If you happen to be one of those sunny sorts who walks through the world with nothing but optimism and good cheer in their sights, then this post probably isn't for you. This one is for the people who can be just as happy as they are sad and angry, and who sometimes don't know what to do with the sheer intensity of it. A small sample from my own life, by way of illustration.

A few days ago I was on my knees in a puddle of water in the middle of the hallway, with broken glass all around me as far as I could see. How the glass got there matters less than how I responded to the unrelenting fact of it. Mitigating circumstances? I was tired, I had a cold, I'd had a long day, and I felt as though I already had one foot in the evening's wind-down, since my child was nearly in bed. But no. I wasn't going to be putting my feet up just yet. I was going to be fishing glass out from behind the skirting boards, hunting for a vacuum cleaner that actually worked (quite the undertaking, as it turned out), shaking out towels full of water and glass and wringing them out on a wing and a prayer, and I was going to come apart… Yes. There it is. The simple task of cleaning up broke me on the spot, and once I'd admitted to myself that I could barely keep track of these few straightforward actions, the tears wouldn't stop. (…)

'Fireworks' - digital graph art 39 x 28 cm | 2016

The history books tell us that around 1800, babies who wouldn't stop crying were given a dummy smeared with sugar, or a little cloth bag of sugar to suck on — a 'sugar tit', as it was rather bluntly called back then — and it settled them nicely. The Americans still carry that logic in their word for the object: a pacifier. Something that makes you peaceful. Quiet. In Dutch we call it a zoethoudertje, literally a little something to keep you sweet, and we use it for anything you're handed to stop you complaining — which may also explain why a well-behaved Dutch child is called a zoet child, a sweet one. As far as I'm concerned, this tiny scrap of history already makes clear how desirable it was, even then, to silence a human being — a very small human being, no less — temporarily. And sugar was an effective means to that end.

Why is sugar so tempting? The need for it is existential in nature, and our brains are programmed for it. Long ago, finding something sweet, in the form of fruit, was rare, and it meant two things: quick energy and safety (hunger temporarily lifted). And here too the word dopamine comes into play, because that's the 'wanting' chemical (people also call it the happiness chemical, but nuance matters here) that's produced the moment sugar enters the human system. It drives you toward the reward and it stirs your longing — longing for more. So the joke is that we're biologically kept sweet by Mother Nature (you aren't satisfied, you're kept talking). Because for survival's sake it matters that you keep going out to look for it. (Bitter plants, by contrast, were often poisonous — no neurological reward.) A 'flawless' system that worked well back when we still took our food from nature and understood our body's signals rather better.

'Beautiful Jungle' — digital art collage from the You + Me series | 90 × 90 cm | 2016

How many pots have truly found their matching lid? Raise your hand, all of you, if you're the lid or the pot of the perfect fit. Or does it secretly rattle? Would the lid have sat just as nicely on another pot — or is there such a thing as a seamless fit? What do individualism and monogamy actually mean for the way relationships develop, and, far more importantly: what do they mean for how happy we feel? Are we doing well on that front? Was it always this way? How are the neighbours getting on? And how about in nature? And does it mean that people who have separated from their partner — in the Netherlands roughly a third of marriages founder — that they (we, I'm one of them) are relational failures? Or are there mitigating circumstances?

If only you knew how badly I want the answers to these questions. Not merely so I can adopt a more suitable attitude in my own relationship, but also because I have the feeling there's something to be gained here, for humankind. (Pfff… what do you mean, setting the bar high.) Somewhere along the way I've arrived at the notion that yin and yang together might just make 'one and one is three'. That if we lay the puzzle pieces together in the right way, we are more than the sum of our parts, and that then we're there, we humans. That we'd finally have worked it out. How to be whole. Am I being naive? Is this wishful thinking on my part?

‘Fertile’ - drawing 28 x 20 cm | 2023

Xandra Dupper — 30st. of August 2026 (…)