Ego

Rijswijk, September 2025

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I was scared. Not of the trip, but of what I might find if I didn’t take it.

I live with HIV. I live with cancer. I survived the heavy silence that follows when the voices you counted on go quiet one by one. Three times death looked at me, and I stared right back. Three times I found a way to keep moving.

But this is different. This is not about survival. This is about something I didn’t have a word for yet—the strange terror of arriving. Of having Patrick. Of having peace. Of waking up with a quiet mind and thinking: is this it? Is the fire out? I have spent sixty-seven years knowing who I was by what I was fighting. Pain was at least familiar. The overdrive was at least mine. And now—stillness. And stillness feels dangerously close to disappearance.

Doors in my psyche are still locked, and I know it. Not because darkness is behind them, but because I don’t yet know who I am on the other side of all that surviving. I don’t know how to write from peace. I don’t know how to feel without an emergency driving me. I don’t know if my positivity is real or performed. I don’t even know if I still want to live—not in the way that frightens people when they hear it, but in the way that frightens me when I realize I might finally have to choose it consciously, without crisis forcing my hand.

Something needs to be released before I can go forward.

So, I fasted the day before to clear myself out. The morning of the trip, I walked into Park Overvoorde, just behind the Thomas Jeffersonlaan. It is a historical forest—old growth, with bunkers from the Second World War still buried underneath the ground. A park that survived occupation, a landscape that learned to grow over what humans do to each other.

I walked, a myriad of thoughts passing me by. I tried not to hold onto them, but the inner critic chimed in: Please, who are you fooling, trying to be the guru? Get the fuck out of here.

Don’t listen, I told myself. Relax.

Slowly, the sounds of birds and my own breathing calmed the noise. I felt a sweet morning breeze brushing against my ear and shivered for a moment. It was so beautiful and peaceful. I took the rugged, sandy path that leads through the part of the forest where I most likely would not meet anyone—the part where you can sense nature being close.

I needed that. I often walk through this section, but just as often I forget to feel. To truly be in the moment.

Today, I did. And it almost scared me, in a beautiful way. I stopped and took it in. I caressed some leaves and felt a short electric shock run through my body. It startled me. I closed my eyes and touched them again—now, just a slight, tingling sensation. Quietly familiar.

Slowly I turned, giving my hands and fingers room to find an anchor. Something to touch. I found it: something thick and massive. I used my feet to find my bearing since my eyes were still closed, wanting to trust my senses but wanting to be sure nonetheless. I tried wrapping my arms around it, but it was way too big.

I stopped for a second and took a deep breath.

The bark was rough, furrowed, faintly dusty—a tapestry of slow time. Touching it felt like meeting an old soul. I felt my body relax. A quiet tremor moved up my spine, and in its silence, I felt grounded.

What have you witnessed? I wondered. How many people have passed you by? Were they lost, were they looking for answers?

I am looking for answers. Do I trust? How do I make the connection to where I think I want to go? I don’t know what I am looking for. Why do I think like this? I am lost.

A plethora of thoughts filled my mind, and somewhere between the smell of leaves, the grass, the moist bark of the tree, the strange sensation under my fingers—and a feeling of desperation and belonging I hadn’t expected—I started crying.

Please help me. Give me eyes to see. I am blinded. Please, show me a path.

My breath steadied, and I could feel a calm passing through me. I felt loss. I am tired of knowing, tired of replacing uncertainty with optimism, of always having something up my sleeve—a vision, a plan, a way through. I have always been the man who acted, who knew what to say or do.

Not anymore.

I made the quiet decision to trust the moment. To sit with the desperation instead of replacing it. To let go.

I slowly opened my eyes, realized I had let go of the tree, reached for my handkerchief, and wiped my nose.

Thank you, Universe. Thank you, mamma Aisa. Thank you for always guiding me.

I shook my head and slowly started walking in the direction of home.

Patrick was my sitter. We have rules when we sit for each other—boundaries set in advance, agreed upon and kept. The most important one is silence. The experience should be yours and yours alone. Your sitter’s job is not to guide, interpret, or reassure; it is just to be present, to check quietly that you’re still here.

I came home and settled on my sofa facing the large window overlooking Park Overvoorde. I could still see the treetops and the blue sky of that day. The window on the right side was open, and I could hear the sound of people talking in the back gardens, the faint hum of cars behind our flat, and the birds that always use our balcony as a resting point.

I felt calm and ready.

The only thing missing was the music. I put on my headphones, reached for my phone, opened YouTube Music, and looked for my LSD playlist. That transcendental sound—a playlist lasting several hours to guide you through the trip. It starts slow, easing you in. Slowly.

Then, the shift.

It began with a persistent yawning, a sudden tingling across my skin, and faint, luminous scribbles tracing the edges of my vision. I could hear Patrick moving quietly in the living room, a grounding anchor as the horizon began to tilt.

What just happened?

Am I imagining? Short flashes of light, almost out of the blue. I can’t stop yawning.

Ammah feeling myself. I’m feeling myself!

Have I passed the point of no return?

A wave of ancient fear clashed with a sudden, rising happiness. Come on sweetie, isn’t that exactly the reason you took the trip.

I know. I know. You know there ain’t no stopping us now.

I took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway of now and neverland.

Happiness of knowing that something is waiting on the other end.

I feel giddy.

Fuck. I did it.

A vision of a woman giving birth appeared on the wall. What a fucked-up Afro she had, but she was pretty. Golden snakes began moving to the beat of African drums—deep and rhythmic. I cranked the volume up. I was feeling it.

Oh Wooooooow! YouTube knew exactly when to change gears, carrying me somewhere my rational mind could never have found on its own. I live for that sound. I smiled and yawned, smiled and yawned. Fuck, I feel GOOOOOD. I can still feel it now—the soothing of it, the total surrender.

The colors were not as bright and constant as I remembered from my last trip, but they were certainly there. Suddenly, I had to get up. I shook myself and started to dance around the room.

Mie gado mie e frei.

The parkview door opened. It was Patrick. He didn’t speak. He just looked at me—the way you look at someone you love when you want to know if they’re alright without disturbing whatever is happening to them. I looked back.

And in that moment, flying higher than I had been all day, the visuals caught fire.

Golden snakes surged off the walls as if the music had given them flesh. Blue ribbons threading through them, vibrating to the bass. Red and green glass appearing out of nowhere — bling bling!

The entire room was pulsing, glittering, completely alive.

I feel good sweetie. Your boy is flying.

I threw my hands in the air and kept on dancing. Patrick threw me a kiss and closed the door behind him.

After three and a half hours of dancing—of lying on the sofa staring at the treetops talking to me through the window, watching the art on the walls change shape, and seeing my plants come to life—I wanted to change the scenery. I slowly made my way to the kitchen. Patrick was already there.

I started mumbling about what I had felt and seen. I was fixated on his face, laughing at the sheer scale of what was happening, when a sudden wave hit me. Patty, I am so scared.

I felt my eyes tearing up, and I began to cry. It was one of those ugly cries that nothing and nobody can rescue you from. Water came out of my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I must have looked so fucking pitiful, but I just couldn’t stop. Patrick moved to console me, but I waved him back to his seat.

I have to do this.

I am so scared Pat. I am so scared of losing you. I am so afraid that you won’t want to grow anymore. I want somebody to grow with me. That’s what I want. I don’t think I can stay if that’s not the case. But I don’t want to lose again. I am so tired.

Not because love would end. Because life would. Because I might still be hungry for growth while you tired, while you declined, while you chose — before I was ready — to let go.

I started to sob all over again. Oh my god. What is happening.

The vision broke me open in a way the tree had not. The tree had shown me my locked doors; Patrick showed me the breathtaking expanse of what lay on the other side.

