Part 1 of the series — honest scenes on micro-aggressions and the weight of deciding, again and again, whether this is the moment to say something.
We're sitting at De Parade, a square in Utrecht with terraces spilling into the evening. Two glasses of wine on the table between us. My partner has started counting. Not because I asked — she started doing it on her own, the way you only notice a sound once someone gives it a name. Forty-five minutes. Twenty-eight people of colour. Every one of them with white company.
I didn't need the count to know it. I felt it before she opened her mouth. There's a phrase I coined for this feeling, years ago, back when laughing it off was the only language I had: stront met ratjes op mijn voorhoofd — something like "shit-with-sprinkles-on-my-forehead mode." As if something is written on me that everyone can read except me.
The archetype on the terrace is easy to name: white yuppies with too much money and not enough taste, talking about nothing much, loud enough to be heard. I'm on the edge of that scene. Watched openly, from a distance, mouth slightly open, as if I've just stepped out of a spaceship that happened to land on the Inktpot — the building, not the bottle. As if I'm the one thing that doesn't fit in a picture that otherwise makes complete sense to everyone else.
There was a time I could laugh this off. Shrug, joke, move on. Not standing out was the goal, even though I stood out everywhere I went — a contradiction that's exhausting just to hold. Then came a stretch where depression stripped every layer of masking away, one by one, until there was nothing left to laugh with. What remained was raw and hard: the understanding that I was alone in a world that only partly understood me, and that this wasn't something I was imagining.
The comments themselves rarely arrive plainly. They come wrapped — in compliments about my "good genes," in fascination with how I look, in surprise that I'm "actually pretty smart," always carrying an undertone somewhere between envy and resentment. People speak to me differently than they speak to my friends. They don't look at me while they're talking. They stand over me, physically, as if confirming they're bigger. If I take a step back — just to keep my neck from aching — I get told: you don't have to be afraid of me.
Inside, I want to say I'm not afraid. That my neck just hurts from being loomed over. Outside, I smile, and say nothing.
That silence is the part no one asks about. Everyone asks about the incident — what exactly was said, whether it was "really meant that way," whether I'm not being too sensitive. Almost no one asks about the years of quietly deciding this isn't the moment, this isn't the right person, this evening isn't meant to be undone by a conversation I'd end up standing in alone anyway.
Because that's what makes telling people so hard. Not the stare, not the comment, not forty-five minutes on a terrace. It's the predictability of what happens once I say it out loud. The look that shifts toward disbelief. The question of whether I'm reading too much into it. The sense that I'm now also responsible for delivering my own experience gently enough not to embarrass the person I'm telling it to.
I don't have a tidy ending for this. No lesson I've pulled from it, no advice to offer on the way out. Next time we're on a terrace, I'll probably count again too, even if I don't say it out loud. And I'll probably smile again, even when I'd rather not. What I do know: writing it down, without laughing it away this time, feels different from staying quiet. Not a solution. Just something I no longer have to hold alone.