reflections on the intermezzo of my world cycling trip
The time has come for the reckoning. The dreaded piece. Oh good Lord. The one about my recovery time. The 6 months between my crash and the consequent broken shoulder and concussion, and the departure which wasn’t a particularly easy one.
Writing this means reckoning with mistakes, with painful decisions and inflated egos, with all sorts of different ways I’ve hurt people around me, and, ultimately, hurt myself too. So yeah, as I type this before anything else is written, I don’t reckon this’ll be a light, breezy one, or necessarily one which comments on the geopolitical state of the world, but I don’t know what it’s going to become. Let’s see. Instead, I imagine it will be a portal into my head. If you’re in for that, then I welcome you. I ponder the question of how to love oneself and what happens when, over an extended period of time, you don’t.
the problem of commodifying the experience of life and the unique sense of alienation one can derive from that process
Let’s start off by addressing a quite fundamental tension inherent to my project. That is the issue of commodifying my life. I want to start off by quoting words in Yanis Varoufakis' final chapter of his book Technofeudalism, a book on the changing driver of the global economy from capital to rent (apparently I really cannot resist the urge to comment on the geopolitical state of the world). They go:
“For young people in today’s world, […] curating an identity online is not optional, and so [curating] their personal lives has become some of the most important work they do. From the moment they take their first steps online, they suffer […] from two perplexingly contradictory demands: they are taught implicitly to see themselves as a brand, yet one that will be judged according to its perceived authenticity. (And that includes potential employers: ‘No one will offer me a job,’ a graduate told me once, ‘until I have discovered my true self.’ And so before posting any image, uploading any video, reviewing any movie, sharing any photograph or message, they must be mindful of who their choice will please or alienate. They must somehow work out which of their potential ‘true selves’ will be found most attractive, continually testing their own opinions against their notion of what the average opinion among online opinion makers might be. Every experience can be captured and shared, and so they are continually consumed by the question of whether to do so. And even if no opportunity actually exists for sharing the experience, that opportunity can readily be imagined, and will be. Every choice, witnessed or otherwise, becomes an act in the curation of an identity.” - Yanis Varoufakis in Technofedalism, chapter 7.
This is exactly the activity I am doing right now, as I type these words and pick this quote to post on my own blog I am showing you that yes, in fact, I read, and I think about stuff, and that this is how I like to present myself. You see? Seb’s personality is reflective! I started off with a quote! All to then parse my experiences and thoughts into a narrative arc capturing the last 6 months of my life to an easily consumable 15-minute read. And so, what do I share? What do I keep for myself? Where are the boundaries of what is appropriate?
Of course the whole premise of this project is that I let you, total stranger, into my life, in order to learn along with me. I have the belief that there's something about me which feels relatable enough for people to let their guard down and come along in my thinking. I’ve heard different explanations: allegedly it’s my puppy-like, semi-naive energy which is disarming and somehow also endearing? Whether that’s true, I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. The end goal here is to further the liberatory political cause that I’ve invested my whole life into: to foster a society that centers life instead of death. In my activities I aim to propel the political narrative forward, to trigger and change the way we all see the world, and turning myself into a consumable package seems to help towards that goal.
So, maybe with these acknowledgements, I can start writing about my past half year, not knowing the bounds for what is too much or too little, but also gaining a sense of liberatory ecstasy from tossing these words out into the world. Ultimately, it relates to how I approach the future of this project.
changing relationships
Perhaps at the heart of my 6 months at home lay the realization that I am, in fact, lonely, and that loneliness is a terrifying experience. Maybe this was my first confrontation with real loneliness - the kind of loneliness where you’re drifting on an island with no one connected to you, while at the same time being surrounded people who applaud you and tell you how great you allegedly are. It’s a toxic and intensely confusing mixture. This is not meant as a ‘look-at-me-being-sad’ kind of story, but rather as an investigation into the different ways we can explore and connect with ourselves and what happens when we postpone that self-exploration.
Let’s state the obvious. The 15 months on my bike were lonely. I was alone most of the time, bar for meeting other travellers on the road, and I was basically doing everything for the ‘sebbiebikes’ project myself too. It was a lot of work. Deeply draining, and deeply rewarding. One of the most frequently asked questions by you was whether I wasn't lonely. To tell the truth, actually, I wasn't so much. You see, it’s one thing to be lonely and another to have the time to realize it. There was simply too much to keep me busy from letting the loneliness of my situation hit me. Surviving kept me occupied most of the time (finding water, food, sleeping spots, shade, biking), and then any leftover time I had I poured into this project. It was a fine, if exhausting, equilibrium.
