought and thinking. Logic. And yet, here was logic leading me straight into the wrong pot.

I don’t like feeling dumb. I want to look smart, similar to the character Susan from The Chronicles of Narnia. She shows quick-witted intelligence and looks capable. I want to appear logical and use realism and predictability, but this gets in the way of imagination and magic and feeling into how her younger sister Lucy is telling her truth of a magical world alive in the wardrobe. And so, I want to villainize logic.

Like smart Susan, for most of my life, logic is this thing that has had me conduct reasoning and assess validity. To be sensible. This started with a desire to get A’s in school to perform well, so that the whole shebang of adulthood could go on its merry way, cued up with dominoes in my favor to unlock all the right doors of my future schooling, network, and work opportunities.

But maybe we don’t have to be logical and make sense all the doggin days of this lifetime?

And yet, I feel this pressure to have a plan. I didn’t speak Dutch to the server at the boothuis cafe yesterday for fear of looking dumb, and I didn’t plan out my question confidently before. The fear stalled my opportunity to make mistakes and learn.

But last week I got back from a two-week cycling trip across four European countries without a plan.

Sure, we had a rough agenda of places to go, but the “ fellowship of the wheel “ and I wung most of it with offline maps, a compass, and seeking out strangers for support when at a crossroads. It went perfectly okay. Sure, my bike gears broke a bit, and my bum is still recovering from a rash, but it went better than okay. I would do it again. And that says something. (!)

What I’m realizing, given my values around curiosity and playfulness, is that this pressure to “look smart” is inviting me to feel more fear and judgment. And it’s also forcing me to take into account thoughts before my feelings, as if on some hierarchy that thoughts and logic are more important. As if these years and evolutions of sensations that bubble up in my body are worth discarding. These values and ways of being have coexisted most of my life, but now they are creating more conflict than before.

The truth is that life’s not a true or false exam. On this wild adventure called life, I will make choices about where to devote my attention, my time, my energy, and where not to. These choices will be made the best I can based on the information I have at the time, and there will be a range of consequences. From there, I will discern whether to continue on that path or pivot and make something that feels “wrong” to be more “right” for me.

And as for this pressure to look smart, to be logical, and to make sense, I notice it and where it comes from. But I want to feel the sense in my body and take in data from all directions. Listening to my heart. Feeling my gut. I fear that I look dumb or not ambitious without a robust list of goals one after another. But I’d rather have a list of ideas for ways I can move through the world and direct my energy to align with what I value and trust that it will fall into place as each step comes.

So, this morning, I went back to that kitchen. Two little pots, same as before, and neither got a spoonful of anything into my drip coffee.

I want my life to make sense. But I would rather live my life in alignment with my felt senses.

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… and onto some other things I find noteworthy of sharing…

🎬 Watching

Susan: “It’s our sister, sir. Lucy.”
Professor: “The weeping girl?”
Susan: “She’s upset.”
Professor: “Hence the weeping.”

🎧Listening

Waking Up Slow by Gabrielle Aplin

(found via watching the movie on Netflix the other night in Voicemails for Isabelle)

Heaven help me
My mind changes like the wind
Please excuse me
I don't know where to begin

🔍Word to define

smart | smärt

adjective

1 informal having or showing a quick-witted intelligence: if he was that smart he would never have been tricked. • mainly North American English showing impertinence by making clever or sarcastic remarks: don't get smart or I'll whack you one.

2 (of a device) programmed so as to be capable of some independent action: hi-tech smart weapons.

3 British English (of a person) clean, neat, and well dressed: you look very smart. • (of clothes) attractively neat and stylish: a smart blue skirt. • (of a thing) bright and fresh in appearance: a smart green van. • (of a person or place) fashionable and upscale: a smart restaurant.

4 quick; brisk: I gave him a smart salute. • painfully severe: a dog that snaps is given a smart blow.

🌟Quote to Inspire

“Expect great things, and great things will come.” — Norman Vincent Peale

📸Photos of the Week

🙏shoutouts

• To for having the cutest calming cuddly doggo (once she warms up to you)

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

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PS - I wrote in the past about not being dumber than a hamster:

PPS - I wrote about the magic of manifestation previously and how it worked for me, despite feeling illogical:

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I hear neighbors down the street shrieking at the big screen in the local watering hole about the drama of the World Cup final tournament. I feel absolutely zero fomo. This moment in time is my first time rebooting my computer in 17 days. I haven’t used my AI companion Claudia in weeks. I feel shameful that I haven’t written nearly as much as I’ve liked to. But I’ve been in a weird predicament with a full life without moments to myself to capture. And then when there is time, I don’t feel ~inspired~. I meant to write this letter earlier today, but misplaced my laptop charger. That sums up the dishevelment that is my life.

This all feels a bit overwhelming. I feel like I’m having a comedown from a holiday, like I popped a mollie or something, but in a totally different way.

It’s been troubling me to decide where to start reflecting on my holiday, so I want to start at the very beginning of this adventure.

Before buying my second-hand touring bike, and cycling roughly 550 kilometers on it. Before eating lollipops for breakfast on two night ferries. Before I bought German train tickets. Before getting sweaty in a sauna in Sweden. Before eating pierogis in Poland. Or met the other biker in the fellowship of the wheel that I had never met before.

For context, I told myself I didn’t deserve a holiday this year. Not one longer than a long weekend, at least. Last year, the projects I pursued, like volunteering to build a house in central Thailand or chicken-sitting in the Netherlands were far off from breaking even with my living costs. In the US, skipping a break could be seen as normal. I’ve certainly gone summers before without days off from work, especially during COVID, when holidays felt unjust while people were dying and the financial stress of unstable work.

But then, I realized I could ask for time off from my client, and then a coworker agreed to support me to make it happen, and for that I am still so blessed. (Reminder to people pleasers out there: there’s no harm in asking a question. That doesn’t make you presumptuous.)

So let me tell you how you happened, Domino Effect. Because I find the way you unfolded quite magical. The first of twelve dominoes was back in April 2025…

Domino #1: Leaped outside my comfort zone, enrolled as a student at a Thai massage school, and put my sweaty squid hands to work touching strangers everyday for hours for weeks
Domino #2: Sparked up a conversation with my new Dutch friend Jay on a lunch break. We later bonded more celebrating Songkran together, squirting water at people to celebrate the Thai New Year
Domino #3: Drove to southeast Netherlands in Tilburg last summer and stayed in touch with Jay for a year via WhatsApp
Domino #4: Rejected Jay’s invitation to a small co-creativity festival in the countryside of Germany because I didn’t think it was possible and my limiting mindset
Domino #5: Slept on it and found a way to accept the invitation by shifting some meetings
Domino #6: met Maud via a carpool and we hit it off sharing stories in the drive
Domino #7: me and Maud joined each others workshops at teh festival and shared dreams about cycling holidays
Domino #8: after the festival I asked about whether the idea of the cycling holiday with her friends was actually happening and whether it was open to new-joiners
Domino #9: Maud invited me and mentioned that we could cycle on her tandem bike up until the day before when I called the German train company to realize that tandem bikes are strictly prohibited
Domino #10: bought a second-hand touring bike the morning of the train
Domino #11: found a bike store within hours to tune the brakes and replace the rims with fresh rubbers
Domino #12: was off from Utrecht, Netherlands to Hamburg, Germany, in a dash

From the very get-go of the late-night call the night before leaving, the intention was to slow down. Not to rush. To co-create the plan as we went, based on how we felt, without any formal blueprint other than the departure to Hamburg and the return from Berlin.

I loved this intention. It felt like this was any holiday I’d want to be on. The night before leaving for this trip, I felt insecure that I didn’t have a bike, a tent, a sleeping bag, sleeping pad or even a cycling jersey. My periwinkle running shoes became the home for my stinky feet for the next 16 days. This trip forced me to ask for help. It forced me to focus on what the bare essentials were. Sure, I regret that I didn’t pack my film camera, and I wish that I captured more in my journal even on exhausted nights, but I did my best for where I was.

And this chain of events and all the dominoes feel divine in the way that it happened, and for that I am so freaking grateful. There’s no way I coud’ve predicted that I’d cycle through three more countries this summer. Life is so beautiful.

Even in the low times I am feeling right now, I am infinitely blessed for this life I live, this strong body I inhabit, this world I breathe in, this running water, this bed I feel sleep cozy in tonight, these friends I get to hug and cry and laugh with, and this spirit that has me notice impermanence of life.

So what can you learn from this, Domino Effect?

You never know how one obscure invitation can unlock something totally wild and different from what you ever thought you wanted or needed.

I truly believe I am one person, one invitation, or one question away from a breakthrough that can rattle the rhythm of my life in a radical way.

Soooo, how are you going to drum up the domino effect in your one wild and precious life?

With gratitude for every domino that fell in my favor,

<3 <3 <3

Jen

~~~

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PS - In case you missed, on July 2nd I wrote a reflection (from my phone) on the train in Germany:

PPS - Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time down). Grab your copy here.

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Today marks 100 days since I moved back to the Netherlands, specifically to Amsterdam, marking my second '100 days in Holland' milestone, counting the nomadic chapter last fall. I'm mid-cycling trip without Internet or writing bandwidth this week, so I'm resurfacing the original Letter 282 from last October, back when I was still finding my footing here.

Back last October, it was a season of my life when I didn’t know if I’d make it to this 100-day milestone, since my visa was only 90 days. It had me constantly looking for my next housesit, counting steps, tomatoes, thrifted flannels, and new friendships. I’ve gathered the numbers, the flavors, the moments that add up to a sense of belonging. It felt natural to be here. Friendships formed with ease. Events sprouted out of thin air. I stayed warm and went outside anyway.

Worth rereading now that I'm more rooted instead of roaming. (Though there's real irony in writing that before my butt is in a bike seat on the Baltic coast. Turns out roots don't mean staying still. I just didn't know I needed this kind of movement until I was in it.)

Now, let’s dive into a reread of letter 322 (as a reread of letter 282) from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

~~~

❓Question to think about

What’s the past 100 days look like?
(What film would I like to show?)

🖊️Writing

100 days in Holland,
and still, I keep going.

🏡 Ingredients of Home & Heart

12 beds slept in:
3 hotels.
2 relatives lived with.
2 plant sits.
3 guest bedrooms slept in on a biking trip.
3 animals cared for.
3 raving reviews on Trusted Pet Sitters.
100 days in Holland,
and still I am here.

🥗 Portions of Movement

1,180,704 steps
115 km cycled in a day, a new personal record.
31 runs
9 Dutch Hoogland cattle spotted
17 Dutch cities strolled1
2 pool swims
6 different bikes ridden.
0 accidents.
2 ocean dips.
1 ferry ride to the island of Texel.
1 running club relay race in Rotterdam.
100 days in Holland,
and still I keep moving.

💰 Money & Making Do on a Budget

10 days calling immigration.
2 IND appointments.
2 months waiting.
€405 fee.
1 DAFT visa.
€600 in rent.
2 coaching clients.
96 bonds sold.
6 second-hand stores.
Plenty thrifted:
3 pairs of pants.
2 thicks socks from Aldi.
1 cozy corduroy flannel.
1 Dutch bank account
1 museum kaart purchased
4 bonus cards accrued.
100 days in Holland,
and still I make do.

🍞 Flavors & Tastes

100 bananas
90 apples
17 plump tomatoes harvested.
1 homemade tomato sauce.
1 Aldi. 1 Jumbo. 1 Deka Markt.
6 Albert Heijns.
9 appel flappen homemade.
Countless pannenkoeken eaten.
1 favorite cheese: Komijnkaas
1 favorite bread: Maisbrood (with corn)
lost count of cheeses and crackers:
Estimate = 25 days.
100 days in Holland,
and still I taste it all.

✍️ Writing & Language as a Daily Staple

14 weekly letters shared online.
9 handwritten letters.
4 writing circles led.
3 writing circles joined.
1 Dutch language café.
? words learned.
A goal of 1 Dutch word a day.
So about 100?
1 audiobook recorded in Almere.
100 days in Holland,
and still I write

🎨 Spirituality & Creativity as Seasoning

4 borrowed books from friends.
4 libraries visited.
2 masses attended. 1 Dutch Catholic. 1 English Mennonite.
2 yoga days. 1 Dutch. 1 English.
2 meditation courses. 1 Dutch. 1 English.
1 creativity accelerator experience
1 fiction and poetry course
1 Artist’s Way workbook
1 live marketing course
reiginting the zest
100 days in Holland,
and still I create.

