Gekooide dieren

Caged animals
Caged animals
From cage to cage
From institution to institution

From one cage to another I move,
the setting changes, but I do not,
not yet outside where I want to be, outside that cage.

But that world outside might
exist only here inside my head,
as hope without bars.

All those people out there, outside my cage,
I do not despise for their freedom,
but for their carelessness, their lack.

A lack of appreciation for their
cage without bars, their naivety,
their not knowing their own reality.

As a caged being I can say nothing,
I can pace back and forth like an animal,
but I am not able to speak.

As an animal I think in images,
feelings and reactions without words
that teach me, teach me nothing.

People talk and talk and convince
each other, confuse each other that this is so
and that is so, but only with words.

Only with words, hearsay,
from once, from the past, from him or her,
but without feeling.

Feeling that originates from the deepest
of what we all are,
caged animals.

Sunday 25 march 2007

In October 2006, I moved to Norway. It’s been 20 years, so I can be forgiven for not remembering everything so clearly, but aside from that excuse, I had a clear story in my mind about those first few years. This weekend, I read my blog from the first three years in Norway. Well, I didn’t actually read it all; I skimmed over it while I copied the text into a document (103 pages, 80.000 words) and fed it to a chatbot. I asked it all kinds of questions and requested it to show me all the quotes, and I was quite surprised. For the last 10 years, I’ve been writing a lot, and I feel like I know myself pretty well now. Because I think I know myself now, the time before the ten-year mark seems like the dark ages to me. It’s a period where I obviously thought about things. I left many relics behind in the form of books I’ve bought in those dark ages, but in my mind, it all felt pretty trivial.

The blog post was meant for family to read, and for the most part, it’s lighthearted. I talk about the weather, my work, and what I do in my free time. But I was also not afraid to share my feelings about life, myself, and the people around me.

One of my go-to stories when people ask why I moved to Norway is about the book “Nooit Meer Slapen” (Never Sleep Again) by the famous Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans. I read that book around age 16, and I can’t quite explain why it resonated with me, but what it represented stayed with me. I realize more and more how it reflects a part of me, the 16-year-old me, wearing a “Great Pretender” T-shirt, was already more aware than his intellect could put into words. The novel shows that human attempts to find certainty, meaning, and success often fail in an indifferent world where knowledge is unreliable and people are fundamentally alone.

Here you can read some quotes from what I wrote:

“And then I suddenly think about my future, or rather the lack of it..”

“Objectively, I don’t really have much to complain about… but it doesn’t do anything for me.”

“It’s my habit to analyze everything, judge it, and not take things for granted, not sleep, so to speak.”

“In sleep, one dreams, and dreams are deception, and I want to see through them.”

The text below is a summary that the Chatbot made of my more personal posts. I edited it, but the bot captured the mood quite well, especially after reading some of the old work. I realize that now, 20 years later, I have not moved an inch forward. What I struggled with back then is what I struggle with now. I am calmer now, but that is just because the sharp edges of the boulder have eroded, and the turbulence of the rushing water flows by with more ease.

Here is a link to the blog, in some browsers it will not open and you might get a warning that it is to old, it is also in Dutch: https://christiaanvangaal.blogspot.com/2006/08/werk-gevonden.html 

I look back on that time as a period when sleep became almost symbolic rather than physical. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t sleep; it was that I couldn’t stop my thoughts. The moment I lay down, my mind would start racing—about work, whether I was doing enough, or if I even wanted to do it at all. The light outside didn’t help, but that was almost a secondary concern. The real problem was that I had no off-switch. I was constantly aware, constantly analyzing, which made rest feel nearly impossible.

That constant thinking connected closely to feeling distant from everything around me. Living in the north made this more obvious. The people were friendly, calm, and patient, but I often felt out of sync with them. Conversations didn’t go deep enough, or maybe I didn’t let them. There was a gap between how I experienced things and how others seemed to go through life. It wasn’t dramatic isolation, but rather a quiet, steady sense that I wasn’t fully part of it.

At the same time, I was trying to figure out what I truly wanted. On paper, everything looked fine: work, stability, no big problems. But that didn’t give me a sense of purpose. I kept wondering if I was just following a routine or avoiding something deeper. That search for meaning didn’t lead to clear answers; it mostly brought more questions. Still, I couldn’t leave it alone.

That’s also where my frustration with people in general arose. I felt that most people were operating on autopilot—following routines, repeating patterns, and not truly questioning anything. That irritated me, partly because I couldn’t do the same. While others seemed to find peace in acceptance, I kept analyzing things, trying to uncover what was underneath. It made me critical, sometimes unfairly so, but I also believed it was necessary. I didn’t want to live half-asleep.

Looking back, that’s really what “never sleeping” meant to me. It was about not being willing to accept things at face value. Not trusting comfort if it came from ignoring reality. There’s a cost to that. It creates unrest, a kind of mental friction that doesn’t go away. But at the time, and even now, I preferred that over the alternative. There was also a constant internal conflict. Part of me wanted calm, simplicity, maybe even the ability to just go along with things. Another part resisted that completely and pushed for clarity, even if it hurt. That tension didn’t resolve itself; it just became something I had to carry. Writing was the only way to deal with it in a structured way. It didn’t solve anything, but it helped me lay things out, slow the thoughts down, and make them visible. Without that, everything stayed tangled in my head. Looking back, those texts weren’t just observations—they were a way of staying afloat in that constant stream of thoughts.