Then after the crash everything happened very fast. My mom flew in and retrieved me from Syria (I was not able to move so getting myself to the Netherlands seemed a big challenge), I had surgery and so acquired a massive scar across my shoulder and before I knew it I was sitting on the couch in the living room I grew up in with a steaming pot of herbal tea in front of me, served by my mom. It felt totally absurd. A few friends came by, but I was not able to participate much in the conversations with them. I mostly nodded along and my speech was slow and subdued. A light concussion and intense painkillers will make sure of that.
I was like a heavy cargo train who came to a screeching halt. It took weeks. I still remember making a video with my anti-Zionist friend from Occupied Palestine a.k.a. Israel. We had a video call where I asked her a bunch of questions for the video and pretended my head wasn’t spinning at an increasing speed and that I could continue on the same old track of intensely working, creating content, and the like (it did become a cool video where she tells us about the schizophrenic experience of living in Israeli society while it’s perpetrating a genocide and she told us about organizations that act in solidarity with Palestinians, like the HRDF). My mom noted I was irritable, and she was right at that, because I didn’t want to be at home. A close friend later also remarked to me his shock at my utter and all-consuming loneliness. I was a broken figure, both literally and emotionally.
With time, and through engaging with those who were closest to me before I left, the realization dawned that these people had inevitably drifted away from me. Some of them were cognizant of it, others weren’t. And not that they had made radically different life choices and started their careers as investment bankers or corporate lawyers: most of them were still living humble lives, scraping to get by as is the course living half-outside the system in the Dutch Randstad. No, it was the true, naked emotional intimacy that seemed no longer attainable between us.
Here comes one of the greatest mistakes I have made in my whole life: to neglect those people that see and affirm me. These words sound dramatic but the meaning is fully meant. I don’t know if I’ve ever done something as reckless as thinking that I could cut myself off from my relationships (when I left the first time, I told people “I would go on this big adventure and that they shouldn’t expect to hear from me”) and expect to still be a functioning human being. This is emotional masochism with seriously high stakes: to teeter on the edge of loneliness, looking into the void below, I imagine oneself falling in.
The biggest cost of now choosing to continue this project is thus the following: to perpetuate my isolation. To limit the extent to which my friends could, even if they wanted to, engage with me in a safe and mutual emotional relationship because of the prospect of my departure. I assume I’ve scared those around me in quite a proper way through how I chose to leave the first time (in the style of ‘Alexander Supertramp’ who I even referred to often in my earlier blog posts, as he totally severed all ties to his former life).
on the phenomenon of parasocial relationships
What obviously made the whole situation that much more puzzling was the ways in which all of my other relationships had also changed. Over the coming months, the inescapable reality revealed itself to me that people had formed relationships to me that I was not a participant in. In the age of the internet, these are called ‘parasocial relationships’, which are defined as "a one-sided emotional connection between an individual and another individual that they do not know, typically a celebrity, media figure, or social media influencer, which involve feelings of intimacy, trust, and reciprocity.” I remember, during one of the first activities I did after my crash, that at a nerdy deliberation day of Extinction Rebellion strategy in Utrecht with around 100 activists, I sat down alone in a corner and people came up to me and asking me about my bike crash. Again, and again, and again. Or I’d be driving my bus around Amsterdam for work, passengers would enter, and upon seeing me their face would light up and the question would follow: “is your shoulder healed yet?”. I’d get hugged enthusiastically by people who - I swear to God - I had never seen. And not that I necessarily minded any of this. In fact, I take joy out of chatting with people I don’t know. This exact thing is obviously something that I foster with how I choose to do this ‘sebbiebikes’ project, and I think it has a thousand and one benefits. But I also hope you understand that the combination of suddenly being marginally well-known in a specific niche of society where people are convinced that i’m now cool, and my experience of intense emotional isolation was (and admittedly still is) a difficult cocktail to drink.
This has nothing to do with any of you personally, as I cherish everything that has come out of this project very much: the emails you’ve sent me, all private message conversations we had, the times you came up to me and told me you took meaning out of this project: thank you, it matters a lot to me. The mistake here really is mine: the fatal error of believing the lie that one best finds himself through total and utter ‘freedom’ , if one takes ‘freedom’ to mean ‘freedom from any relational obligations’. What a horrible farce.
the belated realization that it is important to care for oneself.
