I am Yvonne van Galen, born and raised in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I was born in 1977, in a household with a lot of animals: 14 cats and 2 dogs. Not for eating of course, I do not eat animals and have been a vegetarian since I was 7 years old. As a child I was cheerful and energetic, living within the limits, on the verge, that’s where I experienced the most. I had a preference for beautiful stories and was drawn to the invisible: the imaginary world of my mind. I still remember very well how creative I was. Sexual abuse was not something I saw coming, but it did happen to me. It hit me hard and I jumped over a border into a dark world. Everything went black. I became involved in drugs at a young age and also pushed limits there. I got kicked out of school and partied and rebelled my ass off. Everything was a daze. I only expressed myself in a negative way. I had lost sight of the positive me. At the age of 18, I started working and left my family home so that I could learn to stand on my own two feet. I quickly mastered that principle. So when I was fired by the Dutch Navy, where I was working, at the age of 20, I just started working somewhere else again, this time in a bakery. There’s a solution for everything. In the following years I had plenty of jobs, from security officer to administrative assistant in the contracting and legal professions. Been there done that. And now don’t think I was fired everywhere, because that’s not how it went. After working somewhere for a while, it lost my interest and I wanted to learn something new. I started looking for another challenge. I am very easy when it comes to certain things: if you are not enjoying yourself in whatever aspect of your life, you just need to make a change. I left the drug scene when I was 24 years old. That was also the moment I started to attract more positive things in my life.

In 2016, I returned to Rotterdam. Initially alone, Marco followed in 2018. For the activities of Enjoy Car Rental we had hired someone. The company kept going and flourishing and that gave me the freedom of “not having to work”. Financially we had our affairs in order and thus I had the space to further develop myself, without money pressure. Back in Rotterdam I started writing poems out of the blue. As a child, I enjoyed making rhymes but, stopped doing that when the sexual abuse started. At a Yvonne van Galen pace I started to express my emotions, in poetic words. It was an emotional time and writing helped me to put things into perspective. In 2017, I impulsively launched a Facebook page and began to openly share my creations: poems in combination with photos. The positive reactions I received helped me to grow confidence. A good starting point to continue the story.