#125: Learning to trust the cycle of loss and new growth.
How Amsterdam proved that emptiness never stays empty.
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"What is that word??"
I was sitting in the Amsterdam Public Library when a slide flashed an inscrutable word: gezellig.
I nudged Nadia, my break-time conference buddy. "What does that mean?"
"It's very Dutch," she said. "The feeling of cozy comfort and belonging when people are together. An evening with close friends would be gezellig."
Funny how a word you can't pronounce can describe the exact thing you are experiencing.
My five days in Amsterdam were pure gezellig. And they taught me something about holes — not just how they form, but how they keep refilling in ways you'd never expect.
I've had three lives as a traveler.
First came the Mike years. Our last trip was for his 50th — London museums, South African safaris, birthday cake in the bush.
But the memories I cherish the most aren’t the landmarks. It's the four of us laughing in the van. Debating our day over café tables. The way Connor insisted on reading every museum plaque in the ancient Japan section, until Kendall shot him a look as sharp as a samurai’s blade.
The moments between adventures outlasted the adventures themselves.
Then that life ended.
Five months after Mike died, I got a new job and found myself on planes again. Different business card, same window seat. I discovered that work travel held its own kind of belonging — soldiers with stories that made me rethink courage, coworkers who became confidants over giant soft pretzels in the Lufthansa lounge. Conference rooms where the laughter of connection happened between PowerPoint slides.
That was gezellig too. I just didn't have the word yet.
Then a year ago, I traded my C-suite office for a writer's desk. (Well, really a writer’s iPad at various tables, couches, and bars, but you get the point.)
The pattern was starting to become clear: lose something, mourn it, then open myself to the possibility of something new filling this space.
But could the same emptiness be filled a third time? I wasn't so sure. But I also wasn't going to wait around to find out.
So I became a solo traveler.
Freedom became my companion instead — wandering museums until my feet hurt, not until someone else's did. Eating gelato for dinner because I only have convince myself it counts as a serving of calcium. Taking seventeen photos of the same cathedral without apologetic glances to a bored companion tapping their watch.
I still met people — taxi drivers with political theories, hiking guides who knew the names of every mountain flower, fellow pilgrims sharing blister remedies. I visit Connor and Kendall every month and get to stroll with them through their budding adult lives. Once a year, my British friend Paul and I excavate our humanity over daylong London walks.
But these are toe-dips in connection, not the full-body plunge into communal belonging.
I told myself this was enough. Adaptation is my superpower. I've had plenty of practice.
Then Amsterdam happened.
“Would you consider speaking at my friend's publishing conference in Amsterdam?”
When I received this email from Nicoline, a bright-eyed Dutch woman I'd met at Do Wales, I said yes before I even finished reading. Traveling to a new city, meeting other authors, and getting to connect with an online friend, Alice, who also lived in Holland? Say no more. I’m buying my tickets.
So I pulled out my usual Solo Sue playbook: Pick a few restaurants (local favorites to tourist hot spots), buy a ticket for a day in the museum (the Van Gogh/Anselm Kiefer joint exhibit was in town), and hone my stroopwafel sampling strategy.
Then gezellig ambushed me.
Nicoline and Hannah, the conference director, endured the rush hour traffic to pick me up at Schiphol airport. Before we had hit the first traffic light, we were deep into books, politics, and the difference between eastern Pennsylvania (Hannah’s from Gettysburg) and western PA (Beaver Falls all the way!). The next morning, Alice and I hugged for the first time ever, and not five minutes later were chatting during our panel like we lived down the street from each other. Soon after, I watched Nicoline sign copies of her book, beaming with happiness for my friend.
Each day brought more: sunshine slanting across a French bistro's patio while we debated writing habits and Dutch personality traits over wine and flat whites. A storytelling night called Mezrab where strangers spilled hilarious and vulnerable secrets, and we ate homemade Iranian lentil soup perched precariously on our laps. A concert where I lay shoulder to shoulder with Alice, watching projected stars dance across the cathedral ceiling, while music and poetry pooled around us.
Something had happened again. A third time. The hole had filled itself in with something completely new. Not with a husband. Not with colleagues. But with writers and creatives who immediately felt like my people.
Life isn't just about losing and finding once.
It's about losing and finding over and over again, with each cycle teaching you to trust the process a little more.
Loss and new growth isn’t a one-time event. It's a sequence of dominos that keeps unfolding throughout your life.
Each hole in our lives becomes a little plot of potential that fills with something we couldn't have imagined when we were staring at the emptiness. Something that wasn't possible before the loss carved out the space.
What makes this third time different for me is that now I recognize the pattern. I wasn’t sure something could grow here yet again, but it has. I feel myself trusting the universe, the mystery, the unfolding a little bit more.
My last night in Amsterdam, I walked the city by myself, watching the sunset turn canal water gold.
Back in my hotel room, I scrolled through photos — all those faces smiling back at me from my phone.
I'd come seeking a city. I found a circle instead.
I opened WhatsApp and told my new friends what they'd given me — not just connection, but proof that life keeps finding new ways to fill the same empty spaces. That each time the filling is different but no less complete. That the cycle can be trusted.
To finding gezellig, again and again, in forms we never saw coming.
We miss you, Sue! What a beautiful piece about your time with us in Amsterdam. I’m so grateful to have had the chance to meet you in person. Here’s to happy writing and gezellig adventures ahead! Liefs, Hannah
I am off to Amsterdam on Tuesday - I look forward to having as wonderful and experience :-)