Now we can finally circle back to the point I opened all of this writing with: how to explore yourself and what happens when you, for an extended period of time, don’t. Here is the truth of the matter which I have come to realize at the wonderful age of 26. Exploring yourself isn’t a background process, something that happens automatically as a by-product of living. I’ve come to realize it’s a deliberate act for which you make time. Exploring yourself is possible by learning to be emotionally naked in front of people who’ll hold you, safely and with love. Or, you can be alone do serious introspection: journal, make art, contemplate through meditation. The wonderfully convenient and insidious thing about travel is that it enables you to do neither.
When you travel, you constantly form these fleeting relationships with people. You hang out for a few days, perhaps a few weeks, and before things get too vulnerable, you separate. At the same time, when you start to feel bored, you change locations, you move, and it makes you feel like you’re progressing: landscapes are changing and you’ve moving somewhere new and it’s exciting and there’s a another language and look at these odd cookies in the supermarket you’ve never seen before and wow! Growth, what a world-traveler who’s unlearning prejudices by exposing yourself to new cultures you are. Sure, this seems hyperbolic, but it really isn’t so far from your experiential truth.
Combine this with the added self-inflicted external pressure of a campaign where you could always be working more (the only thing stopping you from making more content is yourself) and every kilometer cycled is a few euros for a revolutionary cause, and you get a boy on a bike who never really stopped and wondered how he was doing. Postponing this work of understanding your emotional state results in an increasing estrangement from yourself, and it leads you to total blindness to the actual, potentially alarming, state that you are in, and suddenly, when you catch up, makes you teeter on the edge of a cliff.
This, in essence, is what happened to me. And this, in essence, is what I am not keen to repeat again.
reprioritization (is this what the adults mean with “personal growth”?)
So now we can finally circle back to why I am telling you all of this, because I promise this has relevance to you. It all informs the question: how does this change my approach to this project? Well, it changes it quite significantly, in fact.
This project is no longer priority number one.
I have become priority number one.
If I don’t radically make this choice, I won’t make it to Japan, it’s that simple. I’ll succumb and it won’t be fun for either of us. But the thing is, I still really want to make it to Japan, and along the way go through places like Iran and Afghanistan and tell you all about them. Over the past weeks I’m starting to find a new equilibrium, discovering that there are ways to respect and love myself, while still continuing with the project.
It just means a bit more… distance to it? Occasionally letting things go because I want to spend a few days unwinding, relaxing, by myself, and thus potentially not making that one cool video on that one cool topic. There’s also some more help now (Bé, for example, is helping manage the email inbox for finance-related things). Perhaps you won’t even notice a difference, but I promise that underneath the hood (my hood) there are ongoing serious reconfigurations.
And, truth be told, I’m still feeling tentative whether I can actually pull it off without slipping back in my old ways of working. But I hope that as the months progress I can indeed prove to myself that the continuation of this project doesn’t have to come at the price of self-annihilation. I hope for your mercy and understanding in this, too.
The rest of my 6 months.
Compared to this relatively fundamental emotional development talking about the rest of my life these 6 months seems banal. I’m not even sure honestly why I should mention any of it (I think it pivots back to my boredom with self-centering in a way that doesn’t offer any lessons like I hope the previous part did), but perhaps some of it interests you. These things are, not in order of importance:
a travel show aired on Dutch public TV every Sunday evening for 6 episodes in a row which features my journey (part 1). I demanded the makers kept the noborder politics intact, which they did, so Dutch households are presented with a noborder politics.
Kaptein Tweewielers and Merit Gear both significantly helped me out in preparing my bike. Jeff, the owner of Kaptein, totally renovated the bike at €0 cost and Mickey from Merit Gear sowed me custom bike bags, again at a €0 price tag (they both really supported the project and its politics)
In March I organized a day at my house where we celebrated resistance to the border regime, and it was incredibly cute. Thank you to everyone who came and made the atmosphere so jubilant.
There’s a renewed decolonial workshop making the rounds in the Dutch leftist scene that I contributed to, called “The Colonial Crisis”. If it comes across your path, give it a chance!
There’s a bunch of other stuff like this GVB ad where I promote becoming a bus driver, different podcasts I was invited on,
