Book excerpt: It started with Margreet's desire to flee from her parental home. Away from of the realm of control, intimidation, manipulation and condemnation She applied was accepted left for pension Bloemenzicht. It's the start of her LIFE A part of the book: Chapter 1. A big step It seemed to be so simple, but it wasn't. Margreet had decided to pack everything she thought she would need in a month into two suitcases. But what should she take with her, and what not? Yesterday she had received an email from Pension Bloemenhof, informing her that she had been hired for a trial month. Margreet had been as happy as a child. Not so much because of the kind of work, it was yet to be seen if she would like it, but because she could get away, away from her parental home where she'd always felt she somehow didn't fit in. She had walked on tiptoe, figuratively, to not stand out. She had tried terribly hard to do everything perfectly so that she might fit in after all. But apparently it had never been good enough. At primary school, learning was still going well, but at secondary school it went wrong. She did more than she could, but it felt like she was missing out on everything. She felt rushed, and a failure. It wasn't about her mind, she was smart enough, but about the pressure from her parents to perform way beyond her capabilities, which had killed her. And she had known intuitively: I have to get out of here, away from my parental home, away from… well, of what? It was still hard to describe, and especially hard to accept that her childhood hadn't been what it should have been, to accept that she hadn't gotten what she needed to be herself, to develop herself into who she really was. The therapist she'd been with, had called it the burden of intimidation and manipulation, the burden of control. Margreet had recognized it, nodded vigorously as the therapist explained it, but she couldn't turn the tide, couldn't stand it she wasn't able to live the way she wanted to live. Wasn't that another problem? The problem that she didn't really know how she wanted to live, that she didn't know what life was? That she didn't know who she really was and what she really liked? It had upset her for a long time. She'd been torn between possibilities, but whatever she'd come up with, for and about herself, she couldn't figure it out. In the end she had come to only one conclusion: she wasn’t able to see herself through her own eyes. She looked, as she always had done, through her parents' eyes, and felt that whatever came to her mind would be disapproved by them. How on earth was she supposed to get off this treadmill? It felt like a first, big step to leave home. She had scoured the internet for a job, applied for all kinds of things without success, until she discovered the advertisement from Pension Bloemenhof in a quiet area on the edge of a Limburg village. She'd sensed something that made her feel sure she had to be there, and immediately sent her application email, and there had been a conviction in her that she would be successful this time. She had no idea why, actually had thought it was quite bizarre, but her feeling turned out to be correct. It had been only a few hours before she got an answer back that she could come in for a trial run in November, asking if she was able to come a few days before to explore the guest house and get settled in. It was already the end of October, so that would be very soon, just about right away, she thought. Ha, nothing better than that! The sooner she could go, the better! And it was so ideal, she had already understood from the advertisement, she could live internally, on her own within the guest house. A place of your own, within safe walls. She didn't know how it was possible, but it already felt that way in advance, like a safe place of her own.