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We've been here for more than a year now, where the small village church right next to us tells us the time, where the gravel trucks and cockrows are each morning's alarm bells, where flowers and fruit and thunderstorms are bountiful and we light a fire in winter nights.
It's been nearly two years since I gave the system its last chance to keep me.
The twin arguments of "It's especially bad right now because of X" and "It's just now gonna get better because of Y" are a pattern I have now encountered in so many variations and in so many areas of life, and they are always bullshit. Irgendwas is immer.
So two years (and two months) ago I set a deadline, publicly, in a crisis meeting at work, and then simply let go. I let them take responsibilities away from me while they continued to pile up the blame at my feet (and I watched and judged), and I let go of ancient images of goalposts I'd always aspired to: The Sex and the City version of city life. I stopped setting myself on fire to feed the wealth of distant and treacherous CEOs.
Maybe I still wouldn't have made the big jump out of the old life into the new, if Dad hadn't presented me with the perfect excuse: I needed to be closer to him to help him move out of the disaster zone that had been mostly unchanged since my parent's divorce in the late nineties. And I needed to see him much more often if I wanted to have any chance at catching a new bout of depression before he'd tell me there had been one, say, six months after the fact (Jesus!).
To be fair, the bosses helped by letting me freelance very comfortably for a year. I just used the moment in which the company was searching for a new position to stick me in and smoothly edged out completely.
And maybe I still wouldn't have moved here with this particular set of criteria, if we hadn't visited Wales. The place not only gave us a massive boost of magical energy, but also showed us a place and life we couldn't have imagined from scratch: referential experience to build a dream of our own on.
So next we tested how visiting a random city for a long weekend could possibly satisfy any needs for city life: and Lisbon delivered. Oh the light, the sea, the wonderful coffee, the old city center.
So off we went, to anywhere close to Kiel (with under 2h driving time) and close to the sea (with under 1h driving time) and good internet. With that set of criteria, we found the most wonderful flat in the backyard of nowhere.
In an insane time of major strain and effort, we dissolved the last remnants of the flat share: K off to a bright flat with three rooms and a balcony, us to where the garden view was full of blossoms.
We drove back and forth three times, two times with a van, one with the car E's parents gifted us with, and Barclay spent his transport on my lap, while I was driving the van through the night.
The amount of trash we got rid of alone!
And then the huge experiment truly started: What happens if your surroundings don't scream messages at you each day anymore, through advertisement and commuting crowds and workplace vibes?
What happens if you leave space for silence and emptiness? What grows to fill that void? Which inner voices slowly come forth to be heard again? Who are we if we can jump into the waves in workday evenings? If creative endeavors are allowed to be the focus?
While packing our bags for an impromptu beach visit in the summer of 2015, E standing in the kitchen, me in the doorframe, she says: "We should just get married." And I laugh and say: "Oh thank god, I was wondering for days now when and how to broach that topic!"
We contemplate how to get married for months, until one day we drive to the office to at least register already, both in sweats and not showered yet, on our way to get groceries, and the woman at the desk asks: Well, if you don't want the special room and don't have witnesses anyway, how about now?
So, yeah.
We get flowers with our groceries anyway, and while stepping out of the supermarket, E. holds them and hums dadummdadamm, dadumdadamm... and we dissolve into laughter again.
I work closely with A., a team lead in the company, and her slow erosion is a copy of my path one year ago: the same patterns being used to keep her down, and it frees me up from any doubts: It wasn't me. I had no chance to succeed in that matrix of strategies.
At the turn of 2015/2016, she leaves the company for another, and my freelancing gig is canceled the day after Christmas with no forewarning. The customer I worked for is furious and buys me directly while booking her from her new workplace, so nothing much changes, only my income doubles, I have no contact to the toxic workplace messages anymore, and since I delegate tax declarations, my administrative workload all but disappears.
Also, A. and I can talk through all the crap we internalized, which helps enormously with the shaking off.
Meanwhile, E. also shakes off one false belief after the other for both of us, and makes huge strides to the right creative project. She studies so much, she fine-tunes her craft more than three years of art school could possibly have taught her.
There's an ermine living under the roof - bothersome, but dammit, also cute - there's a red kite flying circles around the church and our house, there's foxes and hedgehogs and badgers and beavers and does, storks and herons and cranes and cuckoos. I regularly pet horses on our walks around the village.
Hawthorn grows between us and the graveyard, and the garden has six different kinds of apples, two cherry trees, two different kinds of plum and a pear tree.
And here we are. I am writing - not just a novel (sloooowly but what other way is there), but also my diary again and maybe now in social media, too. I'm also going outside and moving my body, riding the bike through oak alleys or running through the forest.
Right now, E. is upstairs painting in oil, and later today I will dive into the next location for the comic project which incorporates all our past learnings. Barclay gets a small walk outside each evening, clinging to my legs, being walked like a very timid, very slow dog, but the main point is: He's now had moss and stone and grass under his paws.
I'm back to freely creating myself, listening to my inner voices instead of the outside propaganda. Dad is on track to move out this October. The Baltic sea has 20°, and I could basically go whenever. And finally, finally I don't feel perpetually exhausted anymore.
