The Story Of My Personal Berlin Wall
In which, at 31, in a foreign city, I surrender to myself and I finally understand what self-love is.
They say bottom line is where change is. They say something will grow from what you are going through and it will be you. This is nice, and hopeful. But they don’t describe how you will die a progressive, agonizing death in order to really start living. Nobody told me change feels like you either join the military or else rot in the jail of your own patterns and addictions.
This is the story of my personal Berlin wall and what I’ve found on each side of it.
Since nobody told me that I could build a doorway through the wall, I instead kept hitting my head to the wall with obnoxiousness, pride and despair, constantly wondering why it doesn’t fall down.
It is a commonly perpetuated idea that emotional walls are blocking people from venturing into life. There are walls that are bad for you and there are walls that are good for you. Think about it, you need walls in order to build a roof above your head. You also build walls to cage a dangerous outlaw. Some walls bring comfort and protection, and some bring division and dissolution. There are walls that will keep you safe from harm, and walls that will prevent you from growing.
So how does one know which wall to break down and which wall to build up?
I have an overwhelming capacity to accommodate emotional baggage. I mostly struggled to find something to do with it for the past, well, 20 years. Recently, my body decided to build a protective layer for itself. Since my mind was scattering in all the four winds aimlessly trying to figure out a resolution for why my life is the way it is, you could say it was a knock out decision. Body-mind: 1–0.
This invisible layer gradually grew invincible. Each time I’d think it would be a comforting thing to retire to bed for the rest of the afternoon — I’d think again: no more. I’d repeat systematically to myself how groggy, foggy and disengaged my brain would feel upon awakening. I’d remind myself instantly what smoking felt like the mornings after. I’d digress and pause. This looked curious and interesting. How my body knew what was best for me and how did it manage to send my mind into rehab is a mystery.
Or maybe it’s not.
I was not in my best shape to date someone when I met my late boyfriend. Long distance, his personal demons he was running from, and a pretty serious rough patch in my life magnified the issue. I was living in a new country for seven months already, occupying important headspace with existential ennui, procrastinating in finding a steady job and placing the most of my responsibility to be happy onto someone else’s back. This put a strain on the idea of what we “should” be when neither me, nor did him had a clear image of the other person, and brought to light deep seated fears and personal trauma that I had shoved under the proverbial rug. Looking back, I understood that the intention of love without the grounds for love will be stormy and probably deceiving. He lived there, I lived here, nobody was willing to move back at some point, and the whole back and forth travelling without expressed clarity or aim blocked our future. Generally, drifting like that through life may be seen as “going with the flow”, but sometimes going with the flow will just get you down the drain. I was unhappy because I couldn’t orchestrate my own commitment to the life I had signed up for and eventually, his detachment, my anxiety around the situation and our questionable way of handling each other’s sensitivities pushed me to press send to a carefully curated, reproach-free and merciful break-up e-mail.
I didn’t leave my long distance lover because I stopped having feelings for him — I did it because I stopped seeing a realistic future to it, because he accentuated the idea of not knowing what he wanted, because he was twenty years my senior and emotionally blocked himself, and, nonetheless, because my life was imbalanced overall.
Closure came as I did things differently than I did in my twenties. I denied myself the dreaded pleasure to indulge in what if’s and maybe’s, and instead stepped full force ahead into therapy and into personal detox. I stopped asking him for reasons why we had failed at love and looked for those answers inside of me. Eventually, I didn’t board the flight I had previously purchased as a surprise for our next meeting. It was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever taken. Ironically, the airline allocated me a seat number that matched his birth date. That symbolic information definitely didn’t make my decision any easier. But in the same time, it made me realize his actual birthday was an event I wouldn’t have been part of anyway, because distance, fear of attachment and different priorities lead to that, sooner or later. They make it hard to remain involved — unless two people are very financially secure, very clear about their feelings or very determined to spend their time together. Sex and silence couldn’t have kept us together, at least not for a long time and not as long as we lived 1800 km apart. I preferred to cut to the chase and save them for a person I could share the real dimensions of my life with, instead of scattering myself around the continent and always second guessing where the boat was headed.
I had recently turned 31 at that point and I had sufficient affairs in the past to know that affairs don’t usually last very long. I realized I was becoming more interested in dating people I could potentially marry, rather than people that I could not see myself with in the future.
Moving far away from the familiar comes with conscious ups and downs, but on a subconscious level, I was mostly postponing to attend to my life in Berlin. Distractions come in many shapes and sizes, they are fun and lightweight until they are suddenly not. I hit a rock bottom, the type that makes people look in the mirror one morning and understand there are no more shortcuts, this is who you have to live with, this is who you have to work at, this is who you have to finally accept: yourself.
They say it takes as many as 20 hours to learn a new skill. I ripped off three band aids at the same time. The same day I cut clear of smoking and painkillers, I removed myself from the imbalanced romantic relationship that was dying a slow death before even seeing the light of tomorrow. While the decision to quit seemed the least prone to endure, it grounded me eventually. The hardest part was quitting the relationship. It may sound radical, but at that time it was the only way to do it and my body knew it, even if my emotions where in the terminal stages of doom.
Patience. It feels like going to school again, only that you set up the programs. You teach yourself the lessons. You give yourself the homework. You establish boundaries and you set time aside for each task. One at a time, each at its own pace. You learn to trust your instinct, once again. You rewire. You feel that space down below your chest. Does it hurt? It’s probably not good. Does it feel like breathing once again? Then it’s the right way to go.
