I made it!

A letter from Amsterdam on making the most of the toilet paper roll of time 🧻

Hello fellow learn-it-all 👋 Greetings from Amsterdam in the Netherlands!! My original plan was to make part two of the past chapter of my life I’m calling my Wanderful Chapter, but since the present feels alive, it would be a dis-service to not write about that. Now, let’s dive into letter 308 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!

❓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.

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

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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 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