Introducing real moments
“If you really knew me,” says the person in front of me, “you would know that I sing in the shower every single morning. You would also know that I never, ever sing in front of others.” A slight smile appears on their face as they turn towards the person on their left.
“Okay, let’s see,” the next person says. “If you really knew me, you would know that I come up with around three great business ideas each year, but I never do anything with them. I’d love to change my job, but I’ll probably keep working as a caregiver until the day I retire.” Someone across the table nods in recognition.
“If you really knew me,” says the next person, “you would know that I have only 3% vision in one eye. You would know that I have regular panic attacks because I’m afraid of going blind. I had a really bad one this morning and almost didn’t make it here because of it.” She hesitantly looks around the table, meeting the eyes of some of the others.
It’s the week before the December holidays and I’m visiting Amsterdam to see family and friends. I’ve gathered eight of them around a long table in my favorite Sichuan restaurant in the city. Bright light bulbs are shining through the red paper lanterns above us. Two pots of Jasmine tea have just been brought to our table.
A few minutes ago, one of my friends suggested we play a round of ‘If you really knew me.’ The aim of the game, he explained, isn’t just to share something that others don’t know about you—it’s to share something you don’t want them to know. Everyone agreed to play, so here we are, revealing parts of ourselves that we tend to keep in the dark.
“If you really knew me,” the next person says, “you would know that speaking in front of groups terrifies me. You would know that beneath the grown-up, successful adult that I portray to be, there’s still an insecure little girl. You would know that I’m scared right now as I’m talking to you and that it’s really hard for me to stay present.” Her eyes water up, and her lower lip starts shaking. She sits in silence for a moment before she turns her head toward me.
“If you really knew me...” I say softly as I feel my heart rate go up. “If you really knew me, you would know that I wet my bed until the age of fifteen. You would know it started in preschool when two kids peeked over the toilet cubicle I was in, and that I felt uncomfortable in public bathrooms until well into my twenties.”
I look around the table to take in the expressions on my friends’ faces. It felt vulnerable to reveal this part of my past. I’m in awe of my friends’ vulnerable expression. My heart is still pounding in my chest, but a warm glow comes over me. I feel connected to myself, connected to the people around this table, and connected to the fragility of the human experience.
While I don’t feel a need to reveal the depths of my being in every social interaction, I deeply appreciate that this kind of interaction is now possible in my life, and proud for the steps I have taken that led me here.
“Well done,” I tell myself as a small grin makes its way on my face, just as the first food makes its way to our table.
A book about living authentically
This is a book about living authentically. It’s about using self-expression and self-reflection to experience a deep connection with yourself and others, to feel more free and alive, and to experience a greater sense of meaning. This book is not about creating this reality for yourself alone, but about living in a way that supports others in experiencing the same. It’s about spreading freedom rather than gaining power.
If you’re interested in welcoming this reality into your life and the world, you can approach this from different angles. You could look at society at large and consider how culture, law, traditional media, social media, and other societal structures affect your ability to live the way you want. You could also reflect on your social groups and relationships, and explore how each of them support or limit your freedom to express yourself. Or you could turn inward and examine how your belief system, traumas, coping mechanisms, and survival strategies influence how safe you feel to reveal your inner truth.
While all these perspectives are relevant and helpful, what they are not is simple.
To reduce the complexity, I invite you to focus on how you experience your life in the present moment. Your life happens one moment at a time, after all, so the endless ways in which you’re affected by societal, relational, and internal dynamics all come together in how you interact with the world in the here and now. Learning to engage differently with the current moment is learning to engage differently with your life.
Obviously, I’m not the first one to consider that perspective. I’m riding the wave of countless spiritual teachers and traditions who for thousands of years have pointed to the present moment
as the only thing we ever really have. What I’m about to present you with, however, is a version of ‘living in the now’ that has emerged from my own embodied research into this topic. It has resulted in a concept that I’ve come to refer to as real moments—which made the concept of authentic living click for me unlike anything else. I hope it will do the same for you, so allow me to explain.
What are real moments?
Simply put, a real moment happens when your outer expression is aligned with your inner truth. You say what you truly think, express how you feel, or do what you really want to do. You reveal your thoughts, feelings, and desires through your words and actions.
