I have a confession to make: Despite my seemingly positive travel posts and a frenzied roulette of indulgent Instagram stories, I can find no other words to describe the last five months of my life beyond “utterly taxing.” The easy-going charade I like to do isn’t something that can withstand the more stressful periods of my life — it’s a seam that frays and unravels in the presence of “real-world” responsibilities: Pressing papers and peer reviews, finding the right job or not the right job, or even finding any job at all. And that was the standard philosophy for the majority of my life.
For better or for worse, my hyper-independence and determination to prove myself to others, to make something of myself while I still have the breath in me, to show everyone that I was here and that I — like everybody else — have loved and have lost, feels like a choking hazard. I can’t recall the last time I called something other than my suitcase “home,” nor do I remember the last time I bought a full-size cosmetic product over the conventional travel-size bottle. As with everything, there are upsides and downsides to such a nomadic lifestyle; while it’s quite simple to enjoy this kind of life for a week or two at a time, it’s another thing entirely to live in it, to bask in the temporariness of every particle that surrounds me in a way where you don’t find yourself sobbing all alone at night in a cramped studio apartment in Berlin.
It’s no secret that everyone wants to go out into the grandiose world of teeming possibilities and accomplish great feats for your own namesake, but how do you begin to trust yourself to do just that? How do I become as soft and adaptable as the tree branches that can withstand the brutish hailstorms and racing winds of darker times, while still remaining as firm and grounded as the roots hanging on deep under the Earth? If I wanted to pretend like I knew the answer to this, I’d write a self-help book — but if I wanted to spit out my amalgamation of odd experiences in the hopes of stumbling upon one phrase or sentence that could help someone, I’d write an article for The Michigan Daily.
The first series of stitches began to give way in October of last year, when my lighthearted essence was shoved out in favor of more pragmatic responsibilities, like the various application cycles that ate up my evenings and weekends, bouncing from short answer to short answer while still attempting to find the time to show up to class and make it seem like I had, in fact, completed the required readings for that day. Between that, my commitment to a short-term stint as a communications intern with the Department of Earth and Environment, and the ever lingering presence of financial, familial and flirtatious woes, I had sort of delved into a state of psychosis by December.
Actually, the term “sort of” would be inaccurate — I had developed full-blown spiritual psychosis just a few days before Christmas, a period that would precede another four long weeks of something akin to asceticism. I don’t remember anything from that awkward limbo of a month, just the fact that I would wake up and spend my entire day reading theological and metaphysical theory for hours on end — not eating, not drinking and barely sleeping — for I had been convinced that I was on the precipice of some divine revelation. I read Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in its entirety, as well as a few books about Carl Jung, the “Book of Revelations” and — for some reason — my high school yearbook.
To pretend that I was sane before I had left for Europe would be an absurdity. But, believe me or not, my pseudo-obsession with some undefinable holistic truth proved to be essential during my time abroad. Leaving behind everything from a few pairs of pants to the vanity of my ego, I had shoved my belongings into my bags a few hours prior to my flight, nearly missing my plane from Las Vegas to Copenhagen. I sprinted across the Harry Reid International Airport with my checked baggage in hand as I prayed and prayed to get there before the boarding gate closed, losing my two most valuable pocket knives in the security check process. Before I knew it, I had jetted off to another continent with no semblance — no proof — of my former self. My leaving for Europe was a sort of self-instigated christening, you could say, as the only thing I had left to do was put on my big red headphones, stare outside of the plane window and think about all of the things I needed to finally leave behind me.
I’m not quite sure how I survived that period of my life — and the last thing I want to do is romanticize psychosis — but it was the constant yearning for something new, the trials and tribulations I underwent to find my “self,” as overused as that word may be, it was perhaps the key to surviving my time abroad. There are several essential lessons I gathered during my quasi-conscious reading sessions of various intellectual works.
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I like to think that airport runways are as short as they are for a reason. Had we been born immortal, I am not sure that there would be any incentive to do things that scare us — and I don’t mean the butterflies you get from asking your crush out, I’m talking about an otherworldly fear that bleeds into every other area of your life and has you doubting your every step.
