Because of her PTSD and anxiety we'll have to run away

Paul Brăiloiu Start Date: Jun 26, 2022 - End Date: Jun 25, 2023
  • Professional Development
  • Vacation/Personal Trip
  • Volunteer Trip
  • France
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Denmark
  • Sweden
  • Spain
  • Portugal
  • Norway
  • Finland

My Travel Story

by: Paul Brăiloiu Start Date: Jun 26, 2022 - End Date: Jun 25, 2023
  • Professional Development
  • Vacation/Personal Trip
  • Volunteer Trip

PLEASE READ! The text was not intended for this but out of desperation it has to do. I’m in no way or form discriminating against my own ethnic group even if at times it looks like it. What you are about to read is an intimate account of what’s happening with our lives, it's sincere, honest and frank. Please give it a go! Keep in mind that it was intended for local use (within The Netherlands) but I cannot find any way of promoting it locally and the ice started cracking long ago, so…. Even if we don’t deserve your spare change please at least share, maybe someone down the line thinks differently or do both and have a blessed day!

So, my name is Paul, born in the spring of 1990 shortly after the Romanian Revolution, therefore I’m born and raised Romanian but I never fit their mindset nor did I adhere to the cultural mainstream. I always was an “odd duckling” , giving up cartoons for documentaries as a kid, not being interested in music, fashion or social life as a teenager instead obsessing about sustainable living ideas on the internet. I remember being bullied even beaten for having thoughts resembling those of Greta Thunberg in the late 2000’s and then being segregated from the others by the school’s principle under the pretext that I’m good with computers, so I ended up spending up to half of my High School alone, learning “IT” ;don’t think I did anything useful, I learned the entire Microsoft Office suite, various database software and some archaic web design, even claiming 4th place in a national contest at 16 with an ecology awareness website for which I received around 150€ worth of RON at that time which I lost in the casino in 3 minutes making me never gamble again so they were wisely spent.

Fast forward… I somehow was persuaded by my mother to try to become a medic so I got admitted with a 9.89 mark (out of 10.00) at a prestigious medical school in a big western city in Romania (with a scholarship). Long story short in the second year, after a very successful first year I gave up to vices like alcohol and weird parties resulting in me skipping classes and eventually be expelled as the policy back then was that you have to retake ALL the skipped classes to a maximum of 10 while I was missing 30-40 meaning I’ll have to repeat the entire year so I had an emotional meltdown resulting in me jumping in the first cheap flight to London that I could get my hands on.

My British Isles story it’s bitter-sweet. So I landed in Luton with 5£ in my pocket and because it was 2009 we the Romanians had no working rights so I ended up going back to the airport trying to sleep but because it was noisy I somehow decided that the town’s graveyard was a safer location. After around a week of sleeping rough I tried again to get hired somewhere and after being told I have no working rights and that they are willing but face a substantial fine if they offer me work I met who ended up being one of my best mates ; and he had this brilliant idea of taking double the cleaning contacts so that I can do half-ish because I ended up doing the hard parts and half the surface of each apartment and if I had nowhere to sleep for the night I simply slept in the place I was cleaning and cashed the contract the next day.

So as usually things got from bad to worse as the real estate company that was giving him contacts find out and accepted to give me work directly but somehow I always got to clean the crack houses or brothels or the dirtiest apartments for the same money they paid for 3-4 hours jobs so me being Paul I went in one more time told them I need a weekend off, they agreed so with the 2000£ I raised I had my best “4 months weekend” holiday in my life as I bought survival and fishing gear and hiked the entire British mainland coast clockwise and that’s why I understand this language as I do.

So I was having the best time of my life as I was paying no rent and dinner was one cast away and the appetizer was waiting to be picked and cooked from the stones or from the sand if we are talking clams, but life being life one day my mother calls and tells me that my father’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma got bad and that I had to come back.

Turned out that he was just the same but that meant that I had to forget what I loved and get domesticated again. I was admitted in the local university’s Law School at 22. School was stressing and I had to work too resulting in me getting very drunk one night, arguing with a friend about politics and smashing a bottle of vodka in his half Russian head which led to me being mistreated for my mistreatment and therefore I’m now 8 years sober.

