Part 4 of 4 · About Me
I wake up and my solar plexus feels like a clenched fist. Fucking hell. How did I end up here? What happened?
I get up, walk barefoot the two meters to my kitchen and make a coffee. Look out at the fog over the Santa Clara lake. It’s January 2018, in southern Portugal.
The last four days I drove from Hamburg to Portugal, after my twenty-year relationship had ended.
Deep inside me, underneath the clenched fist, I feel something that keeps me from turning the fist into an action. Into fighting. Into drinking. Into destroying. Not this time. This time you really let go, Dirk. It feels like the big lake I’m looking at.
I haven’t had a glass of wine in four days. I have 3000 euros left in my account. I don’t know how this goes on. But I know I’m alive, and in a place I love.
I sit down at my table, hold my coffee mug in my hand, and the tears come.
I put the empty mug back on the table, put on my shoes and go out. The air is fresh. It smells of eucalyptus and sauna. I breathe in deep and start walking.
“Why haven’t you learned anything from your mistakes,” I hear in my head. “Why have you ended up here again?”
I start thinking. I don’t know. It isn’t the first capitulation. There were others. At 19, at 24. And now this one.
I look at the path ahead of me. Hear my steps. Enjoy the quiet and the wide view over these hills.
“You fucked it up,” I hear myself say. “Royally.” Again.
The sentences are like stings. And even though I can feel the fist they are stinging into, this time I let them stand and don’t fight them. I just feel how much it hurts.
Good that I’m walking. Good that I can move. The movement and the surroundings give me strength and room not to fight the thoughts.
Beyond the next climb, the fist has loosened noticeably.
“I have never really taken a long time alone,” I think. “Always straight into the next story. Relationships, jobs, ideologies.”
“Why isn’t insight enough?” I ask myself.
Walking down the hill, the question comes up: how did the breakdowns begin? Is there a connection? Can I see a pattern?
The first breakdown, clearly: release the tension. Escape. Numbing. Then dependency.
The second time: “Now I’ve learned how to use it in moderation. Can’t be that hard.” Within a short time I was deep back in dependency and self-destruction.
And the third and last stretch, by far the longest, was subtle and insidious:
I had fallen in love. Head over heels. Two watercolor paintboxes meet, and suddenly there aren’t two boxes anymore, but one, with all the colors run together. I didn’t know where I ended and she began.
I stop. Stand still for a moment and let my eyes go over the wide land.
“I didn’t manage to stay with the inner movement that being in love had set off in me,” I think. “I mistook it for something else. This means us now. Forever. There is no you and me anymore. I moved it from the inside to the outside and gave away my own responsibility.”
Again I feel the fist in my solar plexus. A small sting.
“Shit. Why didn’t you stop it? Because I couldn’t. Because it went too fast. Because back then I didn’t know what I know today.”
I give away the responsibility for the price of being liked and loved. Then I fight the thing I gave the responsibility to.
I give away my center and my yes — which, back then, had apparently never formed at all. There were only impulses I had to follow like an autopilot.
And I ask myself: Fuck. Wait. Where is my paintbox, and what is actually in it?
By now I’ve walked five kilometers through the hills to Santa Clara. In the small mini supermarket I ask myself, with every little item, whether it makes me happier. I buy oats, pasta and tomato sauce and start the walk back.
It’s a sunny day in April and I’m sitting on the sand by the Atlantic, looking at the sea.
Weeks have passed since I left the lake. For a few days now I’ve been volunteering at a retreat center a bit further south.
The fist comes up again. In the solar plexus. I can see that it has already changed. It has become an open hand, turned upward, that opens or tightens again depending on the mood. I’ve been watching this for a while now.
Mostly it’s a signal that something is working. The time at the lake taught me to sit with it and not fight it.
Right now it tightens again. A memory comes up. I’m 24, in the time when my first daughter was born. Inside I felt lost. Like a paintbox where the single colors could no longer be told apart. Muddy. I was restless, sad and angry. With alcohol and substances I tried to numb that muddy mixture.
Back then I wasn’t able to be a hundred percent present for my partner and for my child. Everything revolved around me and my terrible life. I had given the responsibility away. To my parents and to the state. Someone had to be to blame for my situation.
While I look at the sea, the clenched fist presses against my solar plexus. I want to get up and leave. Instead I breathe in long, keep looking at the sea, and breathe out longer. While a tear runs, the fist slowly relaxes.
Back then I had nothing that felt like something I could return to, again and again. There was no such thing as a center. There was only that muddy mix. And I wasn’t able to hold that inner state, let alone heal it.
During the time at the lake something grew that felt like a home. I slowly felt contact again. Contact between my eyes, the tree, and what the tree sets off in me. Or the pencil, the way it touches the paper. Or my lips on the coffee cup and the feeling when the first warm sip touches them.
