If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you’ll know I have little trouble sharing my inner world with you. Today is no exception.
As I sit here, sipping an all-too-trendy mint tea in a gym where I encounter both my healthy and unhealthy tendencies, I feel the urge to write about something that’s been on my mind lately: balance people.
“Balance people?” I hear you think. Yes, exactly. People who, consciously or not, show up in your life to restore balance. Between light and dark, control and chaos, giving and receiving. They’re not here to please you. They’re here to help you grow.
Let me be clear about one important thing:
This piece is not about situations where you’re completely powerless. Violence, abuse, loss, those are not lessons in disguise. Some things just happen to you, period. They deserve recognition, not interpretation.
What I am trying to explore here are the more everyday, recurring patterns. The people who create friction, hold up mirrors, or throw you slightly off balance. The ones who bring discomfort, not ease and in doing so, spark movement.
A simple example:
There are people who take, and people who pay.
People who push, and people who wait.
One challenges you. The other invites you to take something back. And yes, that can sting.
Because balance rarely comes without friction. It’s in those moments when you think, “Why is this happening to me again?” Or: “Things are going so well… this can’t possibly last.” Life wobbles. Highs and lows follow one another, and somewhere along the way, we learn how to move with it without collapsing every time.
It’s like watching a film. You see the scenes play out on the screen. You hear the words, notice the patterns. Sometimes, you see the plot twist coming from a mile away. And sometimes, well… sometimes you really didn’t.
In my life, there have always been people (or systems) that revealed something about myself sometimes in frustrating ways. Take the UWV (the Dutch social security agency). It was a process where I constantly had to justify myself, had to align with frameworks that weren’t mine. At times, it felt like I was surviving more than living.
And yet looking back it brought a kind of harmony.
That period forced me to take responsibility for choices I’d rather postpone. I had to stay grounded, even when the system seemed to move me. I had a choice: do I stay stuck in frustration, or do I see this as an opportunity to grow stronger?
Balance people, whether human or systemic make you feel what happens when you stay on one side too long. They reflect. They prod. They invite you to grow, to define your boundaries more clearly or to soften them.
No, this isn’t an excuse for unreasonable behavior. But it is a way of understanding their role in your story. Life is rarely black and white. It moves, balances, sways. And we? We learn to walk that tightrope. Sometimes stumbling. Sometimes dancing.
So next time you meet someone who rubs you the wrong way, ask yourself:
What is this situation or this balance person here to show me?
With love,
Betty
Balance People