Our house…
in the middle of my life

It’s funny how “the house“ has become this entity, a being of its own. (“Whats the house doing?”, “The house went out last night“). Maybe that’s what makes it so special, it gives you the idea of belonging to something bigger than yourself, something rare, something special. Something so unique that you will think back on it for the rest of your life, cherishing good memories about people that probably live within a different world by then.

Cause thats the flip side of being part of something that’s more than the sum of its parts: the parts themselves cease to embody the entirety of what they once made up. Ideally, they become something else to you, develop a new meaning. Something that can seize you in a way that reminds you of what was and still manages to touch you in a different and independent way.
As far as I can remember I have always been looking for a sense of belonging within groups. The first time I understood what it means to belong was when I joined the scouts at age 12. Later in my teens I joined a band and spent my high-school years with those guys.

While hitchhiking around Europe for a couple of months after I graduated from high school, I stayed in several free communities and realized that living collectively was something that I enjoyed. When I moved to Amsterdam in 2017, I moved into my current home, a student house of 30. With these 30 people I not just share a front door, but a kitchen, showers, toilets and a roof terrace. For me, living with so many other individuals was a conscious choice, something that I was seeking out. As I settled into my new home I was lucky to not just find a communal living space but a new set of friends, a safe haven, people to share my life with.

The house that I live in is everything but your standard student house. To visitors, it often seems more like a squat than a rental house. I still remember exactly the first time I entered the house and thought to myself „this is perfect“. Like Pipi Longstockings Villa Villekulla, it looks and feels like a place where childhood dreams come true. Like in Peter Pans Never Never land, grownups don’t exist and the kids rule their very own ruleless world. It’s a place to try out ideas and ideals, to learn about collectivity and kindness, love and envy, friendship, brother and sisterhood and what it means to feel like you truly belong.

When I entered the house I was pretty young, just 21, and I looked at it as an amazing adventure playground that held all these new experiences for me. I was curious and excited and absolutely thrilled. My new housemates soon became my main social group. I didn’t make many friends at art school, but frankly, I didn’t really care. All I cared about was getting home as quick as I could after classes ended, to be with these people again that took me in as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Without any further question I had become a member of the collective after I got picked at the hospitieravond. I watched this sort of natural fusion of new housemates with the entirety of the house collective happen to others that came in after me and it fascinated me how eventually it felt as if they always had been there. For some, it took a bit longer than for others, but the ones that stayed, really merged in eventually.

The house kept its promise of promiscuity and hedonistic experimentation and for a year or two this was exactly what I was looking for. I realized later that this place can be many different things, depending what you are looking for.

After failing the first year of my study, I decided that I needed to get my act straight and remember what I came to Amsterdam for: my study at the art academy. From that point on my presence in the house changed and so did my interactions with the collective. I wasn’t all over the place anymore but became more intentional  about who I talked to about what. I realized that for every social need I had there was someone that I could turn to, someone who was able to give me just what I needed in that moment. The beauty of sharing a house and life with thirty other humans is that you get to bask in the wisdom of thirty very different individuals simultaneously. Thirty different perspectives at hand, you get to learn from and through a collective mind.

Time passed and I settled more into my study, made friends outside of the house, got a boyfriend. I wasn’t spending that much time just hanging around in the kitchen anymore the way I used to do, but the importance, the meaning that the house held for me didn’t change.
I remember I was nervous when I brought my boyfriend along to a pub crawl organized by one of my housemates. He was meeting the whole bunch for the first time and I guess that it probably would have been a dealbreaker for me if he hadn’t liked them. It almost felt as if I was introducing him to my actual family. Everything went well though, he loved them and they were fond of him too and we all just had a great time that night. I was so happy. When he decided to move back to the States a year later I was pretty miserable. George had been my first true love, the first person that I felt like I could have spent a good part of my life with.

I went back to living at the house again full time, and the collective caught me, slowly built me up again and gave me the strength to find happiness and joy within myself once more. In the four years I’ve spent within this place so far, I shared my deepest secrets with the people around me, my best and my absolute worst moments, I’ve always had someone to laugh with and a shoulder to cry on. I’ve felt cared for, understood, seen, at home. In my housemates I found brothers and sisters, friends, lovers and even parents at times. They were for me everything a young adult in their 20s could ask for, and I hope I could be that for them too.

I have no clue what will be when I move out of this place. I guess some people will stick. I hope so at least. What I know for sure is that at some point within the next few years, the house will be gone, demolished, to make space for new, more expensive houses, a new neighbourhood in old Amsterdam. I don’t even think I mind, the place is a dump. I surely won’t miss the ever clogged and leaking plumbing, the mice in the ceiling or the paper thin walls dividing our bedrooms. After all, this ancient office building we live in is past its own time. I just hope that we all will keep it in good memory and that we can make the time until then worthwhile.