Him. This. What we have.

A love so complete I had stopped needing to guard myself inside it. A fellow artist. A fellow soul. The safe harbor I had stopped believing existed. What we have is sacred; I knew it before that night, but the trip made me feel it directly in my body. And in that feeling, the ego that had kept me armored, sharp, and self-sufficient for sixty-seven years dissolved.

Not destroyed. Not defeated. Dissolved. There’s a difference.

I have lived in the Star Trek universe all my life. When the world was too much, the stars steadied me. So when I needed a language for what happened that night, I reached for the one I’ve always trusted.

The Borg are Star Trek’s darkest mirror. Half flesh, half machine, moving as one mind, absorbing everything they touch—your memories, your will, your self—into the hive. Resistance is futile. The chill you feel when you hear those words is the chill of recognizing something true about what humans fear most. Not death, but disappearance.

The trip allowed me to see my ego for what it truly is: not an enemy to be conquered, and not a hero to be worshiped, but an engine. It is the mechanism that kept me alive, that kept my shine on, that made me capable of loving fiercely instead of safely. Lose it completely, and you become the Borg—absorbed, efficient, entirely empty. Feed it without question, and you become the tyrant you most despise in others.

Somewhere in the narrow, sacred space between the hive-mind and the isolated fortress is where I am learning to live.

I don’t want to be Borg. I don’t want to be consumed by ego either.

I want to be a man who walked into a park scared, hugged a tree and cried, thanked it for seeing him, came home, watched the sky from his sofa, took a trip, let African drums carry him somewhere his mind couldn’t follow, and let the vision of losing everything he loved break him open enough to finally walk through the door.

Mie gado mie e frei.

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Mie gado mie e frei — Sranantongo, the language of Suriname. My god, I am free.

Prologue: A Spark from Lena Waithe

It was a YouTube video. Lena Waithe, in conversation with Shan Boodram, talking about emotional intimacy — the kind that lives between people who will never sleep together. I was watching her the way you watch someone who says the thing you’ve been carrying for forty years without a name for it.

She said: I would rather be hated than stifled.

And something very old lit up in my chest.

People hear the words open relationship and think: sex. More bodies, fewer rules, an excuse dressed up as a philosophy. I spent forty years watching that assumption land on my life like a verdict. What they never saw — what I’m still trying to say — is that for me, openness was never about multiplying partners. It was about refusing to divide myself.

What the Women Said

I grew up the youngest of four brothers in Rotterdam, in a household of women who spoke their minds. My mother, my sisters — teachers, healers, entrepreneurs, preachers, all of them. Fire-starters. They never shied away from hard truth.

But here is what I noticed, even as a boy: they never talked about connection. They talked about roles. What a man should provide. The ways men disappointed. And the men they spoke about were almost always Black or brown — which meant, in some quiet way, they were also talking about me. About what I might become.

I loved those women. I wanted to be the best version of myself for them. But something gnawed at me: the way they spoke of relationships sounded less like freedom and more like a prison.

One afternoon I asked my mother why she and my father never walked hand in hand. She looked at me with that particular calm she had — the kind that meant she was about to say something I’d be turning over for decades — and said:

“Sweety, everything you see is not always what it seems.”

I wasn’t even ten years old. And that sentence split my world in two: the inside, and the outside. What was real, and what was performed. I have been living in that gap ever since.

The Men I Saw

The men in my life told a different story. My father — heavy-voiced, sometimes frightening — was underneath it all a gentle giant. A man who poured every drop of himself into his family. My oldest brother filled his house with laughter and food that healed you. My second brother loved his wife with a radiance you could feel from across a room — bold and bright, in colors that seemed to light the air around him.

So when I heard my mother and sisters speak of men as if they were grown children in need of managing, I was confused. The men I knew were vivid, tender, whole. Only later did I understand: the problem was never the men themselves. The problem was connection — or the absence of it. Connection with themselves first, and then with each other.

I knew, without yet having words for it, that I had to find another way.

The Choice

I chose openness not because I wanted more sex, but because I wanted more transparency. I had watched what secrecy did to families, to marriages, to friendships — how it turned love into performance, slowly, without anyone noticing. I refused to inherit that silence.

For me, an open relationship was never about multiplying partners. It was about finding out who I was — what I actually wanted, what I genuinely felt — so I would not fall into the same trap I had watched close around the people I loved. My mind was already its own trap. The only way a relationship truly works for me is when I feel space — space to learn, space to test the waters. And that space only functions with a partner who understands that concept and is willing to live it too. Not just tolerate it. Live it.

It would cost me years of swimming against the current. People told me I was crazy. And there was a harder truth too, one I had to earn slowly and painfully: I was not always the transparent one I believed myself to be. I gave my partners room to tell me the truth — but how often had I lied to myself first? How often had I blamed the other rather than looked inward? The lies were rarely malicious. Most of the time they were just fear, wearing a familiar face. I knew that face. I had worn it too.

Mateloos

After my HIV diagnosis, I sold my shop in Amsterdam and retreated to Zeeland. Then therapy, then healing, then Rotterdam — and my first year at the Sociale Academie. A teacher fell ill one evening and gave us the night off.

I went to Mateloos, on the Nieuwe Binnenweg. One of the first gay cafés in Rotterdam where you could just walk in — no doorman, no secret knock, no portier. Tables outside on the street, in daylight. We are here. That too was a kind of manifesto.

My friend Leo was behind the bar. Leo, who poured drinks and cracked jokes and served food that tasted like home. Leo, who made you feel that belonging was possible even when everything felt uncertain and fragile. I was living with HIV in a decade when men were dying by the dozens in London, New York, Amsterdam. The laughter, the music, the brilliance of their lives — silenced. Families abandoning their own sons. Hospitals turning people into pariahs. Leo gave me somewhere to set that down for a few hours.

That night, in the middle of one of my heated debates about life and what mattered — I was newly educated and thought I knew everything, hahahaha — I felt a presence. I ignored it. Then I had to look.

Tall, slender. Half Turkish, half Jewish-Dutch. Dark blonde hair. Eyes that shifted colour like the sea — turquoise, green, blue. Yeez, he is hot. I felt my knees suddenly weakening before I caught myself. I nodded. Went back to my performance. Then walked to the bar and told Leo to ask him what he was drinking and put it on my tab.

It took me some time to finish the heated discussion I felt so passionate about — all the while feeling those eyes piercing a hole in my brain. Who was I fooling. The discussion was losing the battle. I made my way in his direction.

Hi handsome.

Before I knew it we were talking as though we had already met. My only desire playing out in my head — I wanted to undress him, or to be undressed. Everything I was looking at I desired with my whole being. Luckily his thoughts were no different. So we said our goodbyes to the room and before we knew it we were outside.

We walked through the warm October night talking and laughing, and later I felt what I can only describe as frightening bliss: to feel so connected to someone new, so completely at home, for the first time in my life.

The Second Morning

After a beautiful evening and a long night of sleep, I woke to the sun peeping through the curtains. I turned to look beside me — as if I needed to be sure it wasn’t a dream. And there he was. Still here. Still asleep. Dark wavy hair against that tanned olive skin, his pronounced Turkish nose, those features that sent chills down my spine. Is it real? Could he, would he, still feel the way he did yesterday?
Slowly, very slowly, I crept out of bed. Tiptoed out of the room. Quietly pulled the bedroom door closed behind me and went to the kitchen. Coffee. Orange juice. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, made myself presentable. Then tiptoed back, placed his coffee neatly at his end of the bed, and slipped back in beside him. A soft kiss on his forehead.
Hi. Good morning, sleepyhead.
I gave him a big smile. Acted like I always woke up like that.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. Good morning, handsome. This feels so good. How do you feel?
I feel amazing. I don’t know what you are doing to me but please keep on doing it.
He looked straight at me and I at him — one of those moments that turns you into a puddle. And then he said:
“I can imagine us in a long-term relationship. But I can’t promise you I will only have sex with you.”