Two years (and two months) ago I drew a line in the sand. One year (and a month) ago we had finally moved from the city to the County of the Seven Lakes.
Right now I finally feel truly well again.
It's been nearly two years since I gave the system its last chance to keep me.
The twin arguments of "It's especially bad right now because of X" and "It's just now gonna get better because of Y" are a pattern I have now encountered in so many variations and in so many areas of life, and they are always bullshit. Irgendwas is immer.
So two years (and two months) ago I set a deadline, publicly, in a crisis meeting at work, and then simply let go. I let them take responsibilities away from me while they continued to pile up the blame at my feet (and I watched and judged), and I let go of ancient images of goalposts I'd always aspired to: The Sex and the City version of city life. I stopped setting myself on fire to feed the wealth of distant and treacherous CEOs.
Maybe I still wouldn't have made the big jump out of the old life into the new, if Dad hadn't presented me with the perfect excuse: I needed to be closer to him to help him move out of the disaster zone that had been mostly unchanged since my parent's divorce in the late nineties. And I needed to see him much more often if I wanted to have any chance at catching a new bout of depression before he'd tell me there had been one, say, six months after the fact (Jesus!).
To be fair, the bosses helped by letting me freelance very comfortably for a year. I just used the moment in which the company was searching for a new position to stick me in and smoothly edged out completely.
And maybe I still wouldn't have moved here with this particular set of criteria, if we hadn't visited Wales. The place not only gave us a massive boost of magical energy, but also showed us a place and life we couldn't have imagined from scratch: referential experience to build a dream of our own on.
So next we tested how visiting a random city for a long weekend could possibly satisfy any needs for city life: and Lisbon delivered. Oh the light, the sea, the wonderful coffee, the old city center.
So off we went, to anywhere close to Kiel (with under 2h driving time) and close to the sea (with under 1h driving time) and good internet. With that set of criteria, we found the most wonderful flat in the backyard of nowhere.
In an insane time of major strain and effort, we dissolved the last remnants of the flat share: K off to a bright flat with three rooms and a balcony, us to where the garden view was full of blossoms.
We drove back and forth three times, two times with a van, one with the car E's parents gifted us with, and Barclay spent his transport on my lap, while I was driving the van through the night.
The amount of trash we got rid of alone!
And then the huge experiment truly started: What happens if your surroundings don't scream messages at you each day anymore, through advertisement and commuting crowds and workplace vibes?
What happens if you leave space for silence and emptiness? What grows to fill that void? Which inner voices slowly come forth to be heard again? Who are we if we can jump into the waves in workday evenings? If creative endeavors are allowed to be the focus?
While packing our bags for an impromptu beach visit in the summer of 2015, E standing in the kitchen, me in the doorframe, she says: "We should just get married." And I laugh and say: "Oh thank god, I was wondering for days now when and how to broach that topic!"
We contemplate how to get married for months, until one day we drive to the office to at least register already, both in sweats and not showered yet, on our way to get groceries, and the woman at the desk asks: Well, if you don't want the special room and don't have witnesses anyway, how about now?
So, yeah.
We get flowers with our groceries anyway, and while stepping out of the supermarket, E. holds them and hums dadummdadamm, dadumdadamm... and we dissolve into laughter again.
I work closely with A., a team lead in the company, and her slow erosion is a copy of my path one year ago: the same patterns being used to keep her down, and it frees me up from any doubts: It wasn't me. I had no chance to succeed in that matrix of strategies.
At the turn of 2015/2016, she leaves the company for another, and my freelancing gig is canceled the day after Christmas with no forewarning. The customer I worked for is furious and buys me directly while booking her from her new workplace, so nothing much changes, only my income doubles, I have no contact to the toxic workplace messages anymore, and since I delegate tax declarations, my administrative workload all but disappears.
Also, A. and I can talk through all the crap we internalized, which helps enormously with the shaking off.
Meanwhile, E. also shakes off one false belief after the other for both of us, and makes huge strides to the right creative project. She studies so much, she fine-tunes her craft more than three years of art school could possibly have taught her.
There's an ermine living under the roof - bothersome, but dammit, also cute - there's a red kite flying circles around the church and our house, there's foxes and hedgehogs and badgers and beavers and does, storks and herons and cranes and cuckoos. I regularly pet horses on our walks around the village.
Hawthorn grows between us and the graveyard, and the garden has six different kinds of apples, two cherry trees, two different kinds of plum and a pear tree.
And here we are. I am writing - not just a novel (sloooowly but what other way is there), but also my diary again and maybe now in social media, too. I'm also going outside and moving my body, riding the bike through oak alleys or running through the forest.
Right now, E. is upstairs painting in oil, and later today I will dive into the next location for the comic project which incorporates all our past learnings. Barclay gets a small walk outside each evening, clinging to my legs, being walked like a very timid, very slow dog, but the main point is: He's now had moss and stone and grass under his paws.
I'm back to freely creating myself, listening to my inner voices instead of the outside propaganda. Dad is on track to move out this October. The Baltic sea has 20°, and I could basically go whenever. And finally, finally I don't feel perpetually exhausted anymore.
Two years (and two months) ago I drew a line in the sand. One year (and a month) ago we had finally moved from the city to the County of the Seven Lakes.
Right now I finally feel truly well again.