I graduated one year latter than my colleagues as I chose “The European Union’s environmental policy” as my thesis which happened to be supervised by the dean herself and she kept removing facts about the gravity of the situation and how important it is to realize that philosophically speaking we are not that different from fish in an abandoned aquarium.

I did not pursue any legal carrier as I only study to pass exams and not with passion like when I was dreaming of being a researcher while in the medical school.

After this I continued wasting my 20’s going from job to job, never contempt with my colleague’s ignorance, quitting what I was doing after every breakup from a long line of toxic relationships until after my divorce I started the most toxic relationship of my life which ended with me being hospitalized and diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (it all makes sense now) and chronic recurrent depression which explains pretty much everything I was doing with my life. But you see…. I found out that it's not only my diagnosis that defined me, it's also the fact that I'm not smart enough to succeed in life with ease by solving problems or innovate nor am I mediocre enough to pass as not threatening for my superiors at work, so basically I'm too smart for my own good.
As the title says, this is not about me, it’s about this extraordinarily kind, sincere, loyal, traumatized and prematurely matured once joyful girl. I've met her while in the mental ward for severe recurrent depression at 29 (so 3 years ago as I’m 32 now), her name’s Alexa, she's now 26, we met online, we realized that we have so many common opinions even from different points of view and that we are both anomalies in an increasingly homogenous copy-cat society.

The thing is, Alexa lost her mother to cancer before we met, she told me that she had to lose nights to watch over her mother in the oncology ward while also attending university SPOILER ALERT, she’s not an English teacher because they couldn’t afford the tuition anymore. Anyway...in Romania the health system is really bad and corrupted meaning you have to bribe doctors and nurses every time so long story short they accrued debt.

So she met me eventually, I was at first a horrible choice of a boyfriend as I was coming out of a toxic relationship and was not trusting women anymore, I was treating her very poorly, I remember I didn't even paid our first meal in town, was making very rude jokes about her figure (never called her fat though). I was still one of this “white dudes living in their mother’s basement” and spent a lot of time playing computer games therefore neglecting her a lot and that's when she took the mature decision of leaving behind a “ somehow handsome bearded child with potential” (her words, I believe I’m rather ugly). Therefore I had to drive her home, came back, started playing, and wanted to turn back and check how she is doing when I realized she's gone….. and that's when I realized that I was a horrible boyfriend and just packed all my stuff and went to apologize and promise that I’ll quit playing around and be the man that she needs. So I started listening to what she was saying and that’s when I found out what she was feeling and fell in love with this character that somehow was still appearing full of life after losing her mother and her first try at higher education.

We moved to her father’s place, the three of us had a great time, we had fishing and debating in common so it was a great start for getting her father’s thoughts away from the heart breaking truth of him being a indebted widower and that life is only marching forward. He was at this point in his 60’s but wait, there’s more, he was still able to work a hard job in construction as an engineer, but in Romania that doesn’t mean you don’t have to assist with the hard manual labor. Turned out the guy was a local legendary football player back in his day in communist Romania, that's until some accident I don’t recall happened, something about a rival on the field or off the field.
So yeah, my father in law was some sort of well known member of the society but not many spoke about the good parts, everyone was criticizing his downfall “ he used to be very rich! Look at him now, he doesn’t even own the house his living in” someone said. It may have been true but it kind of hurt too, basically he used to own a bar and some slots machines which were all the rage in the 90’s so his first two offspring were raised lacking nothing and abusing everything, but they had the same financial education with their father so both are not doing well financially. The second family though, the one that Alexa and her brother are part of didn’t have much to eat let alone affording brand clothing to not be judged badly at school.