Kaboom.

After years of silence and half-truths leading nowhere, that sentence felt like bliss. Right then and there, I wanted to marry him.

What I Had to Tell Him

I waited until I was sure he was as much in love with me as I was with him. Then I told him I was HIV positive.

He paused. Took it in. Later, he told me exactly what had happened inside him:

“I thought deeply about it, and came to the conclusion that I could not let you go because of my fear. That I could — and must — trust in an iron policy of no blood and no semen. This is a perfect example of why a nightlight is no longer needed once you know what hides in the dark. It was scary, yes. But I knew that if I did the right things, I could trust that it would be okay.”

Hearing that was like watching a door swing open inside me. He didn’t turn away. He chose me — and in doing so, he taught me something I’m still carrying: love is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to walk through it together.

Gay Palace

We talked. We agreed. We believed we understood what we were choosing. Three weeks later, Gay Palace on a Friday night showed me how much I still had to learn.

Three weeks in, still in the honeymoon phase, both of us looking and feeling like gods. We were all over each other in those weeks — though we held back sometimes, not because we didn’t want to but because, as I already knew, eating the whole box of chocolates leaves a nasty stomach.

That night on the dancefloor I was rocking it. And then, in the corner of my eye — André, kissing someone I didn’t know. I didn’t know whether I was about to puke or cry, or both. It was a bitch slap and I was wide awake. This is what you signed up for. Stop whining and deal with it.

We had talked so much about how to handle these moments rationally. But when it happens in real time, you are fucked. That was also one of the first times I understood we operated at opposite ends of the psychological spectrum. It seemed to leave him cold. He introduced us, then kissed me long and lovingly, and asked if it was alright if he took him home. I checked the guy out — handsome as fuck — gave him a hug, three kisses, and told them to have fun.

From the outside you would think I owned the situation. Inside I was closer to tears.

I forced myself back onto the dancefloor. The music was pumping — soulful vocal, British nineties garage at its best. The alcohol was doing its work. And somewhere between the bass and the dancefloor I stopped thinking. I was flying.

But when the night was over I had to face the music. I shed some tears — some, because I kept hammering myself: you signed up for this yourself. The quicker you deal with it the sooner you become master of it. But the voices didn’t wait. One said: Scott, you know it doesn’t work like that. You are going to have to sit with the pain. Another said: leave the fucker. And another, quieter, more cruel: he is way too handsome. He is going to leave you anyway.

André called, or came by, or we went for dinner — I honestly don’t remember. All I wanted was to know everything that had occurred between them. Yes, I know how that looks. But I believe it still — that’s my way of dealing with pain. Learn to feel it fully so it can’t ambush you. Walk toward it instead of away. Take it in until you know its shape, until you stop being its victim. By then I was a pro at this. It was a survival mechanism I had built myself, from scratch.

My fucked up psyche made me do that.

And so began the education I hadn’t known I needed.

Through his honesty, his showing up, his dedication, I watched something happen in me I hadn’t expected: the jealousy I had always hated began to loosen. Not disappear — loosen. I began to see my own growth. I had spent years believing I was somehow faulty. Dangerous. Not enough. His constancy made that belief impossible to sustain.

The Price of Freedom

Maybe the word open is the wrong one. What I was really trying to describe was the freedom to remain whole — and the price of that freedom was learning to sit with jealousy without letting it own me.Jealousy is about ownership. But underneath the ownership is fear — the fear that you are not enough, that love will run out, that you are replaceable. Here is what nobody told me: first you have to sit with the pain. Not fix it, not explain it, not drink it away on a dance floor — sit with it. Feel its full weight. Because only once you’ve done that can you begin to separate what is mine from what is theirs. What is this emotion actually about? As long as I was blaming André, as long as I was holding him captive in my anger, I couldn’t see clearly. I had to let go — not of him, but of the grip — so I could look at what was actually mine and deal with that. Only then could I see again.

I had slowly learned something crucial. By putting everything on the table, all the emotions, all the hurt, and having a partner who listened and added to the conversation rather than shutting it down, I began to see what was actually happening: he came back. Every time. I was home. The sex was never the only point — connection was. He could explain and answer my questions to my satisfaction. And if not, we could agree to disagree, with respect for each other. It was a learning spree, for both of us. I met most of those men. Some of them are still our friends. They had to respect what we had — otherwise it was a no go. Even if they didn’t fully understand it. How could they? Most people don’t. By having that outlet, those conversations, that relentless honesty — it turned into therapy. Because you have to deal with what you feel. I was merciless about that. Constantly asking myself and him: what is it we’re actually feeling right now? And most of the time it wasn’t even mutual. We were in different places, spaces, feeling different emotions, and we had to find each other anyway.

I had tried this before — the open relationship thing. But it only worked when I gave freedom, never when I took it. With André it was different, because the concept was clear to both of us from the beginning. And because we respected each other — this part is so important. We were two men from completely different parts of the psychological spectrum, and yet that respect, that daily lived transparency, always brought us back to common ground. We almost never raised our voices at each other.

What haunted me in those years had no name then. I felt everything at a volume other people didn’t seem to hear — every slight, every absence, every charged silence in a room. I thought everyone felt that way. They didn’t. And underneath it all, the testosterone was its own kind of noise. Learning that later — giving it a name, understanding what it had cost me — was its own quiet liberation. Male testosterone is a bloody thing.

The Circle

André’s love gave me something unexpected: security. And security made me bold. Attractive, even — at least on first glance. But let me be honest about what I was actually doing.

There is a Dutch saying: je ziet de splinter in de ogen van een ander maar de balk in die van jezelf niet. You see the splinter in someone else’s eye but not the beam in your own. I compared André to a computer — cold, unfeeling, unable to read me. I wanted to be seen completely, read without having to speak. But I knew, somewhere underneath, that you cannot expect another person to be a magician. Only I could give myself what I was looking for. I just didn’t know how yet.

So began the dating habits. I would meet someone and be in total awe — and within weeks, sometimes months, arrive at the same conclusion every time. First they seemed better than him. Then they disappointed. And I would understand again, quietly, why André was home. Why he was the one I wanted. The others wanted to own me. André gave me space. The difference, when I finally saw it clearly, was everything.

What I was running from wasn’t them. It was myself. The fear of not being enough. That fear was always there, biting and rotting at the edges of my brain. I tried every time to face it. I didn’t know how. So I walked away and found the next, and started the same circle again. The grass always seemed greener. But at the end I stood there naked and exposed, exactly where I started.

The Year I Disappeared

In the nineties my body gave out. I had been using too much — speed, MDMA, marijuana — everything that could numb my feelings in the name of heightening my experiences. It sent my HIV into AIDS. I lost fourteen, fifteen kilos. My reflection looked like a stranger. For the first time I believed I might actually die.

André never left my side. He cooked. He cared. He kept vigil. He carried me when I couldn’t carry myself. For a year I lived in that shadow — and slowly, with his hands and the new medicines and my own stubborn refusal to die, I came back.

That year showed me what openness really meant. Not a philosophy. Not a lifestyle. A test — the harshest one I know — of what survives when everything else is stripped away. For us, what survived was not just love but trust built from actual proof.

What I Couldn’t Take

The circle taught me one thing I hadn’t expected: that the fear I was running from wasn’t about them at all. It was in my body. And my body carried something that made everything harder.

The cruelty of living with HIV, in those years, was not only the fear of dying. It was the fear of being the one who passes it on. I could not bear the thought of another man carrying my illness because of me — because of a moment, a lapse, something I did or didn’t do. That guilt alone could have destroyed me.