🫂 A Serving of Connection

15 internet friend IRL meetups
2 random run-ins with friends from Thailand.
2 fashion show friends made in a dressing room.
1 Thai massage exchange in Tilberg.
1 castle visit
1 trip to London to meet more Internet friends.
1 Dutch writing friend met at a German castle.
1 publishing friend made at Almere’s train station.
1 cousin’s 5th birthday party.
1 American friend visiting.
1 trip to the Rijksmuseum.
1 walk through the Hortus Botanicus.
100 days in Holland,
and still I long find belonging.

Many joyous dancing days,
and lots of nights crying
Longing and
Missing Omi.
And as it becomes frigid
I will not alter to a white walker.
I shall thrift, and move,
And knit and layer,
and wrap my fingers ‘round steamy mugs
And write,
(of course.)

100 days in Holland,
and still I keep going.

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🎧Listening

Just Kids by Mat Kearney

Shoutout to for sharing her fun writing playlist in that helped me find this song:

Graceful

frequently asked questions about my debut novel + writing process

From the Words Like Silver archive, written late last year…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Grace Smith

🔍 Dutch word to define

oppepper

It means a boost, pick-me-up, or something that gives extra energy or motivation.

Example:

• A cup of coffee in the afternoon can be an oppepper.

• Getting encouraging feedback might also be an oppepper.

It’s used for both physical (energy) and mental (morale, mood) boosts.

🌟Quote to inspire

“Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.”

—René Descartes

📸Photos

Peppered throughout :)

🙏Shoutouts

• to for her feedback on my upcoming snailmail project :)

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

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P.S. #1 - I coach writers. I guide them to find their voice, build a writing rhythm, and have fun hitting “publish.” Let’s chat.

P.S. #2 - You’re invited. If a friend forwarded you this, welcome to the learn-it-all crew. Sign up here to get the next letter.

P.S. #3 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #4 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about what I’m learning lately on the internet and in Amsterdam in My Season of Saying Yes

Greetings from my first ever super duper snell fast ICE train in Germany somewhere between Düsseldorf and Hamburg. I’m embarking on a two week cycling holiday around the Baltic coast with Dutch friends I met last week.

Not much idea of where exactly we’ll go or how much we’ll cycle each day but I’m so excited to see how it unfolds. There’s been good omens all around with there being a train ticket last night, the bus driver making a special stop for me, buying my 2nd hand bike this morning and getting it repaired with fresh tires all within no time at all really.

And before I forget I want to express some gratitude to each of you for hopping along the crazy caravan of my curiosities I share each week. Happy halfway 2026! What a beautiful year it is unfolding to be. Sending love and big hugs to everyone here who has been a part of my year <3 <3 <3

I intend to write a little dollop’ll do ya1 on my journal pages reflecting on all the moments and experiences from the first half of 2026 that I want future me to remember.

Before I disappear from wifi, I want to celebrate June and all of its juiciness.

On recency bias

Here’s what’s funny about writing a month-end recap: my brain wants to weight the last week as if they’re the whole story. About a month ago I was genuinely dissatisfied and unsure the Dutch Dream was panning out the way with all my expectations. I started June out delirious with a stomach bug that felt somehow worse than the Thai belly I experienced a year ago? I’ll spare you the details but it was a whole lot of liquids coming from places liquids shouldn’t be. I remember standing barefoot outside my front door in the cold feeling like a volcano was erupting inside me. The barren souls of my feet on the cold pavement and I tilted my face up to the sky thinking “why me?”

Then all within two weeks time, beautiful things snowballed making life go so (almost too?) freaking fabulously.

Lately, it feels like there’s actually a natural flow of life and I don’t need to be so dang effortFUL to will my way into things happening. I’m actually getting better at this whole “unfolding” thing that Michael Singer told me about at his Temple of the Universe in Florida a few months ago. I share out invitations without expectation and then I also am open to accepting invitations.

With this mindset, lately, it feels like there’s actually some sort of divineness to this little thing we call life. And like everything did in fact happen for a reason. This outlook has been allowing me to notice beauty day after day and I’ve been feeling wholeheartedly happy. And I mean actually feeling it. This feeling that I used to be so uncomfortable with and thought I needed to earn.

And so, here’s a slew of eight events from recent days where it feels like the stars are feeling aligning…

1. My tent neighbor from the festival I went to invited me to cycle two weeks along the baltic sea. A DREAM I never knew I had until now

2. a colleague on my team agreed to cover my synchronous workshops (only a week in advance), so I could go on aforementioned dream cycling trip

3. asserted myself and landed a new client, I met randomly IRL at a Dutch easter mass for a totally new type of project

4. I discovered I could buy a €50 unlimited NL train pass, which now makes it seem like a no-brainer to go visit for a tante Jenny visit in the south and then go to a friend’s birthday party in the east in Nijmegen

5. Said yes to the invitation to co-create an offline club journaling circle to support the well-being of creatives in Amsterdam on a committee with 4 other ladies!!

6. a friend whose company I really enjoy, kissed me which delighted me with such surprise

7. the more I am vulnerable with shedding layers and allowing others to touch me, the more I feel a sense of belonging in this world.

8. sat in a zen center circle and a random person guessed that Mary Oliver was a muse of mine before I even recited her Summer Day poem in the circle

There’s something swirling in the hot hot city air of amsterdam that’s making my chest beat with more life than I knew possible. About a month ago, I was feeling so dissatisfied with life and my Dutch dream not going as planned It’s crazy how life can turn around so quick.

It’s tempting to let the good week overwrite the hard month or vice versa. Neither is the full picture. Both were true. And maybe that right there is the actual lesson. I can hold both versions without needing one to cancel the other out.

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What I wrote in June

This month I wrote my way through four things: why I keep saying yes, what my relationship to time is like, what it means to not know who I’m becoming since my values are in flux, and an invitation five years from my past self to continue to live courageously. If you missed any:

1. A done-list instead of a to-do list, salsa class nerves, and “why not?!” making fear feel smaller:

2. My first Amsterdam summer with no swim meets, no regattas, no shape imposed from outside and three tensions I’m still sitting in:

• On regret, Saturn returns, and heading offline for five days without answers:

• Five years to the day since I boarded a plane to Hawaii and blew up a life that looked good on paper but wasn’t true. This time the invitation goes to you: go blow up your life and live courageously:

Song of the month

Breakaway by Kelly Clarkson

Photo of the month

To all the beautiful humans that co-created this festival with me for five days. You gave me light in my darkness, music that felt like medicine through movement, listening ears, laughter and play, hugs to heal my tears, and open space to express my words and stories. Thank you To Gather. <3

What’s next

I’m about to be mostly offline for two weeks, cycling the Baltic coast. This is my own small “blow up your life” experiment, like from letter 320 is to be believed. When I’m back, I might try something: a soft retro on the first half of 2026. Rather than just a month, something that encompasses the journey’s arc from January to June. But also I might just write about the cycling caravan. Who knows what’ll be alive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Stay tuned.

Tot snel 🌺🌺

Jen

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Greetings from Middelburg. There’s been such a heat wave going on in the Netherlands. I traveled by train to the south on Friday for my first auntie visit, and it was near 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So like a sauna on the train. It’s been hard to breathe for me lately. Congestion fills my chest, and so, alas, I have been resting today. It feels illegal to be inside on a summer day. I’m still plugging along on this letter to find a bit of joy in my day by creating something, so here I am. And because today is a day that holds some significance.