Real moments are not moments of selfishness or moments of recklessness. When I invite you to say what you think, I’m not asking you to vent polarizing opinions on social media, criticize others without empathy, or dominate conversations to make your point. When I invite you to express how you feel, I’m not suggesting to yell at strangers in traffic, blame your partner for “making you” upset, or complain about your life to anyone who will listen. When I invite you to do what you truly want to do, I don’t mean you should do things at the expense of others, chase the goals your parents, culture, or friends told you to have, or to push or manipulate people to get your needs met.
What I invite you to do is create moments in which you express and live your truth in a way that is authentic, vulnerable, aligned with your values, and attuned to the people around you. I invite you to show up in a way that leads to healthier, more sustainable relationships with yourself, others, and the world as a whole.
I want to be clear that real moments don’t have to be grand or complicated. They don’t have to happen during revealing dinner conversations in Chinese restaurants, but can be as small as the friend who texted me earlier that night that they wouldn’t make it to the dinner because they needed some time for themselves—or me replying that I felt disappointed not to see them but also happy that they were taking care of themselves.
Real moments can be profound moments that shake you to your core, but can also be as simple as shaking your head to say no, pausing to check in with how you feel, or taking a moment to consciously decide how you want to spend your day off. They happen when, rather than acting on auto-pilot, you’re truly present with yourself and others, and you allow your actions to emerge from that place.
The cost of not creating real moments
Most moments in my life were not real moments. While sharing opinions and ideas came natural to me, I rarely shared my vulnerable thoughts and insecurities. I did not express—or even feel—most of my emotions. And while I believed I was living the life I wanted, I was out of touch with most of my actual, present-moment needs. Many of my day-to-day choices didn’t actually serve me or my relationships. Over and over again, I could have turned the current moment into a real moment—and over and over again I didn’t.
The moments stacked up and turned into years of being untrue to myself. I endured jobs, relationships, and living situations in which I felt unhappy. I stayed in circumstances that I could have changed or left behind. I suppressed parts of my identity that I wish I would have celebrated.
During the romantic relationship in my mid-twenties, my partner would sometimes ask me how I was. She must have been aware that I was struggling and she offered a gentle listening ear. Using just one of these opportunities to create a real moment could have been a starting point for deepening our relationship and improving my life. Deep down, I think I would have wanted to tell her how terrified I was that my company wouldn’t work out and how disconnected I felt in our relationship. But it didn’t even seem possible—the words wouldn’t leave my mouth. So I would sit on the edge of the couch and stare at the ceiling, waiting for her to dismiss me from the conversation.
Meanwhile, I largely lived my life on auto-pilot. As a teenager, I had somehow adopted the belief that in order to be happy I should be independent and earn a lot of money, so when I left university to pursue a tech startup after getting my Bachelor’s degree, I thought I was doing exactly what I wanted. I spent my days behind the screen and my evenings networking with fellow startup founders. I felt part of a subculture that became the cornerstone of my identity and did whatever I could to make my company a success—or to make it seem so in the eyes of my peers.
A few years in, I had acquired too little clients and too much debt, and I didn’t make enough money to keep going. Theoretically, I was in charge of my own time, but in reality I spent all my time on work and work related activities. I could barely keep my eyes open without drinking coffee. My skin turned more pale each month while the circles around my eyes turned darker. I neglected many of my basic needs like eating healthy and doing exercise, and I barely made time for friends. I was stuck in a situation that I didn’t know how to get out of.
Just before I completely ran out of money, I got lucky. A big company acquired my startup, which cleared my debt and left me
with enough money to not have to work for a few years. But instead of using this opportunity to take a break, I started working on a new project straight away and worked around the clock for another two years. When I had a long, honest conversation with a friend, I finally realized that all the cells in my body were begging me to take a long vacation. Yet, even though I was excited by the prospect of palm trees and tropical beaches, I feared that taking time off would make me fall behind on my peers. In a twisted way, they had become my competition. Thankfully, my friend convinced me to go.
It wasn’t until my plane took off and the city underneath me turned smaller, that I realized that this competition only existed in my head. Nobody cared whether I worked on my company or went away on a trip. I realized I had been blinded by my own, outdated ambitions. I had forgotten that what I wanted to begin with was simply to be happy. With the start of this trip, I started seeing much of my cultural conditioning, and my life began to open to new possibilities. But I still hadn’t learned to listen to myself more deeply on a daily basis. This only started a few years later—and it came to me in a most peculiar way.