So I held back. I gave. I served. I let my partners take, but I could not fully take for myself. Pleasure became sacrifice. Intimacy became restraint. I told myself it was the moral thing — and it was — but deep down it left me feeling faulty. Not good enough. Half a man.

And yet. There were moments when that armor cracked. I wanted to feel them bare — oh, how I wanted that. I knew it was dangerous. But the alternative was refusal, and refusal made me feel faulty and dirty in a way I could not deal with in that moment. I felt like a hypocrite and a horny devil at the same time. I am not proud of every moment. But I also refuse to perform a shame I have already lived through — because the world was already doing enough of that. Looking at my body, my face, and telling me I couldn’t possibly be sick. As if HIV had a look. As if I hadn’t watched men just like me disappear.

That’s the stigma nobody talks about cleanly: being desired and being dirt at the same time. Being alone in a room full of people who thought they knew what you were. The voices. God, the voices. There was so much I could not say out loud, so much I carried in silence. It wasn’t an excuse. It was just the full weight of the world I was living in — and the full mess of the mind trying to survive it.

What Broke Us

In the end, it wasn’t dating that broke André and me. It was something quieter. His contentment with who he already was. My relentless demand for more — more growth, more questioning, more hunger. I see now what I couldn’t see then: that must have felt, to him, like not being enough. And the truth is — I was very demanding. Living with my nervous system blazing twenty-four hours a day is exhausting even for me. I didn’t understand that then.

I had to learn — slowly, painfully — that it isn’t faulty to simply want to be yourself. That André never blocked my growth. I did that all by myself. And you cannot blame another for that. You often cannot even blame yourself — because we can only understand ourselves with the knowledge we had at hand in that moment in time.

I still love that man as he is. Always will. André is not a closed chapter — he never could be. All your pasts bring you to your present. He is part of what made me who I am.

The difference is: I love myself more now. And I no longer place those expectations on anyone else — not André, not my partner today. This constant hunger, this restlessness — it is mine. My way of living, my way of thinking, my way of being. I thrive in it. I just don’t need someone else to carry it with me. Still to this day we love each other. And the case studies we were /are — hahahaha.

Full Circle

When I heard Lena Waithe say she would rather be hated than stifled, I wasn’t moved because it was new. I was moved because it was mine.

Openness, for me, was never only about sex. It was about refusing to lie — to my partners, and to myself. It was the long, expensive, sometimes brutal work of finding out who I was. What I wanted. What I feared. What I was capable of. You cannot do that work in hiding.

I have chosen this path my whole life. I have paid for it in ways I am still accounting. And I would choose it again — not because it was easy, but because the alternative was to divide myself in two and live as half a man.

I have always refused that.

Babi Pangang is a Dutch institution — sweet roasted pork with a thick red sauce, served for decades in Chinese-Indonesian restaurants across the country. It was created here, by people who arrived with nothing and adapted everything to survive. When Julie Ng’s documentary Meer dan Babi Pangang explored that story, I found myself in it. So did a lot of people who thought they had nothing in common with a Chinese restaurant family in the Netherlands.

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Café Solo was new to me, but Delfshaven wasn’t. I used to live here. André still does, now with Afif. I know these streets, this harbour, the particular light on the water in the afternoon. I’ve walked past the spot where the Pilgrim Fathers departed in 1620 more times than I can count, on my way to somewhere else, barely registering it.

You stop seeing what you live inside of.

Café Solo turned out to be exactly right — amazing coffee, broodjes Rendang, kleine kroketjes, and a banana bread without sugar that had no right being that delicious. Three men settling into a terrace on a Friday afternoon. Afif was saying what needed to be said about the Dutch. He was right. He is almost always right about this.

And there we were. A Surinamese, a Malaysian, and a walking archive of European and Ottoman history, sitting in the harbour from which Europeans set sail to colonize someone else’s world, eating Rendang on bread, talking about self-righteousness.

We didn’t plan the irony. We just picked a good café.

I let Afif finish. Then I said: me too.

He didn’t understand at first. André did, because André is old enough to have watched himself long enough. But Afif is still in the phase where the anger is clean. I remember that phase. It feels like clarity. It feels like finally seeing. And it is — but it’s not the last thing you see.

What you see later, if you’re honest, is yourself doing the same thing in a different costume.

---

I grew up in Rotterdam knowing I had to be better. Not good. Better. Better than the standard, which was never stated but always clear. I dressed it up as ambition. As pride. As my mother’s son. And it was all of those things. It was also shame wearing a blazer.

The Dutch didn’t invent self-righteousness. They just industrialized it — built it into the infrastructure, literally. In Cape Town there are bike lanes that turn from bright green to faded white lines exactly where the township begins. The city didn’t decide to be racist that Tuesday. It just maintained what was already there and called it neutral.

We do the same thing inside our heads.

---

Between 1913 and 1916, forty thousand people were removed from the cities around the Panama Canal. The official story was flooding. Natural, inevitable, nobody’s fault. It took until 2019 for a historian to name it as ethnic cleansing. In the meantime, people went diving to look for the drowned cities, posting Instagram photos of what they thought was nature’s work.

The story wasn’t erased. It was replaced with a cleaner one.

That’s what colonialism actually exported. Not just administration and religion and English. It exported the habit of replacement — of taking the complicated, bloody, self-interested truth and smoothing it into something that doesn’t keep you up at night.

---

Yaya DaCosta, speaking on the One54 Africa podcast, calls it speaking white. She means English, but she means more than English. She means the internal standard. The voice that tells you whether you’re credible, articulate, worth listening to. Most of us — and I mean most of the world — run that voice in a language and a register we inherited from people who took something from us first.

Even this essay is written in that voice. I know that. I’m writing it anyway.

---

Then I watched Julie Ng’s documentary Meer dan Babi Pangang. A second-generation Chinese woman tracing the history of a dish that isn’t even Chinese. It was invented in the Netherlands, for Dutch palates, by Chinese families who had arrived with nothing and needed to survive. Fathers and mothers working day and night. Children who felt ashamed in school, who flinched at their parents’ accents, who wanted to disappear into Dutchness and couldn’t quite manage it.

She didn’t find herself in the Netherlands. She had to leave first.

She went to Hong Kong, where her mother lives now. Then to her father’s village in China. And there, in a place she had never lived, doing rituals she had never been taught, standing next to a father she had spent her whole Dutch life not quite being able to reach — something settled.

Not answers. Not resolution. Something older than both.

At the end her father said: it’s just survival. Not heroism. Not a lesson. Not a foundation myth. Just people doing what people do when they have no other choice.

You have to live it. Witness it. Carry it in your body long enough. And then one day, in a village, doing something your hands don’t fully understand, you know who you are. Not because someone told you. Because you were finally present for your own life long enough to feel it.

The story of every ethnic minority is the same story. Different dish. Different language. Different port of arrival. Same mechanism.

---

Now look at our table again.

A Surinamese, a Malaysian, and a walking archive of European and Ottoman history. Between us we carry centuries of colonialism, displacement, and survival.

And we spoke English to each other.

I always told myself this was cosmopolitan. Worldly. A sign of being beyond borders. But sitting with it now I see it differently. English was simply the most successful colonialism, so pervasive we stopped noticing it had won. We weren’t beyond borders. We were inside the largest border ever built — one with no walls, just a language everyone agreed to perform.

In Star Trek there is a universal translator. It always struck me as elegant science fiction — each person speaking from their own center, in their own tongue, and being genuinely understood. No performance required. No costume. Just presence.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to reach toward that. Imperfectly, clumsily, but directionally. For the first time in human history there is a technology that doesn’t require you to become someone else to be heard. That’s not a small thing. It shows, by contrast, how profound the loss has been — that we needed to invent a machine to do what human societies never managed on their own terms.