So without further ado, here’s letter 320. Enjoy!

~~~

🖊️Writing

Five years ago today, on June 28, 2021, I stepped onto a plane that changed my life.

The destination? Hawaii.

It was a mere plane ticket. A three-month work contract. An accommodation. And a storage unit later. That’s all it took to begin this experiment for a new path. I never felt more terrified and completely alive before, especially while sprinting across LAX to make my connection.

Most everyone in my inner circle thought I was crazy.

On paper, my life looked good. Like really really good. I was making more money with my company than I had in management consulting. I was running the lakefront for a couple of days a week. Some of my swipes on Hinge turned into dates. I was maxing out my Roth IRA investments. My social calendar was full of boxes over the weekends. And I was even living in the beautiful city of Chicago, with affordable rent, with two roommates, near Oz park.

And yet, I still wasn’t satisfied.

My integrity was broken because my thoughts, my words, and my actions didn’t align.

But let me rewind.

I began 2021 feeling such a zest for life, believing anything was possible.

I felt like this year would redeem itself and turn around with this new fella by my side. We couldn’t stop exchanging stories. He was interesting in the way that made me lean forward, and the pit of questions never stopped. And somewhere in all those conversations, I realized, I was infatuated with the courageous and adventurous life he was living.

But then he dumped me via text with the kindest words, which made it even worse.

I remember walking the lakefront, letting tears freeze on my cheeks as I kept rereading these little letters lit up on my screen. The tips of my ears went numb. I didn’t mind that I could stop feeling. It felt better than mourning my imagined adventures we’d never experience. But underneath was something quieter and more honest: I wanted to actually live with adventure too.

A month later, I would turn 25. And in the meantime, I acted on one of my intentions: to pursue my first therapist. She helped me realize what I was so attracted to about this guy. She asked me what I valued in life. Adventure, I told her. Without hesitation.

Then she asked how that was showing up in my life right now.

I had no recent examples.

COVID had taken a lot. I knew that. But staring at my therapist over the Zoom room, I also knew that on my deathbed, that reason would leave me sour with regret. I was wearing an old skin that had belonged to society and someone else’s idea of a good life rather than my own that I wanted to create.

So on my 25th birthday in February, I made myself a promise: I would not sign another lease in the Midwest.

In April, I drew out a mind map of possibilities.

Then in June, I moved to Hawaii.

That one decision cracked everything open. Chicken skin rises when I zoom out and admire my past self with such gratitide. Her playfulness. Her patience to build community. Her honesty with herself. All the ecstatic highs from surfing at night to dancing in caves and the loneliness and the getting it wrong with near-death experiences. All of this enabled me to be exactly where I am today.

So this is my invitation: GO BLOW UP YOUR LIFE.

Test out an experiment and live in closer alignment with what you actually care about. Inspire future you of what’s possible. ♡

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❓Question to think about

What could you do today to inspire future you?

🎧Listening

The Water Poem by Ram Dass and AWARÉ

I came alive creatively moving as water would flow to this song at a dance night last weekend.

🗂️ From the Archives

The first letter I wrote after arriving in Hawaii in 2021:

The last letter I wrote after leaving Hawaii in 2024:

🌟Quote to Inspire

“Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749–1832) German writer, poet, playwright, and scientist

This quote emphasizes that good intentions is merely a starting point. According to Wolfgang von Goethe’s philosophy, it is only through decisive action and execution that understanding and willingness translate into real-world results.

(Note: While often attributed to Goethe in modern popular culture, this specific quote is actually a famous distillation of a principle originally written by martial artist and actor Bruce Lee)

🙏Shoutouts

• For those new friends I met at the To Gather festival in Germany last weekend, who have made me the happiest I’ve felt all year. More reflections to come on that experience still

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about self-evolution and not knowing future me

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I absolutely adored the app called “Vine”1 because it gave me a reason to be goofy and connected me with friends in real life. In 2015, I vividly remember getting filmed going into a cafe in Luxembourg that said “world’s best cup of coffee” to try to personify Will Ferrell2 from the movie Elf, congratulating the staff on their achievement. I got to express that online, but really, it allowed me to perform aliveness.

Flash forward about a decade later. I’m living in Hawaii after a quarter life crisis. I borrowed an orange-covered book from a friend of a friend in Chicago. This book was called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry3 by John Mark Comer. He elegantly sashayed the quote by Mary Oliver in there that “Attention is the beginning of devotion” and it rattled my bones as I journaled about my attention, and then therefore, my devotions. This lead me to took a year off from social media because I was devoting too much of my attention to platforms that felt mainly like I was trying to prove something. These platforms zapped me of my presence.

And then I read another book about The Power of Regret4 by Daniel Pink.

I realized that statistically speaking, I would be likely to regret my inactions in life rather than my actions. As the philosopher Seneca points out “we suffer more often in our imagination than reality “. And so I began to fear I would have too many regrets if I didn’t start taking action. And that I cared too often about how others perceived me.

What about how I perceive myself?

I used to think I wanted to live by minimizing regrets of the deathbed version of my future self. This would default me to saying yes to most invitations, crazy ideas, and dreams. But now I just don’t know. Is this decision-making framing really helping me? Is putting my attention onto potential regrets really how I want to live?

I’m not sure I know who my future self will be anymore. I recognize the evolutions of my being, which makes me unclear of what that next iteration will look like.

I’m also kind of in denial about the precious time in this one life goes so fast and then so slow and I want to do so much but I also want to slow down. It’s creating quite the conundrum for how I want to live. Like some sort of earthquake happening in slow motion without knowing where the rattling is coming from or how it started. It might be because I’m 30. And that the astrological event is happening where Saturn is passing its return to where it was when I was born. Or because I’m more isolated than usual in a new place with the sensation of a blank slate.

We as humans were blessed with big brains that know of our impending doom never coming out of life alive.

I grew up in a region of the world far enough from the equator that flowers would bloom only about half the year, leaves would change color reminding me of the decay of time, and the roads would get coated with white fluffy stuff that would turn to grey slush then ice. I thought that living somewhere with seasons again would be good for me. That my time anxiety would somehow melt away. That my sentimental tendencies around mourning the present moment would vanish.

But here we are.

I’m still left to my own devices.

I don’t think anybody can live this out but myself.

What I do know is that I want to keep trying new things. To create and express. I want to keep meeting new people. I don’t know if there will ever be a plane ride where I’ll sit down and not attempt at least a smile or make eye contact with the person next to me to spark up a chitchat. Because connection feels good. It feels right. Like we were born here to connect with each other.

And so I know how I like to live most of the time, though I’m hesitant about continuing to live solely by minimizing regrets.

A couple nights ago, I read on a Hinge bio that someone’s personal motto is: “I’d rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” I agree and I will continue to ask questions that cannot be answered like who is future me? How does she want me to live today? What does she value?

Today I’ve schlepped myself and bags to a bus to a train station and about to be in a car to set up a tent and touch some grass. Five days offline in the Dutch countryside with a bunch of friends I’ve yet to make. I’m going to stew and noodle over who future me is out there.

Until next week when I’m back online.

Keep on noodling,

Jen

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PS - I wrote about my relationship with time last week. If you liked reading this, you’d probably enjoy reading that letter too.

PPS - This note is so resonant for me. Wow.

Dear Summer,

Today, while walking about, I saw Dutch flags with backpacks hanging from them. The heavy bag that weighed each student down with books and made them feel like a turtle all through school can now be hung up victoriously. Each graduate feels free and light as a feather.

I stood there looking up and thought: that’s where I am too. I made it here to Amsterdam over two months ago. Except I’m not sure how to fill my freedom yet.

But I remember what constraints felt like.

Growing up in Michigan, summers had a shape. Swim team schedules. Sailing regattas. Family vacations. They had a particular dingy smell of damp, chlorinated towels in the mornings and a crunchy sound as my wheels rolled over fish flies. And I remember the particular freedom on the Fourth of July, plucking sweet pea flowers in the fields, hoping a tick wouldn’t find me and my sister. Then with my siblings and cousins, we’d jump off the dock with the dogs and stay outside until the fireworks started popping off and the fireflies started glowing. The black pavement would burn our footsies. We’d compare freckles as if they were a kind of currency. And when we’d change out of our swimsuits, we’d look at the contrast of how the cutout on the back of our one-pieces created that perfect oval of sun-browned skin. Just like a turtle tan.

Apart from the excitement of a bookmark of a grade, I remember the dread that filled me on the last day of school with the yellow slip for the summer reading list and the blue spiral-bound math workbook. I’d rather come back to school in September with bracelets up my arm. These little handmade things that became small acts of friendship to give away, rather than penciled-in pages of proof that I did the brainy work. I knew a summer well spent meant being outside, seizing the light of the sun.

What I loved about these summers was that I had a choice. What do I want to do? When? Who do I want to play with? Which pool? Which ice cream flavor?

Summer was the first place I learned that I got to decide. The constraints gave the freedom its shape. Without the swim meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays or regattas on Wednesdays, it just felt like time.

I’ve been wrestling with how I relate to you, Summer, and the time that is during this period. I used to put pressure on you as a kid to be the BEST of times to shine bright, making up for the darker, more depressing times to come during the rest of the year.

Usually, my existential spirals wait until the year-end or my birthday, but here we are at the start of summer. A built-in container. A season that used to be amorphous when I lived three years in Hawaii, and now you, Summer, have a shape again.

This is my 30th season with you. My first in Amsterdam. And for the first time since childhood, I have less constraints. No family holiday. No weddings to stand up in. No swim team schedule. No sailing regattas. No triathlons. Just the long nights full of light leading up to the solstice. Spaciousness. And somehow that’s the harder thing.

Before I turned 30 this year, I had a mission to squeeze the pulp out of life. I wanted an era of exploration. And that led to my wanderful chapter of nomading for 17 months. I wanted to run from stagnation and prove I was making the most of my twenties and society’s get-out-of-jail-free card. Saying HELL YES to anything and everything zesty. And I don’t regret any of it. In 2019, I was couchsurfing in New York City, interviewing curious career pivotters for my first book, “Being a Learn-it-all,” when I met Jesse Itzler. He’s a man who reverse-engineers his calendar and wills his way into every experience. He plays offense. I subscribed to that philosophy for a while. Honestly, up until now.

But I’m starting to notice something: I don’t want to be in a race of collecting bookmarks1 and then keep racing onwards. Do I really want to cram more jars of jam on the shelf and somehow think my life is more meaningful for it?

So here are three tensions I’m holding

(1) How can I be stable and also have space for spontaneity?
I want the anchor of routine, AND I also want to say yes to that spontaneous thing that appears on a Wednesday afternoon to go swimming in the sun that I couldn’t have planned. I want to slow down the perception of time with novelty2, but why can’t I enjoy what is not novel?

(2) How do I play offense and defense at the same time?
Non-negotiables on the calendar, AND leaving space for the natural forces to flow in?

And the hardest one…

(3) How do I live with intention and let go?
I am an intentional person. I make lists and mantras and master prompts. I like to do projects and always have a rough idea of how they align with my values, AND I also believe that the universe has a current, and that fighting against that flow is exhausting.

I don’t have clean answers to any of these. Not yet.

But what I’m noticing is a shift. I used to think adventure was the best, most immersive way for me to learn. Now, I see how I can travel by going deeper into the layers of the person sitting across from me. I used to think a life well lived meant minimizing future regrets and cramming in the experiences to fill my life resume. Now I’m wondering if the metric was wrong to begin with.

How can I find magic in the mundanities? Bliss in the boredom? Nuance without novelty?

I want to appreciate the insignificant moments, like a crispy toastie cheese sandwich, the white flowers wafting my way from my neighbor’s wall, the willows that make my eyes weep as I cycle the Singel gracht to Dutch class. These aren’t bookmarks. This was just a Monday. And I’m starting to think Monday might be enough.

But I’m also not ready to fully let go of ambition, of striving, of the call toward something more. I want to inspire the people around me by what’s possible. I want to make things with my hands. I want to feel my heart rate rise. I don’t want to stagnate in the name of presence.

So I’m torn. And I’m sitting with that.

Maybe time isn’t something to spend. It’s something to notice and be okay accepting as it flows by. This my human experience. This is it.

Do I need to shake up the snow globe that is my life? Or am I finally ready to set it down and watch the snow settle?

I don’t know yet. But I think, Summer of 2026, you might just be where I find out.

What does it mean to relish a life that’s finite?

That’s the question. The next letter is where I try to answer it.

Somewhere in the middle of it,

LJ

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❓Question to think about

Are you collecting bookmarks or actually living the pages?

📝 Noteworthy Notes

🗂️ From the Archives

Last January, I wrote about time as a gift rather than a limitation and that each moment offers a chance to notice, savor, and choose what matters most. I liked that I’d written it. I just hadn’t quite figured out how to live it yet.

🌟Quote to Inspire

“All we have to do is decide what to do with the time given to us.” — Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkein

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

📸Photos of the Week

🌟 Wins from my week

• Handwrite this letter every day for about 5 days and tinkered so much with it. Getting these thoughts out feels fabulous! I’m off to watch Devil Wear Prada 2 (finally).

• Got a 69% on my Dutch reading and writing exam, and I’m now moving into A2 by self studying this summer. I want to keep learning Dutch in fun ways outside of the classroom.

• Led my first workshop on using a Claude plugin to create AI-driven workflows for the Building a Second Brain community and found it useful!

• Went to my second Salsa social party and danced with lots of different leaders. Had a lot of fun!

🙏 Shoutouts

• to amany folks I talked about time with over the past days. I feel like such a weirdo

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about why I said Yes, before future me forgets the frivolities of May 2026

Subscribe now

🖊️Writing

I feel this tension between being courageous and honest while also craving to feel safe and preserved.

And then there’s also this other tension, that I want to see the glass half full and focus on the water there yet I still want to be *real* and honest about the parts that aren’t full.

So where does that leave me?

I write most of the time based on what I presume my future self would want to read. But I know she doesn’t want to just read the “what”. Most of those events are recorded in my calendar.

My future self wants to know the HOW. The WHY? The Thoughts after the fact. The FEELINGS. The WHO and the somebodies that might become nobodies, since my mind is a machine with forgetting as part of its infrastructure.

My future self wants to remember that ~cinnamon sky~ from a couple of nights ago while strolling at sunset. About sharing stories of my happy high times while simultaneously making new ones. She wants to remember speed walking home in the heavy rain with a soggy Dell cardboard box.

And so, per usual, in this week’s letter, I am writing about what the heck happened in May AND I am adding some depth.

When I share little bullets and nuggets of my month I’m playing it safe. Covering the bases and trying to hit a home run in home swing out of the park but what about lingering at each one for a while? I’ve been at this writing thing pretty “seriously” for over six years, devoted each weeks and I fear about not getting better. About regression. Or digression?

Of why I said yes. I want to preserve that thinking because the way I make decisions and my motivations will shift in the future. I want to capture the change. To notice it and see it for what it is.

So here are three things from May I’m going deeper on.

On Salsa

My month started out with signing up for an eight-week Level 1 Salsa class.

Hold the phone. Yes you read that right. I moved to the land of the Dutchies and am learning a partner dance that originated in Cuba. Huh? What the heck?

Why?

Well, that day when I got overstimulated celebrating King Willem’s birthday, I met a bunch of salsa teachers, and they were so fun! The energy was something I hadn’t felt in a while so I followed that. It also helped that I received it as a complimentary gift. And I just moved to Amsterdam two months ago, knowing only one person, so I want, and honestly need to make friends. It’s also nice to have some play and movement on my calendar.

On day one, I walked in. Solo foot work felt like a piece of cake. Then we partnered up. A follower came up to me, and I felt like my eleven-year-old self in sixth grade who took ballroom dancing class. The fear of repulsing my partner with my slimy squids as we made a connection to start dancing came back to me like it was yesterday. I got over it with speed realizing that my partner had a sweat band. I was somehow sweating less than him.

That first lesson felt scary and uplifting at the same time. Everyone in the room was a beginner. We were all finding the beat together, listening for the calls, slowly synchronizing our feet and when to open up with the “cumbia step” and slowly getting better. That’s the whole reason I said yes.

What Salsa is teaching me is how to be more confident in a new form of connection. That first weekend in May, I cycled to a salsa party with just one 90-minute lesson under my belt. It was at a bar. It's been years since my last time at a bar at night. First time going to a bar solo in a while too, but I knew Zey from class would be there. I brought my earplugs and left my phone and wallet at home. All I brought was a sticky note with the directions in the pocket of my leather jacket. After two hours of stimulation and a range of styles across eight partners, I was glad I showed up and was kapoot. Excited for my next salsa party.

What’s next for Salsa? I am showing up. I am excited to keep going into the summer and making some friends to have fun connecting with through dance. I’m tentatively taking Level Two.

On Dutch Language Class

One of my regrets from my 2017 study abroad in Amsterdam was that I was never diligent in my efforts to learn Dutch. Sure I loved my teacher Bonny. I liked my classmates. But when push came to shove, the only time I ever spoke Dutch was at the pub with a greenie in hand. And I never challenged myself to learn new questions on my own time.

I’m changing that around this time. when I received a raving referral to Taalhuis my first week here in Amsterdam, I signed up days later for my A1.2 course. I learned some things in this class…

What I didn’t like: The loudest student in my Dutch class, we’ll call her Felicity from Turkey, who would never let my brain process the question before she’d blurt out the answer. I didn’t appreciate her condescending look at me while partnered up and doing the " “geen versus niet" exercises together, or how she’d refuse to sing along for the “head, shoulders, knees and toes” song. Something else was how Izzy was a perfectionit with grammar and how Welma from South Africa had zero imagination and would need to look up Every Single Dutch Word on her phone in the middle of class. I prefer to just take a guess, move on, and revisit it again.

What I liked: How docent Johannes would be playful and laugh at Dutch when it wouldn’t make sense, and never fret if I’d start speaking French instead of my intended Dutch. I loved befriending Sam from Seattle, who has been learning Dutch with her two children by watching cartoons with them at night. And Mike from Britain says he always appreciates the questions I ask in class about pronunciation and how to better understand word placement in sentences. I really like the memory games, images of interviewing a peer about their house, and real estate house-buying dialogue, and the open question-and-answer portion of class for open dialogue and bring the illogical, random parts of the lessons to the surface.

What Dutch class actually taught me was less about the language and more about how I learn and who I want to be in a room where I don’t know the answer. It taught me that I want to have fun. I want to learn how to speak and listen, rather than read and write, or fixate on grammar. I want to be okay with feeling dumb. And be okay using the little Dutch I know when I’m speaking to test my recall. I don’t want to brute-force it because I know I will quit before making much progress at all. Dutch is a long-term game for me.

What’s next for Dutch? I’m pushing pause on the next A2 class. I work inside on a computer, so this summer I want to see how self-studying goes. I intend to sandwich my evening journaling with noting down a new word I learn each day and asking Dutch questions each time I am with a Dutch person. The plan is to presume A2 class in the fall.

On picnicking in Vondelpark

I met an Australian Dutch fella at an offline scrapbooking event in mid-May. We bonded over both of our grandmothers being from the Netherlands and fleeing from the country after the war. He wrote his phone number on a napkin and invited me to his afternoon birthday picnic in two Saturdays.

When Saturday came, I rolled up with nerves high, only knowing him. He introduced me to the other American there who loves acting and the European lifestyle. Then I chatted with an Icelander who eats stingray soup on December 23rd each year, and an Italian obsessed with Harry Potter and bike mechanics, and the rest of the folks were from Australia. I had never been in the minority around so many Australians. It was such a hoot.

We each took photos in a beach hat, and played frisbee with it. My feet got super duper muddy. We danced to ABBA and Come on Eileen. Some of my favorite karaoke songs. I felt like I was dancing with some of the people I miss the most through their favorite music. We ate some cake, sang some songs, shared some stories, drank some €7 coconuts, attempted some cartwheels, and exchanged laughs aplenty. It was one of my most fun summery days yet. And then biked home.

How blessed am I to be here for a whole Dutch summer?

I showed up knowing I had nothing to lose and could always leave early, but ended up staying late.

What I want to take away from May is the question: “Why not?!” It makes the fear seem smaller. And honestly, most of the best things this month started with exactly that.

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❓Question to think about

What do you want to remember from May 2026?

If you missed over the past months I wrote about:

Woo weee okay now into the rest of this letter…. :-)