I mean it’s not the guy’s fault he died and left us(her, but she’s part of us) with ~€5000 debt. Oh wait, didn't told you yet? Yeah, one night we were expecting him to arrive from work so that we could eat and ask each other “how was your day?” when we received a phone call, “ -your father hit himself!”. Later we realized that he was run over by two locals, from whom one was a good friend of the family. “What do you mean run over by two locals?” you may ask, well… one of them was towing the other with an improvised cable, illegal even by Romanian laws, being night when they stopped to make sure they can cross the intersection, the cable lost tension and was laying on the ground, being night resulted in the cable not being visible, which led to him stumbling and getting caught under the towed car for more than 12 meters, while people on all sides of the intersection were yelling and waving for the first driver to stop but he didn’t do that in time. I remember her yelling in pain, I remember him trying to calm her down not showing pain, but if you remember I used to study medicine and was volunteering at the emergency room (ER)… well I was somehow aware of what’s more likely to happen next. So I spent the road to the hospital and the time before we got the news preparing her as good as I could for what all three outcomes meant. She dealt really well with what happened, we arranged the mourning and the burial as good as we could with what money we could get out hands on. It is what it is! What can you do when time only runs in one direction?
But she dealt with the lose after all and because we had no place to call home as the Belgians (some frenemies) that owned the house didn't know if they wanted to prolong the bailment (free rent) contract that they signed with her father when he lost the house to the banks and they bought it back for him; well…. We decided to leave Romania. At one point we ended up coordinating a fleet of around 8 vans across Britain while in the comfort of our not really our home working for a couple or Romanians settled there for 5 years then who were not able to say one entire phrase in English without changing the word order and with a very thick accentD. I realized I’m a nice voice, a proficient negotiator, a trust worthy personality and a pleasant and understanding superior as I was complimented often by the drivers for getting them well paid contracts. Of course that was short lived as the bosses did not realize that the market was not booming all of a sudden but because we were good at what we were doing and never paid us more than 300£/month therefore we endured and raised the 1000€ needed to move and start working in the Netherlands.
We had the misfortune of being new to the agency employed work so we worked 7 months of hectic day/night shift for PostNL Zaltbomel while living in a bungalow campus in Oisterwijk,. The only good part was the campus and the area as the beauty was outstanding, surrounded by nature, that's how we fell in love with North Brabant and the Netherlands at large.
So we were having a good time not knowing we were being used and abused, paid miserably, overtaxed and overcharged, but at least we managed to pay her father’s debt as no other sibling will want to pitch in . We spent the little time we had off duty by fishing and visiting windmills and museums or simply hiking when we heard that her brother and his fiancé were having a bad time in Romania as they were having less and less profit from their market stall as it was winter and people didn't have much money to spend on fruit and vegetables and we decided to help them spent the winter working like us in warehouses.
Since they arrived everything started going down, two weeks after we found out there was a coalition against us because the two of us did better and faster than the other 5 people from the other shift, and because the supervisor and them had the same nationality the supervisor decided to feed us an ugly speech about how there’s no more work needed and that we need to find another job.
The now 4 of us ended up in Belgium in Antwerp, went for the introduction and bad luck struck again as her brothers fiancé was refused on basis of not being able to communicate in English but actually she froze and said nothing. We then had to rent a van from Antwerp to Roosendal where we didn’t have the chance to start working as one very unlucky day, the day before the first day at work me and my brother in law try to play chess and we kind of argued about if it's legal or not to open by doing two moves each and both thought we were right and he got very angry and had an epileptic seizure. Now that's the moment everything went down, I heard and saw her heart breaking as we were making sure he comes back from the seizure, that feeling of life showing you that it still has family members to take from you…… it must be horrible, it is real enough for the bystanders but I believe it’s much more damaging to witness face to face.
So we had to burn through our finances as I had the bad idea of making sure they arrive back home safely so that we bought a VW golf 4 from 2001 from an old airplane engineer from Friesland (he spoke no English or normal Dutch nore did I spoke Fris or Old English) but the car was exceptionally well looked . So I drove 30+ hours with 4 hours of sleep and didn’t even received a “thanks” but that was not the point, we waited a bit to calm down but she could not stay in one place so I ended up driving around the country 4000 extra kilometers, enough to reach India for that matter, so I had to say stop, “what’s the matter?” to which she told me that she cannot stay still after all that happened because in the meantime her brother had multiple seizures one of which was at the place we were staying for the time being, so I suggested we see a philologist. We found out she has PTSD and extreme anxiety and in order to mitigate the effects she’ll have to go away from what’s hurting her, meaning people and places with bad memories. And because we run out of money really quick we decided to come back to the Netherlands.
