My life lately 🌻📸

Behind the scenes of The Cursor Mag

It’s been a year since I wrote this piece on living abroad and that means it’s also been a year since I moved to Amsterdam and started working at Miro.

I figured it might be nice to give you a personal update of my life and what I’ve been up to. The first year living in Amsterdam went by so fast and just within a year, I’ve learned so many new things about life and work.

Regardless of the season, Amsterdam looks like a postcard

Moving abroad means freedom

Packing up my life in one place and move to another was not an easy decision for me. Up until the actual move I felt anxious about it. The idea of building a complete new social circle was daunting. What if we couldn’t find a home to live in? What if moving abroad was the wrong decision? What am I giving up - and what will I gain for it? Will it be hard to make new friends as an adult?

It took a while to define what ‘home’ was for me, feeling stuck between a place that is no longer home and a place that isn’t home yet. For the last few months however, Amsterdam has really started to feel like home to me.

The one thing that surprised me the most was how easy it has been to meet new people and grow new friendships here in Amsterdam. I definitely notice that moving with a partner helps, because you get exposed by twice the amount of new people. Not only the ones I meet, but also the ones my partner meets.

Moving is a lot of work and it’s scary, but it’s also so freeing and such a privilege to expose yourself to a new surrounding. If anything, moving to Amsterdam made me rediscover something about myself that I kind of forgot after 10 years of living in the same place. I’m curious about what’s going on elsewhere in the world and I want to live in many different places.

This May I went on a holiday to Indonesia to visit my family and go on a train trip through Java. The last week was spend snorkeling the coral reefs of Raja Ampat. I enjoyed the food, scenery and good weather but most of all, I enjoyed time in nature instead of online.

Time away from the screen is sacred

One of the things that changed the most in the way I spend my time nowadays is that I intentionally try to find interests that don’t involve a screen.

Since COVID, I’ve spend more and more of my free time behind a computer. I put most of my free time in content creation and growing my Instagram page and brand partnerships. While I still enjoy creating and sharing design content, it became too all-consuming at some point. My whole identity seemed to be shaped around design.

Last May I took the first long holiday in years, it was also the first holiday in a long time where I did not do any work at all. It made me realise how much I missed time away from the screen. I picked up old interests like reading and drawing.

These are the books I’ve read that left an impact on me:

1. What you’re looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama (Goodreads)

2. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Goodreads)

3. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Goodreads)

4. I’m glad my mom died by Jennette McCurdy (Goodreads)

5. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Goodreads)

If you have any books that you really enjoyed reading and that you think I’ll like too, let me know!

Finding my way at Miro

My onboarding phase at Miro was overwhelming to say the least. It was a big change to move from a big company with high design maturity and processes to a company that just got out of hypergrowth and is still finding it’s way in terms of processes and design rituals.

Another challenge was to sharpen my UI skills, as in previous roles my focus was more on service and UX design. It happened more than once that I would open Figma with a sinking feeling in my stomach, anxious that I wouldn’t be able to deliver a UI design of high quality.

Over the past year, I’ve gotten much better at UI design and feeling more confident when opening Figma. However, I don’t think I’ll ever become the kind of designer who enjoys working alone behind their computer for days.

Currently I’m part of the Facilitation Tools team where I focus on improving and building the widget you use to facilitate your workshops: Timer, Dot Voting, Polls etc. I just recently joined this team after having worked on the Platform side of Miro for the past year. As someone who’s very passionate about workshop facilitation, this area is right up my alley and it’s really exciting to work on something you also love as a user.

This year I'm very intentional about spending time away from my desk - regardless if it's for a quick cup of coffee outside or a longer citytrip.. One of my favorite destinations is Barcelona, where I went to Sonar with my partner and our friends. I also visited Museum Voorlinden, where they show work from one of my favorite artists called Ron Mueck.

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