It was on a rainy day in November that I looked outside the window of my workplace in Amsterdam and asked: “Is there more to it? Is there something else?”
I was three months into the promotion – portfolio manager – still a financial analyst of banks, still no diploma, at a consultancy in Amsterdam. At twenty-seven it felt a bit too much. As if I had reached middle-age tranquility too early, and at the most unfortunate time.
I was in love with a French man. Instead of analyzing banks I should have been somewhere drinking champagne, or doing any other activity that would procure me a nice husband. I was busy proving I could do it all.
I could, in theory. Five days a week in a highly stressful office. Gym devotee. Runner. Learning Dutch next to the three languages I already spoke. Avoiding fun at all costs.
I took the rest to the Chinese medical center in Amsterdam. “Treat my gastritis,” I asked. The doctor looked aghast. He thought I had come for the tenth time to stop smoking. “Look, no,” I said to his horrified face. “I came because I want to get rid of the pain.”
He looked at me for a minute and prescribed tea, every day until the pain was gone.
The tea, the job, and the French man were too much. On the tenth or eleventh day of insomnia, it arrived: a full-blown psychosis. It reached me on the third glass of champagne I had finally gone to drink instead of reading the balance sheets of a German bank that was always in trouble.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever beat that euphoric, super-happy state I had finally grasped: I was Buddha, and I was enlightened.
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