We have changed 5 jobs in 3 months, we cannot stay too much in one place because of her anxiety, and we realize that soon we’ll be homeless if we don't come up with a plan to earn something but we cannot work from home as we will not have a home if we are not paying for a rent, but we’ll be broke soon won't we?
It's quite a sad story as she went from a happy, talented piano playing little girl of a poor family (by Romanian standards) to a broken hearted, scared, anxious young woman with so many demons to fight.
So because she was the first child of her father's second marriage and also a girl she was the “third parent” of the household so not only did her mother preferred her brother but she was fed this ideas that she has to put herself second. Well…… I'm putting her first and I’ll be her eyes if she doesn't see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'll be carrying her burden the same way she carried me when I was but a former shadow of myself.
I wasn’t about to publish this, I was writing for a different reason but something happened today. Something happened today (June 15th) we had to leave work before we started once again as she didn’t feel right and we were afraid she will faint, or worse God forbids have a seizure. The way the supervisors looked at us was not a good sign. I'm so scared myself, I feel like I'm surrounded by dead ends and at high speed. I mean I'm very proficient around coastlines and woods but it's illegal to wild camp in The Netherlands isn't it? Plus she can catch a cold and we won't be ensured if we don't work, we have the option of going back but she despises Romania, I mean I understand Americans seeing the country in a favorable light as the locals love foreigners and corruption is accessible to anyone not only the ultra rich, I understand that but we are Romanians and most of them hate different, gays, Gypsies, Hungarians, for the argument’s sake I’ll say that if they don’t have anything to hate they’ll hate their neighbor for made up reasons. Out of desperation I could try to do illegal things but there's always the risk of ending up in a position in which I will not be able to help her anymore.
The only option left is to be honest, tell my story and beg, and that’s what I’m going to do, I'm going to beg YOU. Why not ask our families? Well my family struggle to make ends meet, her family is gone, the siblings she has are in trouble too, and the brother with the market stall that we spent our savings on to make sure his alright will respond with “ I am in debt, I cannot help! Ask somebody else” .
Now I can assure you only one thing, we will never be like the market stall guy, we’ll do anything to help back even if you pledged 1€ . Like I said I never had debt my entire life, I chose to live off the land instead of claiming benefits or universal credit, but I treat this like a credit.
How can you help? Well…. It depends, if you are as desperate as us, I can help you by sharing your story, can you please share mine too? If you can spare some change it goes a long way, promise! If you cannot spare a cent but have usefull skills and want to help then you are a miracle, for example if you’re good around cars we need a timing belt and oil+filters change and a motor diagnostics, if you are a psychiatrist and you know your way around trauma, loss or PTSD and can spare some time that will be fantastic, if you're a dentist we can really use some help the thing is I have less dental problems but bigger as my wisdom teeth grow inwards like the elephant so I kind of need surgery not just the normal stuff, right if you’re dentistry professor I can be your subject if you want to show your students this mutation.
If you are a veteran and struggled with PTSD please write to us about your experience and what works for you, please note that at the moment she's not really able to have long conversations but she is an avid reader, she’s the type that reads employment contracts twice if she’s out of paper. If you decide to write please do it electronically as we have no idea were we’ll be if this goes down again.
If you are someone who does charitable fundraising, I believe you can see this is my first time, please share some tips.

Now if you are successful and also want to help, you are also welcomed to help. Maybe you have an old caravan laying around that you don’t use anymore. Maybe you can let us live on a boat for part of the year. The possibilities are endless!

If you are really rich but you are skeptical about our honesty or have heard rumors of Romanians stealing or committing various heinous acts or fraud I can only say that we had a different upbringing and if this convinced you but you are still skeptical but would like to help you can use your connections to make sure your “hard earned money” is used as you agree.

If you have a social following that can do good you are most welcomed to share our story or organize events!

The bottom line is that she needs a resting period of probably 2 months in which we can try work from home jobs or alternative ways maybe even create art or simply working to help society by solving problems or helping the people in need, we thought about a non profit organization for housing and feeding the needy as I’m also good with tiny houses and permaculture but never had the chance to do it on my own land. But with current Amsterdam prices, because this job is also good this resting time translates into €5000 ( deposit+rent+ food+car repair/transportation). Now, if we get a caravan that’ll instantly come down to €3000 as we’ll have no deposit to pay. If someone also takes fare of the car then we’ll be good with €1800-2000
The most important part is EVERY LITTLE HELPS and if we survive we’ll be a force for good!

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