The importance of real moments
The journey that led to my discovery of real moments started with a simple, fleeting thought. It was so subtle that I could easily have missed it, but for some reason, I chose to pay attention. Superficial as it may seem, the thought that sparked a life-changing journey and laid the foundation for this book was this: I’m not wearing the clothes I want to wear.
It happened on a Saturday night. My partner[1] and I were at Wasteland—a massive techno party where thousands of people dress up in leather, latex, lingerie, or simply nothing at all, and everybody dances like there’s no tomorrow. The first time a friend invited me to this party, I immediately declined—I couldn’t picture myself in a place like that. But over the days that followed, my curiosity beat my judgment and I decided to join her after all.
As I wandered through the crowded dance floors, my preconceived notions evaporated quickly. I saw things I never imagined seeing in real life, yet none of it seemed a big deal. People dressed how they wanted, danced how they wanted, and unapologetically embraced their queerness and sexuality. And I was deeply intrigued by all of it.
My partner and I were sitting on a black, leather sofa in one of the smaller rooms. The music was less loud here, so we could actually hear each other speak. Both somewhat intoxicated, we were having a conversation that was more honest than I was generally capable of at that point in my life.
“You know,” I said, “I want to do something different.”
“What do you mean?” she replied with a voice that was both gentle and excited.
“The next time we go to a party like this, I don’t want to dress like the other guys. I want to dress... more feminine.”
“Why not,” she said as she smiled and gave me a kiss. Our conversation moved on, and the thought faded from my mind, but it resurfaced months later during a dull moment at work. This time, it was accompanied by a clear image of what I wanted to wear: black boots, a black G-string, black see-through tights, and nothing else. I found some images online and sent them to my girlfriend. “I want to go out like this tonight,” I wrote. “Are you in?”
The moment she replied with a “yes!” a mix of nervousness and excitement came over me. I closed my laptop and jumped on my bike to go shopping.
That evening, we arrived at a small queer nightclub in the heart of Amsterdam. Before heading to the dance floor, we stepped into a changing room. I took the clothes from my bag, carefully laid them on a bench, and peeked my head around the corner to see what others were wearing. My shoulders dropped as I took in the image. Aside from the bartenders, only one other visitor had made an effort to dress up. Everybody else wore jeans, t-shirts and sneakers.
“Do you want to wait?” my girlfriend asked.
“Yes,” I thought. I wanted to wait. I wanted to abandon the plan and go home. But this idea had been with me for months now, and I couldn’t let it go. So, “No,” I heard myself say. “I came here to do this.”
I got changed and slowly walked into the club. Unsure where to look, what to do with my hands, or what to do with myself in general, I made my way to the bar, where the bartender greeted me with a smile. As I waited for our drinks, I focussed on the music and calmed myself by slowly breathing in and out.
I looked around the room and realized that most people weren’t paying much attention to me. The few people I crossed eyes with gave me a genuine smile. Someone gave me a compliment. Gradually, I began to feel at ease.
At some point, the owner of the club walked up to me. He playfully insisted that I should be dancing on the stage and managed to convince me. Moments later, I was dancing on the platform in front of the DJ. I could see every single person in the room and knew that they could see me just the same. To my surprise, I enjoyed it. I felt like I had jumped out of an airplane, not only to find out I had a parachute, but also that an excited crowd awaited me on the ground.
Over the years that followed, my desire to dress more feminine grew. I often caught myself looking at the clothes of female-presenting people on the street. I admired how they moved their bodies and wondered how their clothes would look on me. I envied their ability to walk into a store and try on a dress without standing out. Slowly, I began to expand my horizons.
I visited the club enough to get to know the bartenders. I spent a week in Berlin, and walked around in tights and a long t-shirt. I attended my office Christmas party in a dress. One day, when Amsterdam was in lockdown because of COVID-19, I biked through the city in broad daylight wearing a dress. Near the end of my ride, I spotted an old friend ahead of me. My heart pounded in my chest and adrenaline surged through my veins. Without thinking, I pulled the handlebars to the left to dive into a side street. I raced home, ran up the stairs, and collapsed on the couch.
As I stared at the ceiling, a single question emerged: “Why is this such a big deal?”
Why didn’t I want my friend to see me in a dress? Is there really such a big difference between a dress and a long t-shirt? Between tights and skinny jeans? Or shorts and a skirt? When I compared the shapes of the fabric or imagined the sewing patterns, the differences seemed minimal. And even if the differences were bigger—why should anyone care which clothes I wear?
