There’s a Dutch saying: bloed kruipt waar het niet gaan kan.
Blood crawls where it cannot walk.
What is yours will find you. Block it, call it something else. It moves anyway. Slowly. Without urgency, it finds the gap you didn’t notice, and when you close that one, it finds the next.
Most men in a life that’s not theirs didn’t make a dramatic mistake. They made a series of reasonable ones. The job that made sense. The path that looked stable. A life that works — and it does work. It holds. It pays. It gives you something to say when people ask. So you stay.
And something in you keeps moving. A low pressure underneath the week — a sense of meeting the day with something less than your full weight behind it. You’re functioning. You’re fine. But at the edges, the blood is creeping.
You get busy.
It waits. You recalibrate.
It waits.
You build another thing on top of the last one. The distance between who you are underneand how your life is, stops feeling painful —it just becomes the way things are.
Normal.
Managed.
Under control.
And still it creeps. Not because it’s restless, but because it’s you.
Year after year, it works its way through whatever you’ve built on top of it — patiently, indifferent to your reasons — finding the next crack, then the next, working its way to the surface.
And at some point the structure can’t hold it anymore and something that was once fine stops being enough.
The life most people live is fine.
It’s just not yours.
You’ve known that for a while.