~~~

🎧Listening

Miracle Love by Matt Corby

Because I’ve been going down rabbit holes of Australian musicians ever since realizing I had no idea that Vance Joy and Tame Impala were Australian.

And we were grown on the same round little blue dot
Although the answers will take their time and the spinning won't stop
So could it be that the nightmare is upon us
And heavy hearts can't decide when they've had enough
So they're burning out cold?

🔍 Dutch Word to define

Kennismaken

a Dutch verb that means “to meet someone for the first time” or “to make someone’s acquaintance”. It is commonly used when you are introduced to a new person or when becoming familiar with a new concept or place. (source)

The word is a combination of two parts:

• Kennis: meaning “knowledge” or “acquaintance”

• Maken: meaning “to make” or “to do”

🗂️ From the Archives

In 2025

Written from Vietnam

A year ago, the month of May in Thailand looked much different…

“Summary of sicknesses my body overcame in May: dengue virus, food poisoning, bed bugs. Grateful every day for my body feeling like it used to.”

In 2021

written from Chicago

“I ended up walking about 5+ miles everyday because I enjoyed it so much. I found calls throughout my day that I didn’t have to be sitting down for. It went so well that I even ran my longest run yet of the year on Sunday adding up to a 10K.”

🌟Quote to Inspire

“Spend more time smiling than frowning and more time praising than criticizing.” — Richard Branson

📸Photos of the Month

• a photography workshop, an intimate listening party of Abby Simone, my roommates cycling together, one of the many “blauwe regen” (wysteria) flowers blooming, me at the open mic for the first time, a puddle of scrapbookers at an Offline event, my first time making appel panenkoken with cinnamon, my new fave cafe, and another Jen journaling.

🙏Shoutouts

• to my friend Emily, who left today for Tahiti to sail back to Hawaii this month. Many prayers are traversing over to the South Pacific that this voyage goes smoothly and she has a lot of fun living our dream out!

• to my new journaling friend who’s featured in the last photo as we are high on life from our decaf lattes and delicious rhubarb macaroon pastries

• to for sharing in this piece about naming her fears and becoming more conscious of them. I resonate with the fear that wanting more makes me appear ungrateful or selfish.

• to my friend Dion who created such a unique video from the birthday picnic

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

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P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote a permission slip for us this summer to follow the fun!!

P.S. #3 - A vignette about the picnic:

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❓Question to think about

How has life felt fun?

Captured this on my sunset stroll last night while watching these girls have so much fun. The energy was infectious.

🖊️Writing

Last Friday, after publishing Dear Screens, I went offline for my “Mindful May ritual”. A container I’ve created the past four years to go inward. I thought I’d take a train up to an island called Terschelling, where my tante Adri was born, but the seven accommodations I reached out to fell through. It’s odd how good I am getting at reading rejections in all languages. And now in Dutch I know “helaas” is not a fun word to read.

So instead, I realized what my spirit really needed, apart from chunks of mindful moments in silence, was two mere intentions: an ocean dip and a forest bath.

On Saturday, when I woke up, I ate a big breakfast with an uitsmijter, or eggs on an open-faced cheese sandwich. Then I packed some snacks from the Jumbo and was off on my adventure due west to the sea. I felt like Captain Jack Sparrow using my signs as a compass to determine which way was west after I cycled through Westerpark.

When I got to the beach, I opened the letter I wrote to myself on a plane from Florida to Michigan over two months ago. It’s something that I serendipitously found while rummaging through letters in my desk. This discovery was a delight and felt like Christmas Eve. On the back of the letter, I left a list of eleven questions for my future self to answer.

The tenth question was: “How has life felt fun?”

I sat there, lounging back, sand in my toes at Bloemendaal aan Zee for a few moments. I heard a young Vietnamese boy balling after licking his chocolate ball of ice cream off his cone, a dad doing circle with a soccer ball around his diapered daughter, anklebiter dogs panting with passion with their tongues hanging to the side, another diaperless daughter hanging from her dad’s forearm like an orangutan.

No “fun things” jumped to my mind. I felt absentminded. I had to really think about it. Why wasn’t something coming to me quicker? I noticed self-judgment in this moment: Why am I not having more fun?

I feel like when something feels implicitly fun, and I follow that, I’m more likely to keep going. Whereas the things I “should” do quietly burn me out, like how I felt like I had to pursue a muckety-muck career with my finance degree. When the choice feels robbed, so does the fun. In order to have fun, we need to feel free. And that’s the other thing, we also need to feel. To not be in our heads and get into our bodies and actually USE the five senses we are gifted.

Having fun isn’t something that can be planned cerebrally. Even when planning a party, it can be easy to get caught up in all the frontal-lobed things, of sending invites, cleaning, preparing food. And then I could forget the whole point of why I’m even doing this thing on the weekend.

And I recognize that having fun requires spaciousness. It’s an energy that needs to be coaxed out and invited to play. It’s not something that is usually forced,

Even a weekend full of good things can tip into obligation when the calendar gets too packed. Fun needs room to breathe. I wrote in Dear Baby Jen in a Bucket that,” The saying goes, “Sink or swim,” but what about floating along and following the fun?

Fun can take many shapes and forms, like mispronouncing Dutch words (graag) or holding my salsa partner’s hand with too floppy of a spaghetti arm so they can’t lead me properly, or getting a little bit lost cycling to the beach and befriending someone to ask “waar is de strand naar Haarlem?”

I believe that our attention is like the aperture of the camera of our life. We can choose to focus on certain things in the frame and blur out others. And now I am choosing to focus the aperture of my life on the fun things.

It’s fun to have fun.

Here are 30 ways I’ve witnessed fun lately:

1. Listening to a favorite playlist while biking to a playdate

2. Writing in a different color pen

3. Gifting a new friend a poem to make them smile

4. Making a new dish with a new type of cheese

5. Wearing braids in a bandana, feeling like Rosie the Riveter

6. Brewing a bubbly bath

7. Telling stories while gluing scraps on paper

8. Squealing while jumping into the river

9. Making animal sounds in a sauna

10. Interviewing a new classmate in Dutch about their autobiographie

11. Messing up the bread slicer at the Lidl grocery store and laughing with a stranger

12. Humming to the “I want to be in America” song from West Side Story while cycling home from Salsa

13. Collapsing off a wall while bouldering

14. Cracking each other’s backs

15. A photoshoot laying in flowers

16. A silly hat that gets passed around a party

17. Pompom earrings that feel like recess on a summer day

18. Making sun tea on the terrace

19. A scoop of pistachio ice cream melting down your cone

20. A doggy in a bike bucket excited to adventure

21. Beach towels drying in the sun

22. Creating an anklet your wear with your fave colors

23. Pancakes baked with apple and a pinch of cinnamon

24. Adding to a leftover meal with whatever smorgasbord is in the veggie bowl

25. Stalking the neighborhood’s newly hatched mama swan’s goslings

26. A photography workshop and then a photoshoot at golden hour

27. Throwing a playful pup’s rubber chicken to fetch

28. Bopping to Dancing Queen while cycling the canals to Bible Study

29. Watching the wild house cats out on the streets at dusk looking for some ruckus

30. Indulging in frites with new friends

The fun stuff is usually a delight and a surprise. Sure, I can plan to write, and that feels fun, but when you schedule fun, sometimes the scheduling takes the fun out of it.

Usually, the best fun sneaks in as an attack on an ordinary day, and it’s up to us to notice it and see it as fun.

Keep following the fun!!

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Your turn

Gameify your life and see how it can be more fun because why not?!

30 ideas by your truly (while skipping down the street :)

1. Do a grapevine in the middle of a run

2. Wander around a bookstore or thrift store for treasure, like old books

3. Run in the rain and see how alive it feels

4. Look up the history of a word, or how to say it in a new language

5. Open up to a random page of a book and see what resonates

6. See how many words you can get to rhyme with your favorite word (don’t choose orange b/c it’ll be a short list)

7. Do a cannonball into the water and see how big a splash you can make

8. Wear the cheetah glasses that make you feel a little extra

9. Buy a variation of a food on your grocery list like goat cheese

10. See if you remember how to make a fishtail or a five-strand braid

11. Tie a bowline knot behind your back in the dark

12. Take a bath in the dark or with a cool light or candle

13. Eat food with your eyes closed

14. See how many planes or birds you can count in the sky

15. Play eye spy while people watching and see who is wearing a color you fancy

16. Compliment the person next to you at the cafe on their effortless chic outfit

17. Buy some silly socks

18. Trim your lavender plant and put the dried flowers into a sachet in your sock drawer

19. See how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop

20. Invent your own song when you forget the words to the song you were singing

21. Wrap your arms around a tree with your toes on the ground and breathe

22. Chat with the birds

23. Whip your hair back and forth like you just don’t care

24. Play a new card game like “ball sack” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

25. Buy some chalk and express yourself on the streets

26. Explore a new artist and listen to their first album, then their last one

27. Buy some boba tea and play with the tapioca texture

28. Ask a friend for their favorite movie and watch it and let them know your honest review

29. Curate a playlist of music that makes you smile and just wanna jiggle :)

30. See how stark a watch tan you can make on your wrist

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📖 Reading

From When To Do What You Love written by Paul Graham, the essayist, entrepreneur and co-founder of Y-Combinator:

“The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like. For example, it’s clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn’t just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.“

🗂️ From the Archives

In Letter 179 I wrote: “I tend to struggle with being mediocre at things or doing them just for fun — I end up taking sports too seriously. But I think with volleyball, I’m ready to go from a dabbler to an intermediate. Why not? Maybe it will become more fun.”

In Letter 71, I noted that longevity in work comes from “feeling like you are in power of your work and actively participating in the choice to have it,” rather than being coerced by an environment that undercuts your well-being.

🔍Word to define

Fun (n.)

Before it meant delight or play, fun was a low thing. Around 1700, it meant a cheat, a trick, a hoax — a close cousin to the Middle English fonnen, to befool. Samuel Johnson, that great arbiter of proper English, called it “a low cant word” and wanted nothing to do with it. It took nearly a century for fun to shed its disreputable origins and mean something closer to what we mean now: diversion, amusement, mirthful sport.

I love that Fun had to fight for its respectability. That it started as something a little suspicious, a little subversive. That the serious people didn’t trust it.

Maybe they still don’t. Maybe that’s the point.

