When I was a child, I saw how my young parents worked themselves to the bone in the wholesale business they had been obliged to take over from my grandfather. Both my mother and father were pulled out of school by their parents at the age of 15 to work in the family business. On my mother's side, they were farmers, and on my father's side, wholesalers of fruit and vegetables. The two teenagers met at the wholesale market in Brussels, where they were engaged several nights a week as free labour. During the day, my mother worked in the fields, did the bookkeeping and the household chores. My father delivered goods to retailers and washed tons of carrots. The other children in the family were allowed to go to school and pursue further studies. That's how it was in those days, apparently.
My mother was a wise and entrepreneurial girl who didn't get the chance to develop herself further. My father had a talent for drawing and was a good athlete, two talents he pursued further only after his retirement. My mother was unlucky; she had her first stroke at 29, and more would follow that would forever change her path in life. From the age of twelve, I helped in the business, did household chores, and took care of my mother when she had to go to the hospital or was recovering. During school holidays, my younger brother and I accompanied our parents to work at the wholesale market in Brussels at night. But, unlike them, I did go to school, followed dancing and acting classes, and finished high school.
I must have felt the effect of missed opportunities and suppressed dreams, because I clearly remember asking myself as a young girl:
What do you want to be able to say about your life when you're dying?
— mini me at 11
And my answer was — and still is — that I have utilised the talents I possess, big or small, to their fullest. That I wouldn't wait until my retirement to do the things I enjoy. The young ianka made that promise to herself, and looking back at my path now, that is also the path I have followed. It is the path of what I later learned to be a Renaissance person.
The result was that I often did not conform to the prevailing norms in my field at the time.
My urge to explore, rebel, learn, adopt, and build my life's work led to a whole list of job descriptions when I introduced myself. I was an actor, writer, director, radio presenter, TV presenter, publisher. I was passionate about understanding the human condition and tried to capture and translate it into various forms of storytelling.
However, because people think in terms of job functions and chronologically ordered CVs, they interpreted this as a sign of indecisiveness, lack of focus, lack of work. They called me a Jack of all trades, a generalist.
They were confused because I was simultaneously successful. What they didn't see was the common thread of storytelling and the role of questioning that connected everything for me. After all, it wasn't the descriptions that defined my work; those were just words attached to functions, to skills. Skills that I could use to create my larger story. It was about what I could achieve with them.
While people hop from job to job, from company to company, from project to project, building a linear CV that they post on LinkedIn like a timeline, I believe in creating a narrative in which everything you do contributes to your body of work, your oeuvre. And although the term 'oeuvre' is traditionally associated with the body of work of an artist or writer (which I still am at heart), I use this as my approach to life, to enrich the only life I have with as many creations as I can.