There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of living in the Netherlands, when you stop apologising for your Dutch before you speak it. You stop prefacing every attempt with ‘Sorry, my Dutch is not very good’ and you just… use it. This is a small moment. It is also, in its way, the real one.

The first time a Dutch person told me my jacket was the wrong colour for my complexion, we had been in the same room for four minutes. She was not being cruel. She was being helpful. This is the thing about Dutch directness that nobody quite prepares you for: it isn’t hostility. It is simply the natural consequence of a culture that considers withholding honest information to be the ruder of the available options.

"Socks to Shabbies" is diving deep into this exact idea—shoe as cultural acclimation, fashion as armor, and what happens when the clothes you buy to fit in accidentally change how the world reads you.

Dutch may have a reputation for sounding harsh, but I’ve found its vocabulary sprinkled with whimsy, cheek, and wit. Every funny word feels like a linguistic treasure — and a reminder that sometimes, the best way to learn a new language is to laugh through it.