(source: etymologyonline)

🇳🇱 Dutch Word

Plezier (n.) — fun, pleasure, enjoyment

The Dutch use this one constantly. Veel plezier! (Have lots of fun!) is what someone calls after you as you head out the door. It’s warm and generous, the verbal equivalent of a send-off wave.

What I find interesting is that plezier comes from the French plaisir, to please, which goes all the way back to the Latin placere, to be agreeable, to give satisfaction. Fun, in Dutch, has its roots in a fundamentally relational pleasure. Something that pleases. Something shared.

My Calvinist ancestors, with their one hot meal and their single offered cookie, probably kept their plezier close to the chest. I like to think I’m expanding the family tradition.

🌟Quote to Inspire

“The most mature human beings are also childlike. That is not as contradictory as it sounds. The most mature people are the ones who can have the most fun. They are able to regress at will; they can become childish and play with children and be close to them. It is no accident, I think, that children generally tend to like them and get along with them. Involuntary regression is of course a very dangerous thing; but voluntary regression seems to be characteristic of very healthy people.”

— Abraham Maslow, psychologist on maturity, Source: Emotional Blocks to Creativity (found via James Clear via Dylan O’Sullivan)

📸Photos of the Week

shared above :)

🙏Shoutouts

• To my Aunt Lindy for creating a song to my poem that I published a couple of weeks ago, “The Silly Goose Lands”. It’s quite catchy and you might find yourself humming to it. I am glad it sounds like it was a fun little project for her. Listen here.

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.P.S. - Here’s what you missed. Last week, I wrote about my on-again, off-again love affair with screens

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📜🖋 Poetry Corner

Dear Screens

Dear Screens,
Sometimes I want to 
smash you to smithereens.

I’ve interacted with you 
since my teens
Always in the back pocket
Of my jeans
Or up on a table as
a part of my work routines.

Dear Screens,
You’re not what I want
When I think of my dreams

Each time I’m staring at you 
You kink my neck down,
Your lit-up glass
Sucks my soul.

You trick me to believe 
This is leisure
But really 
You are in the ether. 

Dear screens,
In today’s world
You’re more essential
Then eating my greens

Because of you
Eye contact feels awkward
Because of you
My attempts at connection 
With strangers on the street 
Are too discreet.


Because of you
Being bored is bad
And so,
It is never had.

Because of you
My well-being wilts
With too much stimulation 
And too little deep sleep.

Because of you
I am too cerebral
With less sun on my skin,
Less time as an animal,
And not enough with my kin.

Because of you 
My retinas are rotting,
And my attention span 
Is flocking.

Dear Screens,
With videocalls
My relationships still have glue,
With your music
I feel less blue,
And in a foreign city
you translate my way through.

And so,
I won't smash you to smithereens.
I'll pick you up again
Another day.

But not today,
Not this weekend.

Happily offline,
Jen

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🌟Quote to Inspire

“You must not ever stop being whimsical.” — Mary Oliver

Listening

Because of You by Kelly Clarkson

I will not make the same mistakes that you did
I will not let myself ‘cause my heart so much misery
I will not break the way you did
You fell so hard
I’ve learned the hard way, to never let it get that far

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side, so I don’t get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid

🙏 Shoutouts

• to and her music that moved me at her set a few nights ago, and is inspiring me to think about how I could release a mini project as an “EP” of my writing

• To Abby Simone whose listening party at a cozy bookstore in Haarlem last weekend got me thinking about the chapters of my own life

• To for hosting yet another fabulous event, this time hosted by another gem of a human named Jennifer centered around scraps and stories in journals

• To Ed at a café where I treated myself to a coffee

• to the stories at Mezrab on what we notice about our bodies. What a welcoming and warm place this is. I am excited to try my hand at storytelling here someday.

• To pen and paper that helped me create the first draft of this letter

📸Photos of the Week

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

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P.S. #1 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote a poem on anticipation six weeks into a Dutch dream called “The silly goose lands”

P.S. #2 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

📜🖋 Poetry Corner

The silly goose lands

Much anticipation 
for this relocation. 

Like a silly goose 
she flew and flapped, 
without her flock, 
Out of energy, 
following an instinct, 
a mere idea, 
hoping it be a sort of 
Panacea —
a cure-all,
with much anticipation. 

Maybe too much anticipation?
Her past self 
set expectation to 
be stuck in a state of elation. 

She romanticized it 
with rose-colored glasses. 
A house on a canal
Near a cafe
And seamlessness
to make gal pals.

Much anticipation 
for this Dutch dream, 
a decade in the making. 
Maybe the elusive bar 
went up too far?

Now,
she's faced with logic, 
a dream rubbed against reality, 
Cycling in soaking wet socks.

Her migration,
Six weeks in. 
In the land of her ancestors. 
Though her friends 
still feel thin 
and Days are dim, 
But even being here 
is still a win. 

When will I ever feel 
like I can surrender 
And loosen my grip?

Sometimes,
I want to gulp a chill pill,
Or not pay the bill.
I want to let loose
And get my fill 
of smelly cheese & frikandel

And yet I am like steam.
 
Floating up above 
a gezellig bubble bath 
in a state of in-between — 
between my arrival, 
and settling into a life, 
Into a rhythm, 
Into a place with any familiar face.

So what does that mean? 
What is stirring?

I say yes 
More than no.

I reach out
even with 
much doubt. 

I smile, 
And 
Do not pout. 

And I think about how 
Omi would be proud,
and she would be so loud 
Clapping and cheering 
And admiring my courage
For the life I lead.
Inspired by her. 

And so, 
I waddle on, 
And
I build my life 
With warmth
With an open heart
an open mind
an open spirit
with a tinge less anticipation 

For now,
I smile 
And hope
to stay awhile.

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📸Photos of the Week

🙏shoutouts

• to prompt of ancticipation at the for inspiring this poem that I wrote a first draft of on a train from Leiden last week

• For my new friends I made last night that I read this poem to thet laughed and were delighted by my words and gave me an oomph of courage to share these words here :)

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about:

Subscribe now

It’s been ten days since I last wrote you about being overprikkeld. Ever since, my writing has been falling out onto my morning pages like the Niagara, and yet choosing what to share has felt like its own project. Too much and not enough at once.

This feeling isn’t anything all that new. I wrote in December 2025 from The month I almost skipped that:

“I do these recaps every month, and they’ve become a cage of my own creation. When something starts as a ritual and then slides into a routine, on an off-day, it can turn into a chore. An obligation you forgot why the heck your past self signed up for.”

So I’m getting off my high horse and writing about what’s simply alive for me right now.

I’ve been trying out what it’s like to risk getting a little lost by leaving my phone at home. What’s that look like?

Last night, I wrote my directions down to a salsa party on a sticky note I stuck into the pocket of my leather jacket.

Then this morning, I cycled 19 minutes to church. I took a left at the light, a right down the Singelgracht. My go-to canal. Then another right, then left at the second bridge across the Amstel River, and then a left after I cycled past the bloemenmarkt (flower market), and rang my bell at two touristic women that I almost hit. Once there, the only seats available were in the front, so everyone witnessed my sweaty six-minute tardy arrival. I sang some songs. Thought about Jesus and what love means. Voiced some prayers for the happiness and health and love of my mother on this holiday today.

And then after the service, I exchanged pleasantries with Carl, a tall Canadian historian, the dad of two daughters from Winnipeg, Canada.

Carl asked me, “What brought you here to Amsterdam from Michigan?”

I told him, “It was just a mere idea from a spiritual stirring and curiosity about where my family is from that turned into a dream.”

I underplayed it. I took that mere idea super duper seriously. I didn’t want it to float by like a cloud in the sky only to swoosh back seventy years later on my deathbed as an idea I never acted on.

Most of my blood relatives live outside Detroit, Michigan. But then the majority of my paternal family lives in the Netherlands, but they weren’t present in my upbringing, living on the other side of the pond. So instead, I grew up with my maternal Polish family eating pierogies at parties and singing “Happy Birthday” in Polish. The Dutch side of my family that I carry in my last name is largely unexplored, except for the decor in my parents’ home with Dutch tins that I ate Honeynut Cheerios out of every morning, and all the stories my dad shared of Opa drawing him goats. And especially my Omi, who idolized cows, cycling, flowers, and cheese. Since her passing, coming back to the Netherlands feels like I’m continuing a conversation I wish I'd had with her.

Carl didn’t ask me, but we were standing in the Mennonite church, and I felt safe in this spiritual space sharing the somethings that are usually nothings. So, I went on to share how I felt more curious about the world and how much of this journey of my life has been a path driven by curiosity to experience life and connect with it in ways I never could if I stayed where I was comfortably born in Michigan.

Before we parted ways, Carl told me that he admired my curiosity and wished more of the world would be curious.

And I am lucky enough to live in a time in the world like today, where this type of path is accessible. Where such an imaginative idea can actually walk on legs when rubbed against reality. Where I can go and send videos of my face talking to people to land a job to make money remotely and to then befriend people through the Internet on a platform that calls itself a book of friends to find an abode to live in. And finally, that I can get a piece of plastic with what looks like a mugshot on it that deems me legal as an immigrant to live on their lands as long as I follow the laws and wire money to their Belastingdienst (tax authorities) every three months.

My lifetime of a mere ninety or so years is a small spec in comparison to the size of the universe. It is significantly insignificant. But if any of it makes someone a little more curious, a little more warm, a little less alone, I’ll take that as worth my while.

So without further ado, here's what that curiosity has been up to in its first month back in Amsterdam…

Becoming a fietser (biker)

It feels like the ultimate slap in the face to the modern technology world to live within a society that moves around their days with an invention from over two hundred years ago.

When I bike on my black 100 euro rusty-wheeled single-speed back-break machine, I actually feel like I’m going places. It forces me to get to know the city quicker and to enjoy getting lost. I feel like my quads have gotten much stronger these past few weeks as well. When I have a meetup that’s far away, like a friend making me panenkoeken (pancakes) that’s 10 kilometers away, I see the to-and-from as my form of sports for the day.

Sure, I show up a bit damp where my appendages meet and with fly-aways fully living their best life. And of course the grass I’m allergic to is blooming, and the wind hits my face in just the right way to provide contact solution I never asked for. But that’s all part of the experience.

I feel a sense of belonging in this society when I sit at a red light among the hordes of Dutchies. From boys biking to field hockey practice to the dad who encourages his daughter to put her hands out like a soaring eagle and the fellow cradling a carton of eggs and loaf of bread without a bag.

There’s something about being on a bike here, moving over the centuries-old cobblestones that makes me feel like I belong. Like I’m fluent in a city before speaking a word of its language. For a moment, I’m not a newcomer, not a “buitenlander” (foreigner) on a visa, just someone moving alongside everyone else.

Learning the Dutch Language

Thanks to nudges from my dad asking me constantly how my Dutch is going, I’ve signed up for an intro course, despite balling on a budget with this sticker shock, city-life transition, and euros.

Since I took a beginner class nine years ago in university, I’ve signed up for level A1.2. and feel in over my head. Every time I start raising my hand to tell docent Johannes “ik heb een vraag” (I have a question), I then usually have an instinct to say “Qu’est-ce que” + French numbers since I still know more French than Dutch after about twelve years of French lessons.

If anything, when I meet another Dutch person out in the wild, speaking a bit of Dutch is a nice way to start up a conversation even if just for a few exchanges. The dynamic is then usually more about what I’m learning instead of what I do or how cloudy the weather is that day.

Diving into City Life + Openness of People + Meetups

Five days into living here and then saw there was a Generalists meetup on Luma. I was too intrigued not to go. That meetup led to the referral by a Romanian woman of the Dutch school I’m studying at, and a feeling of being less alone in all the hobbies that I want to collect.

Honestly, I thought the ship sailed on my desire for city-life since living in Chicago after COVID, but I couldn’t be wronger. I’ve dusted off my extraverted social skills and feel like a golden retriever with her tongue hanging out excited to connect with anyone my path crosses.

There have definitely been lonely nights. And then I think back to what my dad, raised me by the expression of, “to have a friend you need to be a friend. Who were you friends to? Who did you invite to play with you?” If the answer was no one, then he’d usher my way to the cabinet above the oven to get the phonebook out and start dialing up classmates to see whose house I could bike over to and play with.

I don’t have any trips planned and my future being like blank slate feels so exhilarating. The last time I lived here I was gone every weekend and this time around I’m so pumped to soak in the life here. I am so grateful that I get to be here every day and travel through the people I meet and the stories they speak.