Suddenly there were edges everywhere. Points of contact. And a quiet inside me, from which I was able to meet the stings and the pain that kept coming up.
And now here. At the retreat center I start asking what these edges are, and which colors are in my box.
My truck stands crosswise to an aqueduct on one side, looking out over the wide hills of the Alentejo on the other. I’m sitting at the same table as a few months ago at the lake. Same cup, new coffee.
In front of me my A4 ring binder and my pencil. The empty page makes the fist come alive again. A slight unease. The impulse to act immediately. As if it were life and death.
I can calm myself down. It’s only an empty page.
I start by collecting. What is this about? What is here right now? What do I see? How am I? I write for a while, and apart from a vague overview nothing concrete has come out of it.
My impulse pulls me outside. Move. Walk. Into nature. While I walk, my attention keeps landing on objects. A branch, a leaf, a stone. And the object sets something in motion inside me. It feels like a trail.
At a clearing I stop. This place looks inviting. I sit down on a tree stump and let my eyes wander. A stone catches my attention. Very concrete. Solid. I put it down in front of me and look at it. What is moving in me? The question I wrote down at the table takes on a concrete form.
The stone looks stable. Firm. Solid. Strong. What is the stone in me?
Steady, immovable presence. I am here. I stand here. And I can trust myself.
I see that the stone marks itself off clearly from its surroundings and at the same time touches the ground at its edges. I lean a stick against the stone, and there is a point of contact there too. But the stone doesn’t become the stick, and it doesn’t become the ground.
While I watch the stone, the still slightly tense fist in my solar plexus opens. A physical opening.
Tomorrow I’ll go out again and see what I meet.
Today is a Tuesday in August 2026. I’m sitting at a different wooden table, in Vietnam.
I sold my truck at the beginning of August. It was my home for ten years. The table where I cried in Portugal and later wrote belongs to somebody else now. Everything I still own is a backpack with seven kilos in it.
Eight years have passed. To this day I don’t drink a drop of alcohol, and I’ve reduced every form of numbing to a minimum.
Ring binder and pencil lie next to me. Always within reach. Still full of empty lines.
Out of the experimenting on that clearing, four words have grown:
Pause. Notice. Choose. Arrive.
You have already read them three times in this text. On the hill above the lake. At the Atlantic. On the tree stump. Back then they just didn’t have a name.
That’s how every morning starts. Empty page. Pause. I write down what is there: Notice.
I look at what has energy. Is there fear sitting in it? Do I dare write that? Am I holding something back? Okay. That’s where I stay. And I express it anyway. That is Choose. A decision can be that small.
Then I look at how it feels. A cup of tea. A candle. Arrive.
The fist is still there. It has become a moving hand now, one that speaks up when something is working. It is my measuring instrument.
Why isn’t insight enough?
Because insight is an event. It happens once. And then, snap, the colors run together again.
What it takes is nothing to understand. It takes a place I come back to. Every morning. For eight years.
What I did with my partner, I did with every world I moved into. Kitchens, schools of therapy, systems. Move in, mix the colors, disappear.
The conductor is the man who has learned to move inside a world without losing himself in it. And the step back with which I once saw the whole garden is the same step I take every morning now. Only smaller.
What would get me mixing again?
Even today I feel the hand when I post something and no feedback comes. Did I do it right? Shouldn’t I mix in some orange and green after all? No. The stone was right today. Done. Today it gets no feedback. Maybe tomorrow.
Who cares.
The workbook I built is called SELF / AUTHORED.
Twenty-five pages. Four stages, twenty-four fields, a lot of white space.
It solves nothing. It is not a system, and I’m not claiming it works for you.
It is what came out of a clearing, a stone, and eight years of empty pages.
My version.
The last question in it is not mine. It’s in the book somebody put into my hands when I was nineteen and thought I was going crazy.
Take a pencil. Start by pausing.
And the fist comes back. For me anyway. That’s the moment you open the workbook.
Thank you for your time.
I don’t take it for granted. If these thoughts help you on your way to more autonomy and clarity, here is how you can support this project and dive deeper:
Share this perspective: Forward this email to one person who is currently navigating a difficult choice or feels stuck in a system that isn’t theirs.
Join the conversation: If a specific part of today’s letter sparked something, hit reply. A single word is enough. I read every message.
Get the Map: The Pause Workbook is my gift to this community. It’s a tool to help you distinguish between what you must do and what you choose to do.
New here? It should be waiting in your welcome email.
Already a subscriber? Thank you for staying. You can download your copy here:
Stay aware,
Dirk
I really like where you land here, Dirk. Insight is an event and the center is a practice.
The paintbox metaphor gets at something Jung understood extremely well: development means learning to enter relationship without disappearing into it. Differentiation without isolation and contact without fusion; not keeping our colors separate from the world.
Self-authorship, to me, is about having somewhere inside yourself to return to when the colors start running together.