I hadn’t always cared for this myself. As a kid, I dressed up in my mom’s clothes all the time. At the age of twelve, I performed in the school musical wearing high heels and a red dress—and I loved it. But that was the last time I wore feminine clothes. Until now, I hadn’t even realized that I had stopped. Somewhere along the way, I seemed to have forgotten that part of myself.
I began to wonder: What other parts of myself have I forgotten? What have I rejected? How else have I limited myself—and how are we all limiting ourselves? How often do we keep ourselves small to fit in, to meet the expectations of others, or to uphold our own beliefs of who we’re supposed to be?
I remained intrigued by these questions for years to come. What started as a desire to dress how I wanted evolved into a deeper journey of learning to deeply listen to my inner truths—my thoughts, emotions, and desires—and starting my life in alignment with that inner truth.
I learned to voice my thoughts constructively and became a better listener. I started using my emotions to navigate my life with greater clarity and confidence. I grew more comfortable communicating and acting on my desires, and understood how to be more attuned to the needs of others. I learned to enjoy, appreciate, and care for my body—through physical self-expression and interactions, such as dance or sex.
My process accelerated when I started working on myself in dedicated environments, such as (non-sexual) tantra retreats and when I created multiple editions of a (drugs and alcohol free) festival that invited people to (re)define the rules by which they live and be their most authentic selves.
However, most of my learning happened because I was naive enough to think that I could teach this stuff. First, I started writing this book (which I thought would take a year or two but ended up taking the better part of a decade). Then, I started facilitating workshops and events in which people could discover and develop their own authentic expression.
It’s been a long journey, and even though I’ve made it to a point where I actually can teach this stuff, I’ve also come to realize that this learning journey is a never-ending one. Nonetheless, I’m excited to share with you my findings so far.
About my approach
My goal with this book is to offer a clear and practical guide for developing the skill of creating real moments. I began writing when the topic was still fairly new to me and continued throughout multiple years of teaching this practice to individuals and groups.
You’ll notice that I write from a variety of perspectives and from different points in my life. Sometimes, I draw from personal experiences, openly sharing my struggles and successes. Other times, I write as a researcher, referencing concepts and people that inspired me. Sometimes, I step into the role of a coach, trainer, or teacher, guiding others on their journey. Often, I write as an interviewer, helping others uncover the essence of their stories.
In Part One of the book, I explore why creating real moments can be so difficult, as I help you examine the role of your social environments and the impact of your own conditioning.
In Part Two, I focus on creating real moments by honoring your inner truth. Honoring means you give importance to your authentic expression while considering the needs and boundaries of others. I’ll introduce a range of techniques to practice noticing, welcoming, and acting on your inner truth in ways that have the potential to contribute to intimacy and connection.
In Part Three, I focus on questioning your inner truth as a way to understand your experience more deeply. Rather than assuming your thoughts, emotions, and desires are “true,” I’ll invite experimentation and self-reflection to uncover how your past conditioning shapes your experience in the here and now. Together with honoring, the practice of questioning your inner truth can contribute to more freedom and flexibility in the present moment.
As I developed the real moments practice, I’ve come to see honoring and questioning as two equally important sides of the work that complement each other. Over the years, I’ve encountered many methods and traditions that emphasize one over the other, and I’ve come to recognize some downsides of doing so.
Some approaches, like various spiritual traditions, emphasize questioning over honoring—they encourage you to be less attached to your emotions and desires. I definitely recommend such practices because they can help you view your inner world from a healthy distance, yet I’ve noticed that focusing too heavily on questioning your inner truth can have unintended consequences.
When, like many people, you have a lifetime of rejecting certain emotions, boundaries, and desires behind you, absorbing yourself in practices that encourage you to be less attached to certain parts of your experience, can sometimes have negative effects. When we haven’t learned to assert yourself, minimizing certain parts of yourself might reinforce the denial of your own humanity. Additionally, it might inspire you to deal with certain issues—such as strong emotions—in solitude, while learning to express them within a supportive community could be transformative.
Other approaches, like certain communication frameworks, emphasize honoring over questioning. They encourage you to articulate specific parts of your experience, such as your feelings and underlying needs, and to ask others to help you fulfill those needs. While honoring and expressing your inner truth is an essential skill, doing so without a healthy dose of questioning can have its downsides.
