My autobiography: When Trust Becomes a Trap
In When trust becomes a trap, I explore how a life driven by logic, honesty, and order can derail in a world governed by nuance, power, and manipulation.
As an autistic man, I experience reality with relentless clarity.
There are moments when I turn on the news and watch people standing on a stage with tears in their eyes, applauded for overcoming one major life event. An accident. An illness. A bankruptcy. The camera zooms in, the audience applauds, the host nods solemnly.
It is sincere and moving. At the same time, it reminds me how naturally human attention gravitates toward what is simple enough to comprehend. A single wave fits within our understanding; a hurricane usually does not. Not because people are unwilling, but because the human mind finds comfort more easily in simplicity than in the totality of complexity.
In my own life, disasters never arrived in portions, never with pauses long enough to breathe. They came one after another, as if fate were a badly calibrated machine that simply refused to stop.
I have seen how someone can go from millionaire one year to relying on a food bank the next.
How a false medical diagnosis can destroy not only your trust, but nearly your life itself.
I have experienced what it means when someone genuinely wants to kill you, and how silent the world becomes afterward. PTSD is not a scar. It is the residue of an explosion that never completely stops echoing.
I discovered that accountants, business partners, and people who were supposed to protect your best interests can just as easily slip their hands into your future and quietly tear pieces out of it.
That judges sometimes deliver rulings that can only be understood once logic itself no longer matters.
That a false fraud registration by the Dutch Tax Authority is not merely an entry in a system, but a blockade inside a human life.
In the midst of all this came a diagnosis that explained everything while simultaneously tearing everything open: autism. Not as a label, but as a key. A key to understanding, but also to the realization that other people had possessed the instruction manual for life all along, while I had not.
And then there was the divorce, the children gradually growing more distant, the body beginning to follow its own course as though separating itself from my will.
Whatever the cause, the result remained the same: a sense of physical unreliability that simply becomes another fact added to the list. Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just another fact among many.
When I watch television and see a single event elevated into either tragedy or triumph, a quiet thought imposes itself upon me. Not emotion. Observation.
Human life does not consist of one linear narrative, but of a sequence of overlapping existences constantly replacing one another. A person can live multiple lives within the same body, layering experiences like geological time, allowing former identities to gather dust in the internal archive, while remaining invisible to the collective eye.
Again and again, life teaches me that recognition is not connected to the depth of someone’s reality, but to how digestible that reality is. Society prefers simplicity over complexity. What is clear and singular aligns seamlessly with human comprehension and is therefore easily recognized and celebrated. What is layered, irregular, and disruptive exceeds the cognitive boundaries within which people organize meaning, and for that reason quietly disappears into the background of existence. Complexity demands a form of attention that is rarely given.
My own story never fit within those simple frameworks.
It is complex.
It is layered.
It is uncomfortable for others and unsuitable for applause.
Maybe that is exactly why I am writing it now. Not to seek approval, but finally to acknowledge my own history in the only language that has never lied to me: the language of logic, nuance, and harsh light.