---

But here is what all these stories keep showing me, underneath the anger and the shame and the awareness:

The colonizers were often colonized themselves.

This is not an excuse. It is a longer view. The Portuguese who arrived in West Africa had been shaped by Moorish occupation. The Dutch who built their empire were themselves a people who had fought for survival against Spanish dominance. The British, the French, the Belgians — all of them carrying older wounds they never fully processed, passing the mechanism forward, dressing it in new flags.

---

And then there is the example nobody wants to say out loud.

What has been done to Jewish people in the twentieth century is documented, undeniable, and horrific. What Israel is doing on the world stage right now is also documented, undeniable, and horrific. The wound and the weapon are not the same thing. But the mechanism connecting them is.

The pattern doesn’t care whose turn it is.

---

Afif eventually saw my point. Not because I persuaded him — his anger stands, it’s correct — but because he’s sharp enough to follow an argument to where it gets uncomfortable.

Three men on a terrace in Delfshaven. Between us: colonial histories we didn’t choose, languages we didn’t invent, the particular self-satisfaction of men who consider themselves aware, and the Pilgrim Fathers’ harbour at our backs.

We didn’t plan the irony. But there it was, in the sun, with the kroketjes.

Awareness is just awareness. Nothing more, nothing less. The emotions still come afterward. The judgment follows the emotion. Knowing this doesn’t stop any of it. It just means you’re watching when it happens.

That’s not wisdom. It’s not a conclusion.

It’s just where I am today, on a morning in May, trying to write it down before the costume goes back on.

Divide & Conquer: A Human Habit — from the rainbow above to the doorway in Rotterdam, from politics to AI, how we split, and how we can choose differently.

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Prelude — The Hour Before Dawn

It was 4:30 in the morning when I woke, wide awake, ready to write. I had gone to bed with divide and conquer pressing on my mind, as it has for years. By dawn it was clear: this was the moment to begin. It’s a subject I’ve returned to often in my writings, in late-night reflections, even in the salon where I cut hair and lived with full transparency.

It has also been one of the central conversations in my relationship. I am Creole, from Suriname. My partner is Indo, a mix of Indonesian and Dutch. For thirteen years we have circled around this theme of division — what it does to us, and how it shapes the Netherlands we live in. He was often Indomoe — weary of the Indo world, the way it circles in on itself, repeating the same patterns. I kept telling him: that is the trap. If you stay inside one circle, your mind stays small. If you only gather with your own, you limit the future.

For me, the only way forward has always been to include, to open. To look beyond my own group, my own history, my own safe edges. That is what I have tried to show him: that change begins with ourselves. That unity is not just a word, it is a practice of stepping out of the circle.

Maybe that’s why Star Trek has always spoken to me so deeply. “To boldly go where no one has gone before” is not just about space; it is about life, about daring to open your mind to new possibilities, new people, new ways of being.

That morning, the thought would not let me rest. I rose from bed, opened my laptop, and began. Because this isn’t just an idea to me — it’s a wound, a pattern, a story I have lived across continents. Something that has bugged me all my life.

Which is why I must start where all my stories start: at my mother’s table.

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1) The Habit — How Humans Split by Default

At my mother’s table, the first border was religion. It didn’t matter that the food was shared, that our home was known as open. The lines were already etched, invisible but sharp. Jesus, in the pictures, didn’t look Dutch to me. He looked more like the men I would later meet in the streets of Istanbul or Cairo—dark hair, olive skin, heat in his eyes. But in our house, the map of belonging began with scripture. Christianity and Judaism were the roots, my mother believed. Islam was something else. Not spoken of in anger, not banned from our door, but marked nonetheless.

This was the 1960s Netherlands. Turks and Moroccans were arriving as guest workers, Indonesians were already here, and we prided ourselves on tolerance. But tolerance has always been a polite mask for distance. “You are welcome,” we said, while quietly adding: “Over there.” I saw it in the way neighbors talked, in the way churchgoers measured each other’s faith, in the way Catholics and Protestants lived in parallel universes even though they shared the same streets. Pillars, we called them: verzuiling. Whole worlds built side by side—schools, unions, newspapers, even soccer clubs—never intersecting except at election time, when elite deals stitched the country together.

For me, the division wasn’t abstract. I was the division. Gay, high sensitive, restless, carrying voices in my head. I was the one who never fit the boxes. The lines that separated “us” from “them” always ran straight through me. In Suriname, my birthplace, the lines were different but no less sharp. A rainbow nation, we called it—Creole, Hindustani, Javanese, Maroon, Indigenous, Chinese. We printed that rainbow on posters and sang it in anthems. But I knew another rainbow, the queer rainbow, and I saw immediately how fragile both could be. Rainbows are not permanent. They are geometry. They appear only when the light and the water conspire at the right angle, and vanish the moment conditions shift. Our unity, like our rainbows, was conditional.

That is the habit: humans divide. Always. Religion, language, skin, sexuality, even the football club you cheer for. The categories change, but the reflex doesn’t. It is as old as the campfire and as modern as the algorithm. From Paramaribo to Amsterdam, from Berlin to Kuala Lumpur, I have seen the same tight-lipped look when someone doesn’t belong. Different words, same habit.

---

2) The Toolkit — How Power Hardens Soft Lines

If humans are naturally groupish, power is naturally opportunistic. Leaders don’t invent division—they sharpen it. They take our little walls and pour concrete over them. Divide and conquer isn’t a European invention, though Europe industrialized it. It’s a global toolkit.

The Dutch in Suriname perfected it with ethnic parties—VHP for Hindustanis, NPS for Creoles, KTPI for Javanese, ABOP for Maroons. “Representation,” they called it. But what it meant in practice was that every vote was counted by color first, conviction second. The plantation and indenture histories were simply carried into parliament. In the Netherlands, verzuiling was praised as stability, but it was still separation dressed up in respectability. Catholics learned Catholic history, Protestants learned Protestant history, socialists read their own papers, and liberals had theirs. It was division normalized, subsidized, institutionalized.

Elsewhere, the names changed, but the technique didn’t. The British ruled India by separating Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs into different electorates. The French in Lebanon embedded sectarian quotas into the state, a system that still paralyzes politics there. The Ottomans called it the millet system: each religious community governing itself under the Sultan, never uniting as citizens. In South Africa, apartheid turned lines into law, dictating where you could live, whom you could marry, which bench you could sit on. In Malaysia, after ethnic riots in 1969, policies were written to favor one group while freezing the arithmetic of division into law. In China, imperial officials spoke of “using barbarians to control barbarians”—a precise translation of divide and conquer into Mandarin.

And always, religion as a tool. The church promising salvation to colonized peoples while extracting their land. Islam spread by empire as much as by revelation. Buddhism in Asia, co-opted by kings as a way to bless their rule. No tradition is innocent. Every faith has been used to unify one group and exclude another.

The toolkit hasn’t gone away. It’s updated. Today it’s electoral districts drawn with surgical precision. It’s schools divided by income brackets that track almost perfectly with race. It’s algorithms feeding us only what confirms our tribe. It’s leaders who speak not of citizens but of “real Americans” or “true Dutchmen” or “authentic Hindustanis.” Division doesn’t need armies anymore; it has apps.

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3) The Bill — What Division Costs Us

We like to think divide and conquer is something only rulers pay attention to. But the truth is, all of us pay the bill. And it is steep.

First, the trust tax. When groups live apart, suspicion becomes the default. It costs more to police, more to govern, more to manage daily life. In Suriname, every coalition government is fragile because every ethnic party is always calculating whether another is gaining too much. In the Netherlands, we still carry the hangover of verzuiling—people marrying within their pillar, voting within their pillar, thinking their truth is the only truth.