Joining the Offline Club

I use Google Maps to get to the door and then my phone goes on flight mode and into the phone hotel for the rest of the night. That’s the deal. The Offline Club is exactly what it sounds like: events around the city for people who have made a quiet decision about their relationship to their screens. Dinners, potlucks, reading evenings. The room filters through the city to the types of people I want to connect with and the conversations I want to be a part of.

Phones permeate everything now. Places, conversations, even pillow talk. It’s rare to find a space that screens haven’t crept into. I noticed it especially after Thailand, where I experience temples and meditation retreats and watched phones follow people even there too. Something about choosing to have intention time away together creates a different kind of presence.

I love being in that room.

Blooming Beauties all around me

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here we are:

Better Boundaries with Claude and Technology

It’s been two months settline into my new role leading customer success and community at Forte Labs and the AI Second Brain live cohort just closed out. I’ve had to get honest about my relationship with these tools. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, I’ve been using AI on and off in its free versions, but this past month I officially committed to Claude for the year. And I’m genuinely excited about what’s possible when AI is used with intention.

But I’m also paying attention to the edges. I want guardrails so my first brain doesn’t quietly disintegrate into a marshmallow. What’s helped is noticing that when I’m out in Amsterdam, people aren’t on their phones the way I expected. They’re just out. Moving through the city. I’m trying to do the same. Not reaching for Claude when I’m away from my desk. Not filling every walk with a playlist. Letting there be some silence between me and the city while I’m still getting to know it. Setting a time to start screens in the morning and a time to stop at night, and trying to mean it.

I’m learning that “I don’t know” is a complete sentence — which, for someone facilitating workshops on tools she learned about a month prior, is a necessary one. And I’m noticing the impatience that creeps in after a conversation with something that answers everything instantly. That feeling is worth paying attention to. Not all of life needs that kind of speed.

What’s next in May?

I’ve joined salsa classes and perhaps I’ll learn how to be a follower and loosen my grip on life just a little bit more. I’m tracking some small things in my journal: moving my body, learning Dutch words, eating vegetables like they aren’t an afterthought. Maybe I make a new friend.

Carl asked me what brought me here. A mere idea, I told him. May feels like the month I stop being a tourist in that idea and start actually settling into it with kindness and with care.

In case you missed it in April, here were my other letters:

Some micro-moments of joy from April:

• My golden lepeltjes (small spoons) that I stir my coffee with

• Putting my eye mask on at night + passing out

• Gifting letters

• Runs along the river

• Kringloopwinkel (flea market) treasure finds

• Jumping into 14 degrees Celsius and then submerging all the way under in a hot bath after and nudling about it

• Creating my Smiling as community service :-) playlist

• My pillows on my bed feeling cozy

❓Question to think about

What are you excited about for May?

Greetings from Amsterdam, Netherlands! If what you’ve read could be useful to someone you know, I invite to share this letter 313 with a friend. :)

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🎧Listening

🌟Quotes to Inspire

“An essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”
— Edwin H. Land (1909 - 1991), an American scientist and inventor, was best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation

And this one too, found via Polina here because it’s too good not to share:

IF I HAD MY LIFE TO LIVE OVER

I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.

—Nadine Stair, 85 years old, Louisville, Kentucky

📸Photos of the month

🙏Shoutouts

• To for inviting me to her Amsterdive open mic a few nights ago. It’s sparked some poetry I can share in the upcoming weeks

• to for her encouragement to get this out

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

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P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Some notes I shared this week:

My new friend’s eyes met mine. My eyes scanned over to the door. He understood immediately and nodded. After some farewell hugs, we exited the party.

I left without apologizing for it.

Let’s rewind.

It’s Koningsdag in the Netherlands.

Nine years ago, as a study abroad student, I celebrated this holiday of the King’s birthday on a boat with a bunch of friends I’d met in class. Whenever I felt tired or socially awkward, I’d grab a greenie. Overprikkeld? Drink something. Numb it and never notice my body’s signal of sensory overload. I wanted the full experience. To be in the swarm of orange and boats, and Heineken was how I got there.

Alcohol was how I made friends. How I became courageous. How I stayed in the crowd past the point my body was asking to leave. But things are different now.

This August marks four years without alcohol.

So before heading to a friend of a friend’s Koningsdag party, I bought a beaded bandanna because I saw some other Dutch girls who looked suave and cool wearing them in Sarphatipark. And then I ran through a grocery list of bullets in my brain that I could talk about with new people, like what I learned in week one of my Dutch course, or where I live in the city, or that I celebrated this holiday nine years ago. Expecting to be the only person there not taking advantage of the open bar, not using the tried-and-true shortcut to quick connection and social lubrication.

To my surprise, I found a sober buddy. Someone else abstaining from the booze and debauchery, while still wanting to participate and be present for the holiday. Already, something in my system settled when I saw them sitting on the windowsill at the edge of the party, taking a break.

And then I hopped on the back of a bike for the next house party. I danced my butt off. The DJ’s bass on Prinsengracht vibrated through me, signaling time for my earplugs. The fog machine smelled funky and made me unsure if I had lost a contact. And my €8 bandana became disheveled and extra floppy after hair-flipping and dropping it low in the middle of the dance floor. I invited peers in the water-closet line to a casual dance-off to pass the time. After my bladder emptied, I saw all the blotto bodies in the room and felt an immediate urge to flee.

I used to think stamina meant staying in the swarm no matter what.

That leaving early was a weakness, and needing the quiet or fresh air was lame. But the more I notice my system, the more I understand that knowing when I’ve hit my limit is resilience. Earplugs in, dancing anyway, then recognizing the moment I’m at maximum and vocalizing it is a harder kind of strength. The people pleaser in me wants to keep going even though it’s already been seven hours in a sea of stimulation.

When I finally voiced my limit with ik ben overprikkeld, my new friend didn’t miss a beat.

While walking down the least crowded streets, we eventually landed on a fluorescently lit FEBO fast food joint for frites. In line, I pulled him in, and we hugged. My heartbeat slowed, tension in my jaw eased, and my breath finally reached my belly. The sounds of the street simmered down.

The prikkels faded. I felt found.

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Hello fellow learn-it-all 👋

Greetings from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Now, let’s dive into the rest of letter 312 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

❓Question to think about

How do I like to actively rest and regulate after being overstimulated?

🔍Word to define

Dutch: Overprikkeld

Ex: Jen is overprikkeld en moet rusten.

English: Overstimulated

Ex: Jen is overstimulated and needs to rest.

A state of being overwhelmed due to excessive sensory input, information, or activity, where the brain or nervous system can no longer properly process the input.

(1) 🎬 Watching

Overstimulation and how that works

(Overprikkeling en hoe dat werkt)

I really love this image that shows how we only have so much of a battery to use up in a day before we need to recharge.

(2) 🎬 Watching

The Dutch are overstimulated, a plea for ‘active relaxation’: ‘Different from physical fatigue’

(Nederlanders zijn overprikkeld, een pleidooi voor ‘actieve ontspanning’: ‘Anders dan fysieke vermoeidheid’.)

It was surprising to hear about how most people come home from a long day and turn on a series, but that doens’t actually relieve mental fatigue and can create more.

🎧Listening

black & white by Chelsea Cutler and Jeremy Zucker

Layin' down next to me
Couple miles out of Tennessee
Empty-handed, but I got you
Haven't been doin' well
Nothin' makes me feel like myself
Nothing comes as close as you do

🌟Quote to Inspire

“Fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm fearsome, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. They leave that wisdom to those to whom it appeals. When the storm comes — when night falls — what’s worse: the danger or the fear of danger? Give me reality, the danger itself.”

— Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo, from The Hague, May 16, 1882

📸Photos of the Week

That first photo is of me nine years ago as a student, celebrating King’s Day.

🙏Shoutouts

• To , , , and for their thoughts on drafts of this piece

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about what a Dutch grammar lesson taught me about making meaning in life

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After I took my seat among the seven other students, the April sun came through the tall glass windows and warmed my back. My docent Johannes wrote something on the whiteboard in royal blue marker that stopped me. Three columns. Adjectief. Comparatief. Superlatief. Day two of leve A1.2 class, and we were already learning how to compare.

I looked down at my notebook. Goed. Beter. Het best. Good. Better. Best. It made me think back to French class when I was eight or so and learned bon, meilleur, le meilleur. And then, at the bottom of the page, a sentence that made the whole thing click: Amsterdam is duurder dan den Haag. Amsterdam is more expensive than The Hague.

Dan. Than. It’s one small word in combination with the “der” at the end of the adjective, and it’s doing heavy work.

No committee invented this. No singular genius sat down and decided that every human language would need a way to bridge two things through the comparatief. It just emerged. This is something our species uses across continents, across centuries, across people who will never meet because the human brain requires it.

I don’t experience warm. I experience that today is warmer than yesterday.

I don’t know I am tall. I know I am taller than my sister, shorter than my brother.

I understand things through relationship. Language knew this before I could even articulate it.

The morning after that class, I made breakfast and found a question on my tea bag: Wat maakt jou uniek? What makes you unique?

I thought about what my dad always says. He thinks I’m the most unique person he knows. And I love him for it. But his comparison set is smaller than mine now. It can’t include the Irishman I met while I lived in a Hawaii hostel who was traveling the world paycheck to paycheck, pushing himself as far as he could go from Canada to the Galapagos to Cape Town. It can’t include the hostel in Koh Phangan, full of indefinite digital nomads who made my seven months of slow travel around northern Thailand look like a long weekend trip. It can’t include the members of the Building a Second Brain community I work in, who nerd out more than me about note-taking before I even make my afternoon tea.

I used to think of shunning comparisons entirely.

That it was a thief and a trap. But Johannes’s whiteboard shifted something.

Comparison isn’t the thief of joy. When used incorrectly, it can shrink me. But at its core, it’s my brain doing what it was always going to do: making meaning.

It is building bridges to form relationships between things. Between what is big and small, cheap and expensive, normal and interesting.

So nowadays, I am extra grateful for the comparatief. I don’t know how my brain would communicate without it.

It’s the shortest distance between two ideas.

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Hello fellow learn-it-all 👋 Greetings from Amsterdam. I hope you enjoyed letter 311 from a learn-it-all. I’m going to be experimenting with the layout. Open to your thoughts and hope you enjoyed learning some little nuggets of dutch in your day, even though you probably had no yearning to ever before.

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - I coach writers. I guide them to build a writing routine and have fun hitting “publish.” Let’s chat.

P.S. #3 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote:

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Greetings from Amsterdam. I’m sitting on a park bench in Oosterpark watching the Dutch ducks waddle and wiggle their green bums and the stark black meerkoots chase each other on top of the water, the chase that takes place of furthering their species. I count the seconds the cormorant holds her breath while fishing underwater. The sun feels soft and warm on my skin.

I feel a flow state of ease after spilling my guts over a big mug of cappuccino with my friend in a jazzy cafe. I finally feel ready to type up this draft without the allure of the internet or the aid of tools like Claude or Grammarly. This letters feels a bit confessional. Feel free to unsub at the bottom of this email if you’re looking for perfection in your inbox, because that’s not this publication. I refrained from using the aforementioned tools to produce this letter apart from my little ol’ faulty walnut.