When you learn to depend on asking others to meet your needs, you might miss many opportunities of taking responsibility for yourself—like when you depend on others to regulate the emotions you claim they invoked in you. Or you may look to fulfill ‘needs’ that actually are unhealthy or unhelpful coping mechanisms.
While I’m wary of overgeneralizing, I believe that it’s often helpful to start with a focus on honoring—learning to notice, welcome, and act on your inner world in a vulnerable, grounded way. Then, you can lean into questioning and start recognizing which parts yourself may benefit from a closer look. Ultimately, the key to developing a healthy real moments practice is to strike a balance between the two. I like to imagine this balance as a yin-yang symbol. Each side is valuable on its own, yet it’s strengthened by the other. The white side of the symbol contains a dot of black. The black side contains a dot of white. It’s a reminder that healthy honoring always contains a bit of questioning, and that healthy questioning always contains a bit of honoring. It’s always valid to express your inner world—even your most irrational parts. Just keep in mind that it may not be aligned with other people’s experience.
Together, the blend of honoring and questioning allows you to assert yourself and get to know yourself deeply, while remaining flexible and not getting caught up in any rigid way of living.
About my perspective
Before we dive into this book, I think it’s important to make two acknowledgements.
First, I’ll reiterate that many of the ideas underneath real moments can be found across numerous therapeutic practices, spiritual traditions, and self-development methods. Different approaches may emphasize certain parts of the process, put them together in different ways, and use different words to describe similar ideas, but the essence of creating real moments has been around for ages. While the real moments practice is rooted in a diverse body of knowledge, I think I’ve found new ways of explaining and connecting many existing ideas in a way that creates value.
Second, I’ve mentioned before that my writing in this book comes from various viewpoints—the personal, the researcher, the interviewer, and the guide—yet I want to acknowledge that—regardless of my role—I always speak through one particular lens that I can never remove.
I was born and raised in the Netherlands; I’m Western, racialized as white, and able-bodied. Although I didn’t turn out to be a typical straight cis-male, I did grow up as one. I’ve never had to worry about hunger, housing, or safety, and I’ve never directly experienced war or poverty. My passport allows me to travel wherever I want. I’ve faced financial stress, but only because I chose the uncertainty of self-employment. Mild bullying was part of my early teenage years, but overall, I felt supported. The experiences I consider traumatic pale in comparison to what many others have faced. I haven’t experienced severe intergenerational trauma, and my parents spent years in group therapy before I was born, which greatly contributed to the safety and stability of my family home.
In my early years of writing, I didn’t realize how my background shaped my words. Later, it dawned on me how many books are written by and for people with similar backgrounds to mine, and I realized I was writing another such book. I decided to change course. I threw out much of what I had written
and started over. I read more diverse literature, interviewed people with a broader range of backgrounds and identities, and engaged in challenging conversations with friends from marginalized backgrounds. While this new approach led to a very different book than the one I first set out to write, I acknowledge that it still describes the world from my perspective.
The voices in this book can never represent the vast diversity of human experience. The people who are featured were not chosen randomly—they’re people I’ve encountered at some point in my life. Most of them grew up in Western Europe or at least lived there for some time. It was me who chose who to interview, me who conducted the interviews, and me who turned those conversations into stories. Despite a serious effort to include a broader range of perspectives and experiences, each of the stories have been filtered through my lens.
Ultimately, the only person I can truly say I wrote this book for is myself—which is why I sometimes think of it as a letter to my 17-year-old self. It’s a vision for his life and for the world at large, although I doubt he would have listened.
Luckily, this letter has reached you instead of him. If you don’t end up reading it, I hope it can help you stabilize that wobbly dining table. Or maybe you can pass it on to someone who could use it. If you do continue reading, I hope you’ll read it with a healthy sense of skepticism.
I hope you won’t blindly accept my ideas, no matter how persuasive they may sound. I hope you won’t blindly reject them either. I hope you can look beyond the terminology and focus on the underlying message. I hope you’ll evaluate my ideas through your own lived experience, that you’ll experiment with the practices, and that you’ll try some new things in your daily life. I hope you’ll keep what serves you, adapt what needs adapting, and lightly dismiss the rest.
Above all, I hope this book inspires you to make meaningful changes in your day-to-day life and that your life will come to align with your inner truth in ways that surpass both my and your imagination.
Want more?
To read more, message me on Telegram or fill out this form. You can also pre-order the actual book, see the table of contents, or check out my events or personal sessions.
In any case, thanks for making it this far!
Mette