Liam Janssen

When people ask me where I was born, I brace myself for the questions that follow. The answer—Goa, India—usually sparks curiosity, and I get it. It’s not the typical birthplace for someone like me, a 32-year-old Dutchman now living in Amsterdam. But my early years were anything but typical.

My mother was just 20 when she left the Netherlands in the early 90s, chasing freedom, adventure, and the legendary Goa parties. What started as a dream of escape turned into a chaotic reality. She fell in with a man who became my father, though their relationship didn’t last long. Neither did the ones that followed. By the time I was ten, I had three half-siblings, each with a different father.

Life was turbulent. My mother’s drug use cast long shadows over our days. She slept a lot—too much—and while I didn’t fully understand what was happening, I knew something wasn’t right. She and one of her boyfriends started smuggling small quantities of drugs back to the Netherlands, just enough to scrape by. Most trips went smoothly, but once, things fell apart. She got caught, and so did we.

We spent several weeks in an Indian prison. I remember the cold cement floors and the constant noise. It was terrifying, but at the same time, my memories of that period feel disjointed, almost surreal, like snapshots from someone else’s life. I didn’t fully grasp the danger we were in until much later.

Despite the chaos of those years, I can’t say I regret them. They shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. Therapy helped me confront the scars, and somewhere in that process, I found music. It became my way of translating the disorder into something meaningful.

Two years ago, I returned to Goa for the first time in two decades. The beaches were crowded, the parties sanitized and commercial. Still, walking the shoreline where I once played as a child felt profound. It was as if I was stitching together two versions of myself—the boy who lived through it all and the man who finally made sense of it.