‘Het gaat niet om hoe je bent, maar om dát je er bent’

‘Het gaat niet om hoe je bent, maar om dát je er bent’ is the reassurance Gwen offers Emma when depression makes her feel like a burden to the people around her. Its force lies in shifting attention from illness, need, or usefulness to the fact of a person’s presence. The expression is not a promise that suffering will vanish: it offers a way to see care and connection when depression makes them difficult to believe in.

The expression and its occasion

Gwen introduces the thought while reflecting on Karel, a longtime colleague at the PAAZ. He has worked there for fifteen years, and, after his son had an accident, he and his wife took on full-time care for him. Gwen admires Karel’s steadiness and the work he does both at the hospital and at home. Even amid the disruption of a merger and relocation, he found time to take Emma for a walk while the ward was locked. To Gwen, his story about gathering family at Christmas and Sinterklaas carries a quiet lesson: illness does not cancel the value of family and friendship, whether someone needs support or gives it.

That reflection makes the expression more than a general comfort. Karel’s care is shown through time given amid competing demands, rather than through a claim that anyone’s difficulties are small. Gwen connects this example to Emma’s relationship with Sergei: seeing them together, she believes the same principle applies to him. Presence and relationship are not made conditional on being well.

A counterweight to depression’s logic

Gwen recognizes that Emma’s belief that she is a burden can feel compelling while she is depressed. Her response does not simply tell Emma to stop worrying. She uses a chessboard to suggest another view: Emma may feel she is standing on the black squares, but the board also has white ones. People’s willingness to make an effort for her is evidence to consider alongside the bleak conclusions depression supplies; their care may also reflect what Emma gives back to them. The image preserves the reality of her present distress while challenging the assumption that it is the whole picture.

Other passages in Emma’s account show why that distinction matters. She describes depression as erasing a sense of time: the past seems to swallow the future, and wherever she looks, she sees only depression. During another night, she tries to keep from feeling, thinking, and remembering, but the memory she is fighting returns and she begins to cry. The recollection reaches back to the depth beyond a balcony, making her suffering more than a passing mood. Against that narrowing vision, Gwen’s expression proposes not an easy correction but a reason to look again at the people and relationships that remain present.

Presence without reducing a person to illness

Emma’s account also resists the idea that a person can be summed up by how others must care for her. When she sees Sergei’s hesitation, she understands that he may see her as a patient for whom he is responsible, someone who might need protection from herself. She recognizes the weight of that view, but also insists inwardly that this is her life and that she must live it herself. She asks him to let her go, even as she acknowledges that things may worsen again. The expression’s emphasis on being there therefore need not mean defining someone by dependence: care can accompany a person without replacing her agency or making illness her entire identity.

A conversation about Emma’s stockpiled medication gives that care a more complicated shape. She is troubled that Sergei resisted removing the pills, as her psychiatrist had asked, and wonders whether his reluctance means he does not take her problems seriously. Gwen suggests another possibility: treating the danger as less than life-threatening may be Sergei’s way of protecting himself from the fear of losing her. The interpretation does not settle what Sergei feels, but it reveals the strain that concern and fear can place on a relationship. In this context, the expression affirms attachment without insisting that support is uncomplicated or perfectly expressed.

The limits and reach of reassurance

The expression does not make every experience accessible to Emma. When Beatrice says that she no longer feels God’s presence, Emma recalls that she had never understood Beatrice’s faith and had not tried to. Beatrice explains that she felt God even through the grief of losing her child, but after starting medication she lost that sense of presence and later returned to the PAAZ. Emma cannot claim to know the feeling herself. She can only acknowledge that its loss sounds painful and suggest that depression, rather than the medication, might be obscuring it. The exchange puts a limit on easy consolation: being present with another person is not the same as sharing or repairing that person’s experience.

Across these moments, ‘Het gaat niet om hoe je bent, maar om dát je er bent’ counters two linked reductions: the depressed conviction that need makes a person a burden, and the tendency to see a patient only as someone to be managed or protected. Its reassurance rests on concrete acts of attention, while leaving room for fear, recurrence, and personal responsibility. It asks that illness not be mistaken for the entirety of a person—and that presence itself count as something of value.