At one point in my life (and for legal reasons, happened in Europe when I was older than 18), I had a one too many glasses of a shitty, high ABV wine — I can’t quite remember if it was white or rosé, nor does it matter all that much now — and having just purchased a stick-and-poke kit, I decided to experiment that night by awkwardly stamping the words “be here now” into the medial side of my right middle finger. Classy, I know.
I’ve been meaning to get the words reworked professionally for almost two years now, but I just haven’t had the guts to think about what should be there instead. What kind of lettering would suit it best? Serif or sans-serif? Times New Roman? A timeless Helvetica? I’d say I’m more a fan of Helvetica Neue. And yes, I have recently acquired typography as a hobby as well.
Nothing ever seems quite right though because it feels misguided to etch into a genuine piece made by moi with some antecedently chosen cultural symbol and turn it into a palimpsest. Why? Because it looks like the quintessence of a “bad tattoo?” Well, what if it’s special … to me?
Some of the decisions we make in our lives, you see, become so staunch and protruding that no amount of ink or gauze or therapy can hide the fundamental alteration of character that has taken place underneath. Many of our lives’ most important choices stick to our skin like the glue on kitchen fly traps, and the only opportunity we have left to exercise our own free will is in deciding how to live through — and how to live with — the choices we’ve already made.
It took me two months and one day to purchase a tourist guidebook for Berlin. Just barely simmering over the halfway mark of my time here, it’s almost as if it took hearing the splashes and sizzles on the stovetop for me to notice that the water was finally boiling up and out of the pot.
Despite the residence permit stapled to the wall overlooking my desk, various photographs and postcards littering the other once-vacant portions of my fragile walls, and the lingering disbelief that I am now a resident of — rather than another tourist in — the city of Berlin, I can’t help but wonder why it took me so long to purchase such a damning physicality of my living in this city.
Had I fully come to accept my role of pawn, a meager but exigent chess piece nonetheless, in the game of living fully? What does it mean to own a book titled “Secret Berlin” while living in the same neighborhood that occupies the middle portion of said document? Is there more to living in something besides just living through it?
I think that — to an extent— the way my parents had taught me how to love was lovingly misguided, as with most things. I came to believe that anything to do with love had, in a sense, something to do with attachment. Anything I allowed myself to love or be loved by came along with a nauseating and pervasive sense of attachment — from people to places to personal potential — as the singularity of cause and effect came to define my every narrative of things I’ve loved.
Should you ever stroll along a beach and grasp a nice, hearty hand full of sand and squeeze it real tight, in hopes of not letting a single grain go, you’ll find that all that sand will slip out of your hands with much more momentum than had you just loosely carried it with you as you traced the part of the world where the Earth meets the ocean. I wonder sometimes, does this happen with everything we latch and grip onto during our lives, and do the fine grains of sand just do a better job of illustrating a metaphor that every poet has come to surmise?
There is no way to describe Berlin as anything other than my mistress. She’s a temptress, too, but she’s a beauty whom I have come to fall fully in love with. I am infatuated with her, actually. I know what Romeo must’ve felt like (finally!) because, despite rain or shine, all I can do is plant my feet firmly in the space outside of her window and call her name all night long, as if I were Marlon Brando screeching “Stella!” until the first light of dawn.
In buying a “Secret Berlin,” I committed to both heartbreak and unconditional love. I had to break her heart, you see, because — despite all my best efforts to stay — I made plans in other cities. I’m a writer, and one who can’t seem to stay in one place for very long, because otherwise, I’m not so sure I’d be very good at my job.
I very rarely, you see, live my life solely for me. My existence is often contained in the stories and secrets of others, to such an extent that I do not think I belong to my own self anymore. So much devotion and commitment to such a courageous task of accepting the label of writer, thus I have bestowed ownership of my life to the lives of others. Who will compose the tall tales if not me? Who will take our personal privacies and turn them into prose? It’s an unforgiving profession, but I suppose all artists have to die for their art.