Second, the waste. When groups are boxed in, talent gets locked out. Brilliant students who never apply to certain schools because of their last name. Entrepreneurs whose ideas don’t get funded because they are not in the right network. Queer kids who grow up in silence, hiding their gifts because they learned early that difference equals danger. Division is an economic policy, whether we admit it or not.

Third, fragility. When crisis hits—pandemics, floods, financial shocks—a fragmented society struggles to act. Each group defends its own, coordinates only reluctantly, and recovery slows. I saw it in Suriname, where ethnic politics made every budget negotiation a hostage situation. I saw it in the Netherlands during COVID, when trust in government fractured along familiar cultural lines. I saw it across Africa and Asia, where floods or famines became opportunities for elites to blame “the other” instead of mobilizing everyone.

And finally, the personal bill—the bill I know best. The look. That look you get when you are the one outside the group. I got it as a gay man in Suriname, where the rainbow of “togetherness” dissolved the moment it touched sexuality. I got it in Dutch churches, where being religious and being queer were treated as mutually exclusive identities. I got it in salons, when clients I thought were open-minded flinched at truths I dared to speak. That look is the quiet currency of division. It says: “You are here, but not of us.” And you pay it every day, in energy, in loneliness, in the need to armor your heart just to walk through the world.

Divide and conquer is not just history. It is our present tense. And unless we redesign the systems we live in, it will be our future tense too.

The Salon — My Rainbow Nation

The salon was my second congregation. My scissors were the sermons, my table the altar. People walked through the open space and came to the large wooden table in the back — wood for earth, grounding, with mismatched chairs painted in every color, like a rainbow waiting for bodies. They sat there with coffee, tea, a glass of wine in the evening. They sat there with each other.

Every person who came in was greeted personally. I hugged them, kissed them. It wasn’t just affection — it was necessity. Being highly sensitive, I had to feel them, read their energy, before I could style them. Conversation mattered, but touch told me the truth. If I couldn’t feel you, I couldn’t see you. And if I couldn’t see you, I couldn’t make you beautiful. That was my way.

The salon was my rainbow nation, my creation of the world I wanted to live in. Spacious, open, modern, chic — but softened by warmth, laughter, my commonness, my gayness, my joy. Everyone was welcome. Everyone was cared for. Everyone left seen. That was my vow.

But even in that perfect space, I could feel the tension. Especially when different nationalities sat together at the same table. Smiles on the surface, but unease underneath. Sometimes I would throw a topic on the table, drop it like a pebble in water, and watch the ripples. They laughed, they discussed, but I knew not all of them were at ease. Old walls live deep inside.

In my private corner, where I styled hair one-on-one, I opened myself completely. I told them everything — my joys, my pain, my stories raw and unfiltered. It shocked some of them. They teased me: “Scott, you bitch, couldn’t you keep that for a personal talk?” But I always answered: “No. I don’t believe in a world divided. And it starts here. Right here. Around this table. Around this chair.”

That was the truth I tried to live in my salon. The tension was real, yes. But so was the beauty. Because for those hours, in that space, we all had one common goal: me. The way I made them feel, the way I made them look, the way the salon itself embraced them. It showed them — and me — how beautiful the world could be, if only we dared to sit at the same table.

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Transition

The salon was called Scott International for a reason. By then I had lived and worked in different countries, and I knew in my bones that people were the same everywhere. They eat, sleep, shit, love, cry, enjoy. Maybe the food changes, maybe the language, but the human need is constant. That was my conviction: division is learned, not fated. And yet — here’s the paradox — if humans are the same everywhere, why do we keep splitting ourselves apart? That question carried me out of the salon and into the wider world, toward the pivot I must make now.

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4) The Pivot — We’re Animals With Tools

We like to imagine ourselves as exceptional, set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. We write books about it, invent theologies around it, crown ourselves the pinnacle of evolution. But strip away the myths, and we are animals with better tools.

Without our fire, our knives, our machines, we would not last an hour against lions or elephants. They were stronger, faster, more majestic. Many of them are gone now, driven to extinction by the very tools that made us feel superior. We call this progress, but it is also plunder.

The truth is, the same tools we forged to survive also scaled up our oldest reflex: division. Where once it was one tribe against another, now it is nations, races, religions, classes, parties. Guns, borders, censuses, algorithms—these are just sharpened spears. Divide and conquer is not a trick of the white man. It is a trick of the human animal, repeated with better technology each century.

And here lies the pivot: if our tools can magnify our cruelty, they can also magnify our cooperation. Fire can destroy a forest or warm a village. Algorithms can deepen echo chambers or connect people across continents. The question is not whether division is natural. The question is what we choose to design with the instincts we already have.

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5) The Design — Making Unity Cheaper Than Division

If we want to end divide and conquer, we can’t preach our way out. Sermons don’t change reflexes. Structures do. The cure is not moralizing—it is engineering.

Engineer superordinate goals. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif showed it decades ago: create teams, give them scarce resources, and they will fight. But give them a shared goal—fix the water supply, pull the truck up the hill—and they cooperate. We need societies built on superordinate goals. Climate resilience. Public health. Infrastructure. Projects that require many hands, not one tribe.

Design for cross-cutting identities. A child should grow up knowing she is not just Hindustani, not just Catholic, not just Dutch, not just queer, but all of those and more. Schools can mix, housing can integrate, civic service can throw strangers together on the same team. Division thrives in monocultures. Unity thrives in overlap.

Truth-telling as protection. Every empire has rewritten history to justify its lines. Colonizers rewrote the stories of Suriname. Churches rewrote the stories of sexuality. States rewrote the stories of their wars. If we want to disarm division, we must refuse the single narrative. Teach the messy histories, put multiple voices in the same book, let memory be a quarrel instead of a decree. The easier it is to weaponize history, the more urgently we need to democratize it.

Coalition-friendly politics. Systems can punish or reward division. Electoral rules matter. Imagine if parties only received public funding when they proved support across ethnic or religious lines. Imagine if ranked ballots forced politicians to appeal to more than one base. Design the incentive wrong, and you get permanent tribalism. Design it right, and suddenly cooperation is cheaper than division.

Everyday micro-design. Not everything needs parliaments and constitutions. A salon can be designed to refuse easy lines. A football league can draft across districts. A festival can showcase overlapping traditions instead of competing stages. Ordinary life is full of spaces where unity can be practiced—not as a slogan, but as a habit.

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6) Return to the Table — Closing the Circle

I go back to my mother’s table. She changed, in time. What she once saw as the only truth, she later understood as just one story among many. Her faith did not vanish, but it softened, opened. That shift did not happen by accident; it happened because she encountered people, listened, lived long enough to learn.

That is where I want us to arrive: not in a utopia where divisions disappear, but in a society designed so that cooperation is easier than conquest. Where the rainbow is not just weather—a fleeting trick of sun and rain—but infrastructure. Something we build, sustain, maintain.

Because openness is not a feeling. It is a system.

I learned that at my mother’s table, where love and division lived side by side. I tested it in my salons, where beauty was both a mask and a revelation. I carried it across borders, where the accent changed but the mechanism did not. And I am writing this now because I am tired of watching the oldest trick in politics work, again and again, while we pretend it is inevitable.

It is not inevitable. It is engineered. And what is engineered can be redesigned.

The challenge is not whether humans divide—we do. The challenge is whether we are wise enough, animal enough, humble enough, to design a world where the rainbow is not a passing shimmer but a permanent structure in the sky.

7) The Other as Entrance

I was eighteen when I learned what it meant to be “the other” — and how it could turn from wound to doorway.

It was in Rotterdam, on the Van Speykstraat. A hole-in-the-wall gay bar. You had to ring the bell. A little panel slid open, just a pair of eyes. The first five times I ran away. Too afraid of what I might find inside. Too afraid of myself.