Now, let’s dive into letter 310 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

~~~

I want to give myself permission to be more human.

What does that mean?

To be more imperfect. To be messy. To not make sense.

I’ll start with these:

After buying a €11 USB stick from the Hema, waiting nine days, and walking back to the local film store to pick up the digital files that I paid €28 for, I received these film photos. So, in total, I paid €39 (or ~ $46).

But the highest cost wasn’t the euros but the frustration that glared back at me once I realized the captured frames were among the worst photos I’d ever taken.

Why?

Because somehow my finger was in over a third of the frame of these special moments I captured. Having a film camera is such a romantic feeling until realizing that for three months I’ve been capturing special moments in New York City, Michigan, and Florida, and without knowing my finger was over the lens.

I’m not sure the next time I’ll be in South Florida and see a tall white egret with skinny little stick legs. Or will be walking down a beach with my cousin Matthew and sister. Or meditate at the temple of the Universe with Michael Singer. Or see snowbanks on the streets of Manhattan. Or watch a girl mosey down the beach with her nose in a book.

But here are all my flaws for all the world1 to see:

I am such a dweeb. My photography teacher who showed me how to use a film camera and develop it 13 years ago in high school, might be insulted by my digression as a photographer. Ms. Zoufal would retract the A she gave me.

But I can’t cover it up. I am imperfect and flawed.

Usually, I try to let go of my flaws. That would include these awful shots I took, but instead, I’m highlighting them. There’s something about this film roll and how these one-hit wonders are forcing me to look at my relationship with myself being so serious all the time, (besides the point of my hobby’s most expensive film development). Producing this camera roll is something an AI tool would never create for me.

SoMeThInG tHaT fEeLs PlAyFuL LiKe TyPiNg In A pLaYfUl MaNnEr ThAt MiGhT gEt LoSt.

The scarcity of the shots on the film makes it feel special, and yet, I usually cancel these buggers before they ever leave the floppy disc onto my computer.

But I don’t want to lose the play. I don’t want to forget about the flaws. What is learning without flaws and some big ol’ belly flops?

Now onto a ~meta theme~ with shame that’s stirring in my spirit:

Lately, these letters haven’t been flowing.

Be it the pressure of my success of my Dutch dream materializing, or my new job that requires more screentime, or feeling like a slight failure that I’ve been planting seeds every doggon week for six years online risking embarrassment and someday expecting that all these seeds would transform from some lively tulip patch full of color and life into a niche big strong oak tree that this publication is known for. But what these letters are, really, is mere snippets that bring delight to my days through creations that feel worth remembering.

Usually, I push away the flaws by spraying pesticides on the weeds that sprout from the seeds in my garden of ideas. I’d scorch them while they’re still too ugly, like these film shots with my finger in the frame.

But weeds can be kinda pretty too, right?

In third grade, Pilar, Luiza, and me rued the day when the lawnmower would plow down the dandelions in the school yards each week, because then we wouldn’t have any flowers to play with and weave into our braids at recess.

Are the weeds really all that bad? What makes a weed a weed anyway?

So I’m granting myself permission to share weeds. Albeit, even the shots with my finger covering the frame. Not all the time. But hopefully this letter will remind future me that it can be valuable to share even the blemished, boring, and bland bits.

Because that’s what being human is all about.

And this writing isn’t some short game I’m playing for fame.

And because that high bar I set for myself is bogus.

And I want to stop feeling like I’m a mouse stuck in a trap chasing cheese, where striving for excellence no longer feels fun.

Because life’s too short not to have fun.

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🎧Listening

Some atmospheric folk music for your eardrums. This fresh rendition drop is inspired by news of David Roback’s death in 2020, the founding member of the alternative rock band Mazzy Star, who first recorded the song in 1993:

Fade Into You by Gregory Alan Isakov and Sylvan Esso

Fade Into You original by Mazzy Star:

🔍Word to define

Human

Ten highlights pulled from Wikipedia (with some JV notes as sub-bullets):

1. Homo sapiens means “thinking man” or “wise man”

   1. Ah yes we have thoughts. The amount of self-proclaimed “overthinkers” is ever-growing

2. Curiosity is hardwired into humanity. It’s what drove the development of science, philosophy, religion, and art

   • Beautiful.

3. Humans are the most widespread primate on Earth

   • Pulse check on the population of our sepcies from this World Population Density Map in 2020 (link)

4. Have a uniquely large prefrontal cortex — the seat of higher thinking, imagination, and self-awareness

   1. Sometimes a gift and sometimes a curse to be a brainiac instead of being as happy as a clam with a walnut brain like a cat.

5. Humans are one of the only species capable of introspection and forming views on their own existence

   1. I can’t imagine being me without introspection

6. Language, art, and trade are considered defining human characteristics

7. Long-distance trade routes may have sparked cultural explosions that gave humans an edge over similar species

   1. who knew culture and something as practical as trade would give our species an edge!?!

8. Humans are highly social and tend to organise into complex, overlapping groups thorugh families, communities, states

9. We’ve been cooking food with fire since Homo erectus — one of our oldest technologies

   1. damn I love fire, perhaps it’s time to become a pyromaniac again with bonfire season this summer?)

10. Childbirth is genuinely dangerous for humans compared to most mammals, and our babies are helpless at birth longer than almost any other species

    • God warned Eve after the Fall from picking the garden’s forbidden apple in Genesis 3:16: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth; in pain you shall bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

🌟Quote to Inspire

“If you are looking for a friend who is faultless, you will be friendless.” — Rumi

🎞️ Some Less Flawed Film

from Jan- March 2026

🙏Shoutouts

• to for being the friend who gave me some courage to share a messier, more human piece of writing

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I coach writers. I guide them to build a writing practice and have fun hitting “publish.” Let’s chat.

P.S. #2 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #3 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about the marvels of March.

Subscribe now

And finally, the note that inspired this letter:

❓Question to think about

What the heck happened in March?

🖊️Writing

Dear March,

Did we really do all of that?

You were a marvel, and also, a little mad. The kind of month where you look back and genuinely can’t believe it all fit inside 31 days.

You remind me of Novelty November in Chiang Rai, 17 months ago: a new job, a new home, new weekend rituals. Except this time the elephants have been replaced by Amsterdam canals and blossoming trees I don’t yet know the names of.

What happened

I started the month on a beach in Florida with my sister Steph. No agenda, no performance, just the two gals decompressing like we did five years ago in Florida. We walked 10K steps, watched Wuthering Heights, and I ugly-cried watching the snippet of Mister Bean (our hero) make his sandwich on a park bench with sardines.

A New Job

On March 4th I started at Forte Labs as the Customer Success and Community Manager. In the day to day, I communicate with curious learners and set them uo for success. I am grateful to be in this sliver of the Internet, especially after follow the founder, Tiago Forte, back in 2019 when I took his live course to start organizing my notes for my first book better. Back in 2022, I was rejected from a similar role. I wrote about it in my 2022 annual review. That rejection lived with me. This time, I got in. (This video cover letter helped.)

A New Mickey Singer Mindset

From South Florida I drove north to Alachua to meet the author and spiritual leader Michael Singer. It was the longest I’d meditated in a while. community and environment does wonders to my practive. A Cava brunch with inspiring people, conversations that made me feel less alone in the universe. Some of the words he spoke that are sticking with me are:

• Mantras:

  • “I can handle this.”

  • “Brush yourself off and boogie on”

• I cannot control other people’s behavior, so I must learn to let go and be okay anyways.

• The past will never change, and if I want to be free, then I need to start with being okay with the past.

• A human life is significantly insignificant, and each person is not really here for that long, only 80 or 90 years inthe history of the universe. So ask yourself “can I be okay with my life?”

• Spiritual is about honoring and respecting reality as it unfolds.

A Renewed Practice of Connection

On March 24th, I attended an anti-networking event in Miami led by and . This was a reminder that the best connections don’t come from working a room or asking “what do you do?”.

Then: Amsterdam.

I reached out, and the door finally opened.

On March 29, I moved to Oost (east Amsterdam), got two new roommates, and signed a housing contract longer than one month. This is the longest contract I’ve signed since the one I signed while living in Chicago in the summer of 2019. Reaching out is what made this happen.

I landed this housing opportunity after over 55 rejections from creating this video to stand out against the flurry of messages also competing for housing in the shortage in the Netherlands.

My 2026 Q1 Reflection

Q1 asked me to be uncomfortable in a specific way: to ask for things. Housing. Opportunities. Connection. It felt needy. But needing things turned out to be clarifying, and it made my mission obvious. Six months of rejections, and here I am: a new job, a new city, a new home. I willed my way into this. And now, for the first time in a long time, I get to just... arrive and settle and see what unfolds from here.

What I published this month

• Finds from February

• How The Little Mermaid wired me

• Snippets from my Wanderful Chapter

• On six years of weekly publishing online

• Making it to Amsterdam

• My audiobook to early buyers with this little video

What I’m learning

Currently active:

• ’s mastermind called Reach Out Party which is like a group hug wtih cheerleader chats that gives me the nudges to send scary emails to people we admire whose orbits we want to be in. And also to feel brave about sharing let downs of rejections.

• ’s Divine Moments course (and the meditations recordings I have to catch up on)

Up next:

• Tiago Forté’s AI Second Brain live cohort course.

• in-person Dutch language classes at Taal School in the Pijp

My March Watchlist (and some notes)

• Ex Machina

  • Really made me wonder about how robots with consciousness probably don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart with their intelligence.

• Wuthering Heights

• Project Hail Mary

  • The best movie I’ve watched this year. Rocky and Grace friendship are goals. I also just have a big crush on Ryan Gosling after my first taste of virality as a young adult was when I saw him in Starbucks on a week day in 2013 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan ad tweeted about and made the local news.

• Her

  • “I think anybody who falls in love is a freak. It’s a crazy thing to do. It’s kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.” — from the main character’s best non-OS human friend Amy, played by Amy Adams

  • Theodore’s girlfriend operating system curates his letters and gets it publihsed under the title "letters from your life" meanwhile I published a book of "letters to my life". I feel less original now, but I didn’t have an OS curate mine.

• Mulan

• The Little Mermaid which inspired my writing of:

• Spy Kids 3D:Game-Over (for being a 2003 movie the special effects are surprisingly good)

• The Chronicles of Narnia (surprised myself that I still have it memorized)

• Dr. No (James Bond first movie in 1962)

• From Russia with Love (1963)

• My Old Ass (I love how this movie make me think more about how my present and future self would converese between each other.)

The mantra I’m carrying into April

“Brush yourself off and boogie on.” — Michael Singer

📖Reading

The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer

I listened to the first part of this book on audio before arriving to Florida and then finished the second half of while driving five hours across Florida to hear from the author speak (and sing) his philosophies himself.

This book shares that journey with you so that you can experience what happened when someone dared to let go and trust the flow of life.
Let it be claer from teh start, however, that this type of surrender does not mean livign life wihtou the assertion of will. My story of these forty years is simply the story of what happened when the assertion of will was guided by whatt life was doing instead of what I wanted it to be doing. (6)

And here’s a picture of me and the author Mickey Singer with his new release of a book that I bought and still am chipping away at reading, though I’ve started rereading the Surrender Experiment

🌟Quote to inspire

“The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

— Naval Ravikant, investor and philosopher

📸Photos of the Month

🙏Shoutouts

• to my cousin Matthew and the deep talks we shared as roommates, the yoga sessions, the movie nights. Fun times I’m fond of!

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - Still sitting on that draft? I coach writers through the resistance and all the way to publish. Let’s talk.

P.S. #2 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

Subscribe now

Greetings from Amsterdam!! Typing that has still has not gotten old. It’s been six days since I made it! Today it my first Saturday of 2026 in the Netherlands and I’ve been feeling the allure of past behaviors to be a go-go girl who does everthing all at once. But not this time. I am trying to teach myself not to rush. That finding a desk or bedside table isn’t as urgent and important as my mind makes it out to be. And besides, it helps that i have a gnarly blister that makes movement more challenging.

Now, let’s dive into letter 309 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

~~~

❓Question to think about

What the heck is a sacred day and why would I care about it?

🖊️Writing

Today is April 4th. I was waiting for an epiphany that never came. Instead, night after night, I found myself marveling at the full flower moon up above. And honestly? That felt like enough.

You’d think after six years of publishing week after week, the blank page would stop being scary. Wrongo. It still is. Alas, here I am anyway.

I like anniversaries because they demand reflection. They show a journey. They create a trigger to pause, look back, and recognize that those connecting dots were a significant part of what got me here.

An anniversary is about choosing which dates hold more weight. But how does one know which days those are?

Sometimes you don’t choose. Sometimes they choose you.

An anniversary doesn’t have to be romantic or grand. It just has to be a date worth returning to. My first one was the day I was born, though I had no say in that. Grief gave me my second. Intention gives me the rest.

April 1, 2006

I was ten years old on spring break in Florida when my Polish grandpa Dziadzia passed away. I didn’t know what “pass away” meant. I definitely didn’t know what a “hard attack” was, but I was smart enough to know it wasn’t good. All the prayers from me, my siblings and cousins nestled into a pullout bed didn’t work. But what I did know was that I could go to the page and write it out. Confused, unfiltered, honest. I didn’t know then that I had just begun something.

April 1, 2019

Thirteen years later, same date. I decided to journal every single day. This was not because inspiration struck, but because I was telling people I was writing a book and felt like a complete impostor without a daily practice to back it up. I chose the practice before I felt ready for it.

March 30, 2020

I hit publish on my first Substack letter a week into COVID, with no plan and no audience. My book Be a Learn-it-all never got finished so instead I pivoted it and spun off a title as Letters from a learn-it-all to serve the same function of actively documenting what I learn as a student of life. WhenI hit that publish button, I jumped like a lemming off a cliff on the last day of a writing program called Write of Passage cohort four. I didn’t notice until years later how close that date was to the others.

These sacred dates were quietly choosing me. Now I’m paying attention on purpose.

And what I notice is this: I’m less scared than I used to be. What hasn’t changed is that this, the writing, the showing up, the noticing, has always been feeling-based rather than logic-driven. And that’s okay. Most of the rest of my life requires me to be frontal-lobey. Writing doesn’t.

Which sacred dates have already chosen you? And which ones are you ready to claim?