The stories I’ve decided to tell belong to something much greater than my own self. And that kind of storytelling requires an agonizing level of relinquishment of personal identity. If my life — my hopes and dreams and hobbies and fears — no longer belongs to me, how on Earth can I expect it to belong to a place like Berlin?
While Berlin has certainly become the brightest of my passions, it cannot be my only one. To let it become such would put out the very fire that burns for her, for in attempting to blow out one candle on a cake, I will surely end up putting them all out. Silenced in tandem, blunted by a singular and passionless existence — that is my worst nightmare.
There are other stories to be written, ones that are calling out to me, begging me to act as a prophet for their liturgical symphonies. Because she had seduced me, it became almost emaciating to process the idea of leaving Berlin eventually. Every morning I arose with an intention to relish the city: Linger in its cafés and spätis, amble down streets trailed by remnants of the Berliner Mauer and stumble through my poor German with shop clerks. Then, every evening, with my curtains partly open to allow the light from the adjacent office building to illuminate my room, I’d stare into that empty glass building and thank all the stars that I get to live in a place like this.
But my June and July are all booked up, and I can’t promise I’ll return to her for a brief rekindling prior to the start of fall semester. It only took me two weeks to fall in love, and now I am near sobbing in my tiny German apartment at the thought of leaving her.
And when my heart begins to bleed nonstop, I find my peace in the very same place I find the origins of my mystical psychosis — lamentation through literature. My poem to her would go something like this:
Spirits that were once so grey and blue,
I can thank the warm light bestowed by you,
What once were tears of edge and thorn,
You had me pulled from a dredge of lorn.
Don’t feel a love like the one I have for you,
And can’t cope with how deep my feelings run true.
If I let you play dress up, would you dress me in black?
Oh to live in a city that just loves you back.
Though my psychotic episode has long absconded, it left a plethora of unresolved conclusions and unexplored trajectories in its wake, a condition of living that necessitates me to live slowly and intentionally — minute by minute, maybe hour by hour, but certainly not day by day — and attach to nothing significant in the long term.
So, it’s been hard attempting to make every day a great day here — but I do it for her. I am beginning to learn just how much self-love is required in the unconditional practice of loving other things. Because despite finally finding a place I’d like to call “home” — after so many years of being married to the idea that I’d never find one — I am conscientious of the fact that I’ll have to leave soon anyway. And the pain attached to that is unwieldy.
Though I have assimilated seemingly well, I was not born in the United States, and it feels like a breath of fresh air to admit that almost all American life feels alien to me. Call it Freudian, but the Plattenbau houses lining the Spree and the superb public transportation network have filled in a gap of my perpetual immigrant “homesickness” that I didn’t even know existed.
But, despite my best wishes, oftentimes growth occurs only for the sake of growth, nothing within it containing the promise of something permanent. And that’s because things that are permanent rarely — if ever — spark any semblance of growth.
I’m afraid that’s just the way it has to be. And — in a way that is very unlike my usual optimistic self — I’m beginning to think I won’t be able to usurp pain in this lifetime. No matter the circumstance, change hurts, and maybe coming to terms with that sooner rather than later would do me good. Sometimes, we just have to be willing to bathe in our anguish, to drown in waves of existential and romantic poetry and to fiercely fray our soul through journaling and creative fiction as a sacrifice for the things we love now. To beat our heads in with Whitman and Yeats and Tolstoy and Thoreau until we remember the reason we’ve been put on this fucking Earth for.
Yes, everything has changed for me since I’ve moved to Berlin, from how I write letters of love to the persons I write them to, but maybe that’s just the whole point. Today is Easter Sunday, and I know this because it was the humming and ringing of church bells that woke me up this morning. Despite their lovely bellows crying out across the entirety of my neighborhood, I also know that she made them clang and clash this morning only and just for me. Oh how lucky I am, to always know that she also loves me.
Statement Contributor Valerija Malashevich can be reached at valerija@umich.edu.