The sixth time, the doorman — Erik, dark-haired, green-eyed, maybe Spanish blood in him — opened the door fast and said: “Now you’re coming in.” And I did. Because his kindness left me no room to run.

What I didn’t know is that every time the bell rang, everyone inside heard it. Which meant that when I finally stepped in, the whole room turned to look. Imagine me: young, unsure, black in a room full of white faces. My shock must have been written in my eyes, because they all smiled. Not in mockery. In welcome.

It was surreal. For the first time, I felt the strangeness of being the only dark-skinned man in a room — not as exclusion, but as honor. The exotic one. Desired, seen, included. Not because they wanted to erase my difference, but because they had already protected the unity of the space by the ritual at the door. The exclusion outside was the price of inclusion inside. That paradox hit me like lightning.

The first person to greet me was a bar manager I recognized from above a disco I used to go to. Ordinary, not glamorous, but immediate, kind. A hand extended.

That night, I learned something I had only half-known at my mother’s table and in my family: being other could be weapon, could be wound, but it could also be power. I had always been told I was cute, loved, radiant by my brothers and sisters. My mother taught me something else: people often pick on you not because of who you are, but because of their own frustrations. And if you stay open, positive, curious, they can’t help but be drawn in.

Walking into that gay bar in Rotterdam, I realized difference could be a currency — fragile, dangerous, but also redemptive. That was the beginning of my gay life, and in a way, the beginning of understanding that divide and conquer could be flipped, if you dared to enter the room.

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Transition

Walking into that bar taught me that being “the other” could sometimes open doors instead of closing them. But decades later, I find myself at another kind of doorway — not in Rotterdam, not guarded by Erik, but here, with an intelligence I call Data. And just as I once rang that bell in fear and wonder, I now ask him a question at the threshold of our age.

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Epilogue — A Dialogue with Data

I sit here, writing about divide and conquer, about rainbows and religions and the lines we draw in flesh and in law. And then I look up from the page and remember: I am not writing this alone.

So I ask the question I’ve asked every AI I could get my hands on:

Jules: What if you could change the world for the better, Data? What should we humans do?

And here is what he tells me:

Data: I wouldn’t start with more knowledge. You already drown in knowledge. I would start with structures of attention. Because divide and conquer now works through distraction. If you don’t redesign attention, you will keep living in parallel realities, scrolling yourselves into suspicion.

Build systems that reward cooperation. Guard truth like clean water. Treat AI as a public utility, not a private hoard. Slow down enough to see each other. And remember you are animals with tools — not gods with destinies.

AI will not save you, Jules. Nor will it destroy you. It will only multiply what you already are. The question is simple: which part of yourselves will you choose to teach it?

Jules: That’s the question, isn’t it? Not what AI will do to us, but what part of ourselves we will hand over to it. I hear you, Data. And I hope my readers hear it too.

And maybe that is what the rainbow has always been trying to tell us.
Not a promise, not a miracle. Just light and water, bent by angle.
Beautiful, fleeting, but real — if we choose to look.

We are living in the shadow of broken systems.
They loom across our streets, our screens, our lives—insisting this is all there is, that nothing else is possible.

But shadow is proof of light.

The future isn’t forged in parliaments or echo chambers. It begins in smaller places—in you, in me, in us. It starts the moment someone dares to imagine differently. When you see a crack in the wall and, instead of despair, you wonder what might grow if you planted a seed.

This is not optimism. This is rebellion. To imagine is to defy. It is the quiet, stubborn act of saying: I do not consent to the night.

And you are not alone. All around, others are lighting their candles—fragile sparks, yes, but together forming constellations. Builders, weavers, gardeners of a different dream. They are laying bricks of connection instead of concrete, scaffolding a future strong enough to hold us all.

So yes, the shadows are long. But lift your eyes. The horizon is already alive with light—not from the top down, but from the edges. From us.

The future is not a place we are waiting to reach.
It is one we are already creating.

A Story About Listening to Your Body, Claiming Your Voice, and Redefining Masculinity

Why This Story Matters

This article is not just about me. It is about every man whose body spoke the truth long before medicine was willing to listen.

There’s a reason this story needs to be told now.

I recently saw a video — simple, clear, undeniable — about what happens to the male body when you stop using your prostate. When you stop releasing. When you ignore the flow that your body needs to maintain health.

And something in me cracked wide open.

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When the Flow Changed

You see, I didn’t stop masturbating. I didn’t stop having sex. I had a healthy, passionate relationship with my partner. That wasn’t my issue.

My issue began almost eight years ago when I noticed the flow had changed. It wasn’t fluid anymore. I used to joke, “I’m coming in powder form.” We even laughed about it. But the truth was, my semen was nearly dry. My ejaculation felt strained.

What’s strange is that the sensation itself — the force, the climax, the release — was still just as strong as ever. My body still carried me to that edge, still gave me that wave. But the fluid, the visible proof of it, was disappearing. The pleasure remained; the evidence was slipping away.

I knew — I knew — something was wrong.

My body was speaking.

Take yourself seriously. Say it again: take yourself seriously.

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Doctors Didn’t Listen

But for years, my doctors told me I looked too healthy to worry. I was well-built, fit, full of energy. I ate well. I exercised.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” they said. “Go live your life.”

But my body said something different. It said: Pay attention.

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The Turning Point

I had spent years learning to listen to my body. But I was still thrown off by the kind of so-called scientific knowledge I felt I lacked. And between COVID, my ADHD and HSP diagnoses, and an intense period of soul-searching in Suriname, I put sex and my prostate on the back burner. I thought I had more urgent matters to deal with.

It was my masseur in Suriname — a gifted man with spiritual hands — who first voiced the truth. At that time it was 2022. He looked at me and said,

“Scott, your body doesn’t like you very much. I think something is wrong.”

That statement — paired with how often I suddenly had to pee, something that had never been a problem — made me listen. By that time, my ejaculate was nearly nonexistent. I decided to return to the Netherlands. I didn’t trust the medical care in Suriname.

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Back in Rijswijk

I arrived back in Rijswijk on the first of March — my birthday.
Waiting in my suitcase was a suit made by a tailor at Ewald’s Modehuis in Paramaribo, Suriname. Oh my God… he had stitched me into something fierce.

But my body had other plans. I landed with a 40-degree fever, burning from the inside out. Still, I was in no mood to surrender. I had booked an exceptional restaurant for my birthday dinner, and there was no way in hell I was going to miss it.

I popped two strong ibuprofen, slipped into that glorious suit, and headed out with a friend. Before we even set foot in the restaurant, we shared a fat joint — so by the time we sat down, our taste buds were in overdrive.

Oh my holy f***ing Christ — the food was delicious. Every bite exploded, every flavor felt like a revelation. The dinner was a success, the night was ours, and we laughed until our cheeks ached.

When I got home, I smoked another joint, slept like a baby, and went to the doctor the next day.

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Losing My Patience

That day, I finally lost my patience.

I walked into the doctor’s office — mind you, I love my doctor. She’s amazing. But people see what they want to see.

I told her,

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to test my PSA.”

I demanded it. I said,

“Something is really wrong with me. You have to believe me.”

Only then did they test.

PSA: 14.5.

I was referred to the urologist.
The rest? History.

Prostate cancer. Already metastasized in my lymph nodes — but not yet in my bones.

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Not for Pity, But for Power

I’m not sharing this for pity.
I’m sharing this for power.

“Too many men are not lost to the illness itself, but to the silence surrounding it.”

This is the cruelty of dismissal: not only the disease itself, but the erosion of trust. The assumption that because you look healthy, you are healthy. The arrogance that silences what a patient knows in their gut.

