Michiel

Michiel is a fellow patient on the PAAZ, struggling with substance use and with the label others attach to it. He can stand beside Emma when she is frightened, yet also withdraw from her when her illness unsettles him. His sharpest conflict is not simply about whether he will recover: it is about whether recovery’s language of human dignity applies to him as much as it does to everyone else. His planned departure for detoxification in the south offers a next step, not a completed cure.

Identity and background

Michiel is an adopted son. He describes his parents as unable to have children before he joined the family, after which his mother became pregnant. He insists that he was never neglected, and recalls completing his training and moving into his father’s hairdressing business successfully. His account holds two truths together: he does not present his adoption as proof that his parents treated him unfairly, but he remembers feeling that, as the adopted child, he could never quite compete with the younger sister who came afterward.

That sister’s story gives his own vulnerability a history. Michiel loved her and calls her a wonderful person, while also describing her as seriously mentally ill. She received a manic-depressive diagnosis only after things had become dire; a year later, she died by suicide. He remembers her as intensely manic and euphoric, able to charm him and their parents and seemingly incapable of doing wrong in their eyes. His grief is complicated by the thought that, had she lived, things might not have turned out well. The thought does not cancel his love; it reveals the painful limits of what he believes love could have changed.

Life on the ward

Michiel’s manner combines bleak humor with sudden care. When Emma says she is exhausted and admits that she no longer knows how to cry, he changes pace and walks beside her rather than staying behind. His response is a dark joke about how “real lunatics” do not cry. The joke borrows the language of stigma, but the gesture that accompanies it is attentive: he keeps her company as she struggles to move through the hospital.

At other moments, his ability to stay close has limits. When Emma asks whether he was present during her episode in the chapel, she is trying to establish what happened. Elsewhere she asks why he walked away in the garden after Dimitri described her as manic-depressive, even though Michiel had started talking about her belief that she could fly. He brushes the question aside by saying he does not like “crazy people.” Emma answers that one such person is speaking to another, but her humor cannot conceal her disappointment. His retreat makes his earlier companionship feel real but not unconditional: he can recognize distress in one moment and distance himself from the person marked by it in another.

A small incident with a dog shows a warmer, more ordinary side of him. Emma sees what appears to be a motionless, frightening creature; Michiel opens the nearby door, claps, and calls the dog Koos over. The apparent monster becomes a lively Jack Russell, eager for attention. Michiel lifts him, laughs as the dog licks his face, and then explains that a friend had brought him by and that he would take him home. The scene briefly replaces Emma’s frightening perception with the familiar sight of Michiel caring for his pet, while his request that she not tell the nursing staff keeps the encounter private.

Stigma, anger, and responsibility

Michiel’s most explosive confrontation comes when he thinks Emma sees him as a junkie who will always be one. He challenges the gap between the ward’s language of recovery and the way he believes patients judge him. The hopeful formulations about people being more than their illnesses, with problems framed as vulnerabilities and challenges, sound hollow if they apply to others but not to him. He presses Emma to say who she thinks he is. His anger makes plain how quickly a shared vocabulary of recovery can fail when a person feels excluded from its promise.

The conflict has consequences beyond hurt feelings. After Michiel’s outburst, Emma confronts him with Beatrice’s crisis: Beatrice had intended to end her life that night and had found medication that Celine had accidentally left behind. Michiel initially treats the aftermath as a kind of happy ending because a new chair and a new door will be provided. Emma rejects that account, insisting that the point is not the replacement door but what happened to Beatrice. The contrast exposes the limits of judging an incident by its visible repair. Michiel’s focus on the damaged object misses the danger and suffering that Emma wants him to acknowledge.

Change and ending

Michiel does not remain only in the position of the angry patient. Emma’s question about the label he fears—whether he believes she thinks that an addict is always an addict—forces him to voice the shame and resentment beneath his outburst. His story of his sister also helps explain why mental illness, suicide, and the possibility of being written off carry such force for him, without making those experiences interchangeable with his own substance-use problem.

When Emma asks why he is in the ward, Michiel accepts that being “crazy” might explain how someone gets in, but rejects the idea that it determines how they get out. He says he is finished with the PAAZ and plans to pack the next day, then fly south on Sunday. If he is going to detoxify, he says, he will make a celebration of it—a beach party. The plan is characteristically defiant and wry, but its future remains uncertain: the account establishes his intention to leave and seek detoxification, not what happens after he goes.

Narrative role

Through Michiel, the story tests the difference between a recovery slogan and lived recognition. His anger reveals how easily an ostensibly compassionate distinction between a person and a diagnosis can become selective, preserving dignity for some while leaving others trapped in a stigmatized identity. His conduct is not presented as simple or consistently supportive: he walks beside Emma, withdraws from her, cares for Koos, and then fails at first to see the stakes of Beatrice’s danger. That unevenness makes him more than a symbol of addiction. He is a fellow patient negotiating grief, shame, and the possibility of change, while insisting—sometimes angrily—that he must be understood as a person rather than as a permanent category.