Share

~~~

6️⃣ Six Years of Showing Up

If you’re interested to learn about my relationship to writing and some notable letters, here’s a paper trail from over the past six years:

2020

• Letter #1 from a Learn-it-all

• Ship It Daily Goal. This 100 day project of publishing culminated in over 100,000 words online in 2020 and finally giving me the confidence to identify publicly as a writer and to start charging money to clients for my work.

2021

• 25 Lessons from 25 Years. My first time sharing about my birthday in this format, which made me feel viral after being featured on Matt D’Avella’s newsletter leading to a spike with 22 new readers

• 🎂 Letter 52 from a learn-it-all: What I’ve learned from one year of publishing

• The Art of Journaling presented as a capstone at OnDeck’s Learning Conference: A one-hour workshop from 2021 I gave on to guide discovering the benefits of creating and experimenting with your journaling practice to improve your well being.

2022

• 💯 Letter 100: 15 Lessons from 100 Weeks of Writing Online — What have you learned from writing online?

• 📱Letter 103: Friendzoning Your Phone. How can I have a better relationship with my phone?

• 😈 Letter 110: The Temptation of Thought. Pondering freedom from the prison we build within our thoughts, Lake Street Drive, George Saunders

• 🏝 Letter 116: Unknowing Myself. My first year in Hawai’i, aloha ke akua, anxiety, mistakes, So Far Sounds, gratitude

• 🚶‍♀️Letter 132: My 12 Hour Walk. Learning to get less lost, patience, epiphanies and taking off pressure to figure ‘it’ out

• 🙉 Letter 137: My Letter to Expectations. Stop shoulding on yourself & my sister visiting

2023

• 🎉 Three Lessons from Three Years of Writing. Letter 152: Writing reflections, Matt Corby, Biking

• 🏄🏻‍♀️ Why the heck do I surf?? Letter 161: a surfing rant, my monthly reflection & my first reggae concert

• 📲 Breaking Free: A Journey to Intentional Living Without Social Media (Letter 180)

• ❤️ Passion is for People. Letter 184: People love you back. Things don’t.

2024

Letters to My Life Book Launch on Amazon —> lead to my work being a bestseller

• 💌 Five Years in Pages: A Love Letter to My Journals: Chronicles of Growth, Reflection, and Discovery

• 🖋️ 200 Weeks Later: Reflecting on My Writing Journey. Discover how a weekly newsletter can transform your world like it did mine.

• 🫂 Friendship means to Forgive: To have you, my friend, feels vital to live.

• ✨ 🦄 I Practice Magic & It Works! ✨ 🦄: How my journal manifested my desire (Letter 206)

• 🌱 Essence Over Excess: Too many things limit how I can be. I don’t need these things. (Letter 202)

• 🔍 Finding Certainty in Uncertainty: From panic to peace on plane bathrooms

• 💔 Feeling Heartache from Leaving Hawaii (Letter 224)

• 🌱 Growing into my Identity as a Writer: Four years of writing later… (Letter 203)

2025

• 🇹🇭 100 Lessons from 100 Days in Thailand: A Crash Course in Thai Culture, Traveling, and Teaching English

• 🥳 Still Writing, Five Years Later: What I’ve learned, what’s kept me going, and why I still show up (letter 255)

• ✨ Learn Out Loud: Writing coaching launch to support you to show up, stay consistent & have fun

• How to Start Writing: Spice up how you show up with a 6–5–4–3–2–1 menu of tips

• The month I almost skipped And why I didn’t

• What’s the Five Year Plan? A love-hate letter to planners for the rest of us still figuring it out

2026

• The most consistent thing in my life: Celebrating 300 weeks of showing up(!)

• Dear Younger Me: What I’d tell fifteen-year-old Jen on friendship, love, and taking the winding road

• On what it means to be interesting and the question of whether newness is the point

🎤 Recording

I found this video that I filmed five years ago today. Looking back on the journey is wild. I mention in it my new habit of journaling for 15 minutes a day. I had no idea back then what I was just beginning.

Crazy that I never shared what my speech was about. I was so fixated on how I was evaluated, versus how the experience was. I’m pretty sure the talk was about my journey of learning how to learn.

📜🖋 Poetry Corner

From my birthday Bloom poem I wrote when I turned 28. These stanzas have been holding weight for me lately as I see flower sprouting around me:

How blessed am I?
Salt on my skin
Brine in my brows
Cake in the kitchen
Serenades of Sto Lat
Friends having fun.

Was this all in my fate?
Sometimes I feel like I am late.
I remind myself,
I am just on time
Just like this rhyme.

All of this gratitude,
feels like a platitude:
Timing is timing.

I am twenty eight
and I am feeling great!

To read the whole poem Birthday Bloom.

🎧Listening

Dive (Acoustic) by Olivia Dean

It isn′t working I’m a tidal wave of question marks And you′re just surfing Leaning into me like it’s an art

What I like about this song is that it’s not about falling in love with someone else, but about the rarer kind of love where patience is necessary to make you feel safe and secure enough to relax and love yourself and dive in anyway.

🌟Quote to inspire

📸Photos of the Week

🇳🇱 Some Dutch Updates

Wasn’t sure where to add this in so plopping it here.

Some hiccups from week 1:

• Albert Heijn closed early for Aaster and I had no idea and ate a very barren dinner

• I forgot a hairtie and my hair fluffed into a poof and kept going in my face. Never doing that again.

• When I eat too many tomatoes on an empty stomach I will get heart burn and need to sprint to the store to buy Rennie

• That swapfiets bike rental isn’t as good of a deal as it sounds with the extra fees in the beginning.

• When water boils over it sets the electric stove off like a mad man and I need to stop letting that happen

Some wins from week 1:

• built some furniture from Ikea successfully!

• met a girl at a generalist meetup who recommended a dutch language school

• Spoke Dutch 5 of the days. “Eeva denke”. Going up to neighbors while parking their bikes. Shrugging solidarity about broken bridges. Asking my roommates to repeat themselves. Tea bags I’m translating.

• Roommate is loaning me her winter coat because I didn’t have room for mine.

• Noticing the tulips and daffodils sprout gives me joy

• Wandering accidentally into Oosterpark

• Meeting in-person at a cute cafe with my coworker Julia and being in a sofa chair

🙏Shoutouts

• To my new roommates for being chill and helping me settle in to making this new home feel like a home

Share

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote a letter from Amsterdam on making the most of the toilet paper roll of time 🧻

P.S. #13- I coach writers. I guide them to build a writing routine and have fun hitting “publish.” Let’s chat.

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❓Question to think about

Why are you moving yet again?!

🖊️Writing

March 29, 2026

Written on a red-eye, somewhere over the Atlantic

It’s 3:51am. I can’t sleep.

I’m somewhere between Detroit and Amsterdam, between who I was and where I’m going, sitting next to a jittery German with a Diet Coke and a tapping foot, which feels about right.

My sister dropped me off at the airport last night. During that drive she melted away much of my fear that I’m crazy for moving again.

On my last night in my childhood room full of clothing piles, my mom came to hug me and said, “Okay, goodnight my adventuresome daughter. I don’t know how you do this.”

I responded, without thinking: “I don’t know how not to do this.”

That surprised me. But it’s true. I cannot fathom not moving through the world in this way. With curiosity out front, asking: why don’t we do more of the things we’re curious about? Life is short.

I’m a Maximizer. It’s my top Gallup strength. I’m wired to take something good and make it greater, to squeeze the pulp out of everything, including this one life I’ve been given.

But here’s what the StrengthsFinder report also says, and what I’m only just beginning to sit with: Maximizers tend to evaluate rather than celebrate.

There’s always a gap between where I am and where I could be. Always another housing listing to refresh, another project to refine, another version of the life that might be better than this one.

So let me do something I don’t do enough of. Let me celebrate!

The day I passed my last final exam in June of 2019, I jumped into the Amstel and planted a seed: come back someday and actually live here. Nine years have passed. After a five-month experiment last year bopping around as a professional pet sitter, I decided I wanted to return. And so the journey started.

I received over fifty housing rejections before finding my room in Amsterdam. (that leaves out undocumented ones). Fifty-plus times someone said no, or went quiet, or chose someone else. Fifty-plus times, I kept going anyway. And now I have a house key. A room. Roommates named Ace and Anna.

I made it. I actually made it.

A few weeks ago, I listened to Michael Singer’s Surrender Experiment and traveled to north Florida to hear him speak at the Temple of the Universe. I keep turning something over. He shared about how with goals, there’s always a next thing. Perpetual forward motion and achieving. The hamster wheel never stops itself. You have to choose to step off.

I’ve been on that wheel for seventeen months across my Wanderful Chapter in Thailand, the Netherlands, Michigan. And now I have three suitcases, one 47 pounds, one 44, one 35 (full of books, obviously). A chapter that gave me everything and also wore me down in ways I’m only now naming.

The transience of housesitting does something to you. Living in other people’s spaces, never fully unpacking, always moving on. My body started asking for something the Maximizer in me kept delaying: stay long enough to actually feel it.

And so here’s the tension I’m carrying onto this plane, the one I want to hold honestly rather than resolve too quickly: I want to carpe the heck out of this diem. And I’m also tired of squeezing. Both things are true. The Maximizer and the body that needs to rest. The woman who can’t imagine not doing this, and the woman who is learning, slowly and imperfectly, that presence might be the most maximized thing of all.

Let me get mathy for a moment…

because numbers help me feel things. When I was 21, I lived in Amsterdam for 5 months.

5 ÷ 252 months = 1.9% of my life so far.

Last year, at age 29, I lived in the Netherlands again for 5 months.

5 ÷ 312 months = 1.6% of my life so far.

Same five months. Smaller fraction.

No wonder time feels like a roll of toilet paper. The more you use, the quicker it goes. The denominator keeps growing but the numerator stays the same. Each passing year becomes a smaller fraction of the whole. Decades compress into what feel like months.

Time isn’t actually speeding up. Only our perception of it is.

Each outer layer of the roll moves faster than the last. The more life we live, the faster it all seems to slip.

My family’s cat Hummer has arthritis and bad hips. Paisley, the Christmas puppy we got when I was a senior in high school, is going deaf. I don’t live by the Pacific Ocean surrounded by kindness in Hawaii anymore. Omi has been gone 6.5 years and I still grieve her and wish she could encourage me from down here on earth. Saltwater keeps streaming down my face. Not because I’m sad, exactly, but because life is so freaking short and I don’t want to miss any of it, including the parts that are already behind me.

If I had unlimited time, like those immortal vampires in Twilight, maybe these moments wouldn’t feel so special and sweet. Maybe I wouldn’t write letters like I do. Maybe the roll of toilet paper being finite is the whole point.

~~~

While Singer spoke about goals he also offered an image that’s glued into my mind. For centuries, humanity assumed the universe revolved around us, and we built entire systems of belief around that assumption, until the scientific revolution. Galileo didn’t just upset the church. He upset the whole story people have been telling themselves.

Singer’s point is that expecting the external world to conform to my internal vision, goals, dreams, and carefully constructed life plan, is the same category of error. It’s not that dreams are bad. It’s that building your life around willing them into reality puts you at the center of a universe that doesn’t actually revolve around you. And there’s a strange relief in that that I am trying to actualize.

I’m letting it in. Slowly. On an overnight plane with not one red-eye, but two. And with three suitcases I’ve zipped my possessions into.

So here’s where I’m landing: I want to keep going. And I want to stop evaluating long enough to feel how far I’ve come.

I don’t know what this chapter holds. I’m scared it might be a flop (whatever that even means). But I won’t know until I try, and I’d rather fail at trying than die without ever knowing. What I do know is that I’m stepping off the hamster wheel. Not forever, not completely, but enough to look around. Enough to say: over fifty rejections and I’m here. That counts. That is worth celebrating.

The time keeps ticking. The only other option is it stops, and that’s not what I want.

So I’ll keep rolling, just a little more slowly, a little more on purpose, a little more awake to what’s unfolding right here.

And right now, what’s here is this: I’m walking down a cobblestone road in East Amsterdam, a little dog sniffing at the tuffs of grass in the street under me, wind kissing my skin, marveling at canal houses with ginormous glossy glass windows and walls of bookcases inside. I think my Omi would be proud.

See you from Amsterdam.

Share

🌟Quote to inspire

“Our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney

📸Boomerang of the Week

Pulled from the Instagram archives.

🙏Shoutouts

• To who nudged me to share these thoughts above because indeed life is short and we could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

P.S. #1 - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.

P.S. #2 - Here’s what you missed. Last week I wrote about my Wanderful Chapter.

P.S. #3 - This was the news I wanted to share three weeks ago :-D

Subscribe now