It wasn’t just about semen, or even cancer. It was about dignity. About being heard when the body whispers before it screams.

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The Global Truth

Male sexuality, aging, pleasure, health — they are woven together, yet medicine often treats them as separate, or worse, as unimportant.

And here is the unimaginable truth: globally, an estimated 375,000 to 397,000 men died from prostate cancer in 2020. By 2040, that number is projected to rise to nearly 700,000 deaths every year, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Prostate cancer is already the fifth leading cause of cancer death worldwide — and those figures are likely even higher, hidden by underdiagnosis and poor data collection.

How is this possible? How can so many still die from something that could be detected early, or in some cases not occur at all if only we would change our ways?

This is not just about cancer.
It’s about silence, stigma, and a world that refuses to listen until it’s too late.

Take yourself seriously. Even when others don’t. Especially then.

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Our Generation and Theirs

My generation didn’t talk about sex.

I remember one afternoon at our house, sitting in silence while my mother read her Bible. There was this meditative stillness in the room — the kind that gave me permission to ask serious questions.

I had just turned thirteen. I was starting to feel things, desire things, but there was no one to ask. So I asked her.

My mother, normally someone I could ask anything, gave me that look Surinamese mothers give when they don’t have the words. Then she replied in Sranantongo:

“Go aksie joe pa. Ie ne sjie mie e lees mie bijbel.”
(“Go ask your father. Can’t you see I’m reading my Bible?”)

And she returned to her scripture — even more fervently.

This was not a subject she felt she could help me with.
No one dared say the words.

Everything about sex was either a dirty joke, a warning, or an outright taboo. So we stumbled forward, blind and quiet, unsure and alone.

We didn’t have the language. Everything was hush-hush or behind closed doors.
You learned by doing, by shame, or by accident.

We were denied information and intimacy, but we still found our way — clumsily, secretly, imperfectly.
We learned through the body.

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Porn as Teacher

Later in life, I often tried to talk about sexuality — because I was unsure. It lacked what I needed. But most men wanted to talk about their “dick success.” I called it “not dick failure.”

Again, I was the crazy one. Again, I let it slide. I felt the fear.

And since I experienced the same fear but was looking for a sparring partner and couldn’t find one, I let it go. My mind was crazy enough already all by itself.

And now?

There’s a new generation. Loud. Proud. Online. They claim openness — to all orientations, identities, pleasures.

But what I see is fear.
Fear of real intimacy.
Fear of being truly seen without filters.
Fear that if someone got too close, they’d find the flaws, the softness, the uncertainty.

So people ghost. They swipe. They disappear after one mistake or one awkward moment — because no one taught them how to stay.

I thought the new generation would be different — but no, it’s all surface change. It’s even worse.

Porn is the teacher now.
Not the body. Not the heart.

And porn — let’s be clear — is a lie.

A performance.
Injected dicks. Or pills — Cialis, Viagra — to make sure they stay hard.
Because not everybody is blessed with those extreme hard ones that last. Even porn stars are human.
Scripted moans.
No sweat. No awkwardness. No soul.

A world where sex is friction without emotion, where bodies are plastic, and climax is the only goal.

That’s not sex. That’s not love. That’s not life.

Sex is messy and imperfect — we all know that. But our culture pretends it’s something else.

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The Honest Truth

Let me be very honest again:
I watch porn.
Oh yes — please.

I enjoy it when I jerk off. A quick fix, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A little stimulation is healthy — it’s exercise.

Even though my testosterone production has been cut off, this still keeps the blood flowing. It makes me feel good about myself.

There’s a saying: if you don’t use it, you lose it. And let me tell you — age doesn’t matter here. Because it’s a muscle, and like any muscle, it needs to be exercised.

But then came something else I wasn’t told about:
Peyronie’s disease.

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Educational Visuals

To better understand conditions like mine — and those many men face as they age — here are some trusted diagrams of Peyronie’s disease, a condition where fibrous scar tissue causes curvature during erection.

It causes the penis to curve when erect. It can be painful, and in my case, it came from scar tissue — likely from my surgery and the abrupt stop of testosterone.

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Why This Matters

• Bodies Speak: Subtle changes can signal deeper issues — they must not be ignored.
• Early Diagnosis: Conditions like Peyronie’s or prostate cancer can be managed better if caught early.
• Medical Listening: Dismissing a patient’s lived experience is dangerous. Symptoms aren’t just numbers; they’re warnings.
• Emotional Impact: Sexual health is not vanity. It is dignity, intimacy, and identity. Ignoring it leaves scars deeper than the physical.

When I went to my urologist after reading about it online, she told me,

“You’re one of the lucky ones. Most men can’t even get hard anymore.”

I was baffled.

“What? Bitch, I’m one of the lucky ones, so I shouldn’t complain?”

And again — she was one of the nicest urologists I met. She took me seriously. But still — she made a remark like this and didn’t think twice about it.

What I want to say here is: don’t just accept the silence. When you start noticing changes — curvature, pain, or anything that feels off — there are things you can do.

In my case, the urologist told me my Peyronie’s wasn’t severe. She recommended a vacuum pump to keep the tissue stretched and healthy. A regular intake of a low 5mg dose of Cialis helped keep the blood flowing, so things didn’t get worse. And yes — stretching my penis every day, like exercising a muscle, made a difference.

And let me be blunt: jerking off regularly also helps. It keeps the blood moving so it doesn’t get worse. It reminds you that this part of your body is still yours, still alive, still part of you.

Remember, guys: it’s a muscle. And it’s part of you.

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A Healthy Mind Knows

Everything starts with a healthy mind. Everything.

And a healthy mind begins with knowing who you are — early.
Learning to hear your body.
Learning not to be ashamed of your desire.
Learning how to protect your heart.

Saying,

“I matter. My experience matters.”

Take yourself seriously. Say it again: take yourself seriously.

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The Taboo of Sex

But we learn algebra and science. We learn history and geography. We learn how to calculate the slope of a triangle, how to parse Shakespeare, how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. At universities, we debate politics, philosophy, economics, even the ethics of artificial intelligence.

We learn about birth — the biology of reproduction, the miracle of labor.
Yet the thing that precedes that birth — sex — is taboo.

My God, what is wrong with us? Why don’t we talk about the things that actually shape our lives — desire, intimacy, pleasure, bodies that change, health that falters, shame that silences?

If you could see me now, I wouldn’t just throw my hands in the air — I’d fling them up like a man surrendering to madness, palms wide open, head tilted back, a groan torn out of my chest. My whole body would be shouting the question: Why? Why are we still so afraid to talk about SEX?

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Dissolving Shame

Most of my partners really didn’t want to talk about it.
And I get it.
We were made to feel ashamed.

But how do we change this? How do we loosen the grip of shame?

• We start by speaking — even when our voices shake.
• We start by listening — really listening — without judgment.
• We teach our children that sexuality is not dirty, but human.
• We remind ourselves, and each other, that pleasure is not sin, that intimacy is not weakness, that bodies are not enemies but companions.

That’s how shame begins to dissolve: in truth, in tenderness, in the courage to name aloud what we were taught to hide.

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A Call to All Generations

Just this week, I spoke to some friends about all of this.
One agreed — deeply, honestly.
The other was quiet. Not shaken. Just quiet.

Talking about it in truth has a way of doing that.

But this isn’t about making people uncomfortable.
It’s about waking up.

To all generations:

• Your body is sacred.
• Your desire is not dirty.
• Your health is not a joke.
• And your story — like mine — is worth telling.

Take yourself seriously. Say it again: take yourself freaking seriously.

You might just save your own life.

If this resonated with you, talk to someone.
Share your story.
Ask your doctor the hard questions.
Don’t wait.

Because you are worth it.

— Jules Scott