Procrastination around the self work can take an entire lifetime.
You need to express yourself.
What will you do today, in the dawn of this new life? You have mixed feelings, it’s the wall. It has grown. So you draw a door in the wall. You now know you can open it whenever you feel necessary. You draw windows — you will thus be able to peak outside, or inside. You will be able to reach behind the wall and evaluate. The wall doesn’t have to be too tall or too short. You should be able to still see the forest from the trees. The wall is not made of stone, brick, hay or wood. It’s made of your own device.
You need to let go and flow.
So you draw a river. It connects the inside to the outside, flowing steady from under the wall to the rest of the world. You don’t build a dam, because you need intake and outtake and the wall was not there in the first place to bottle up what you’re keeping behind it.
You need to reach out to the surface
But you cannot swim. You’ve spent some proverbial six days at the bottom of the ocean. You know it was the bottom, because for the first time you fell down, you touched something. It was no longer free fall. Touching the bottom of that pit caused a wave, and the wave acted like a trampoline, it pushed you back into movement. You don’t know how to swim, but you are learning now. Your body knows the pace, it slowly readjusts to the temperature. The movement is slow but steady: it regenerates hope. You didn’t expect this to happen. You were expecting the worst, and you forgot to hope for the best. You knew it would happen, but you couldn’t estimate the timeframe. It’s here — it’s nothing that you’ve expected.
You need to go back to the child you were.
So you cut your way through the woods, through the darkness. The wilderness reminds you of times you wished you had the courage, or the courage of others had woken your jealousy and your sense of defeat. You told yourself back then — one day I will do this too. I will arrive here myself. You forgot you made that promise. Now you’re there. There’s no way to come back, you’re already halfway into mud. Your feet are hurting. You stop at the safest spot, it’s nothing that you dreamt of, it’s a memory of the unknown in which you ventured. It’s cold. So you assemble a tent. You light a match, the spark is vivid and the fire keeps you warm. You ask yourself — have I been here before? Where is this place? You have arrived all alone. You are alone. The first time you were here you were not afraid. You used to let figures and small creatures from your mind dance around the darkness of the room in your childhood bed. You would speak fearlessly to the wild beasts of your imagination and befriend invisible monsters that as a grown up you were scared to tame. They are here now, surrounding you, and at first you don’t recognize them because they have matured and changed their clothes, their hair, their style, the same way that you did. You look them in the eye — for instance, look at that hunch back creature with long legs and spiky shoulders, could it be fear? It has long legs so it runs far but doesn’t manage to let any bird sit on its shoulders. It put a shell on its deformed back because their back broke a while ago and they had to dissimulate they had one. How about the beautiful mermaid over there that cannot sing her song because she had to walk on land and a Medusa told her she had to be mute in order for the world to love her? Could she be the child who sang endlessly until some school rejected her? Could Medusa be her maternal figure? Could she be the authentic self you denied because your mother always tried to change you? Is she the insecurity in you? Let’s have a look at the fat old man who wears his head in a bucket there. The last time you saw him, he was a joyous child running around the playground and the bucket only served to hold his toys. Now he’s grown up, added a couple layers of nervous breakdowns, abused his body with poor choices and placed his baggage — and his ability to let go, in a bucket he always carries and never puts aside. The bucket is so heavy now that his head had stopped fitting in, and his shirt has gotten so small he can barely move. Who is this? Do you recognize him? Could he be the pain you could never heal?
A couple of more examples such as these are meant to address the way we can cope with our monsters in a creative and imaginative manner. Nobody knows what their shortcomings and wounds look like unless they design a face for them and embody them. I found it helpful to personify my fears in order to be able to sit down and talk to them, the way you sit a dinner table with many different guests you haven’t met since you were a baby. This is your first supper. What will they tell you? Listen carefully to each of them — they all have a story to tell. They will say how their lives turned the way they did, and why you have become strangers to each other after all these years. These people are all you — they are emotions you suppressed, gifts you were denied, but they’re all parts of you that have grown stranded.
You need to touch them.
You will need to touch their layers and their skins. It will feel unpleasant, uncanny, electric, non familiar. They will eventually soften. They will eventually peel. Their backs will arch back into posture, their heads will be once again held up high. They will start voicing out unadulterated words, from a time when you didn’t develop a consciousness.
When in doubt, dance it off.
Your own personal demons have forgotten how to swing. Some of them lay paralyzed in your bed, some have gotten so old and used up they are now locked in an asylum with Alzheimer and a walking deficiency. Some have only managed to run faster than Forrest Gump, and some have simply splattered themselves across the road, letting cars and pedestrians walk over them.
Sit. You are home. Hold hands with your demons around the campfire. When the morning comes you will be alone again. Call yourself by your name. Again, and again, and again.
Knowing my ex-boyfriend, for the short time that I did, gave me a clear picture of who I am — and of who I no longer wanted to be. There is some regret attached to the fact that I couldn’t show him back then who I essentially am as an individual, but from that regret, and from what I went through something has grown, and that is still me, just a more balanced, confident and happy version.
The melancholia of the parallel lives we could’ve lived is something that never truly goes away. Until one day, when it finally does. And that’s, maybe, a rare Polaroid depicting the exact leap between tempest youth and thoughtful adulthood. It’s not saying I love you and I will always be with you — it’s saying sorry instead, and walking different paths in life from that doorstep.
My body kick-boxed me back into me that day. It told me to wait before I made the next move, and my brain to start up-cycling. It told me to open a door into the wall, instead of struggling to climb it. It signalled me to travel back to myself, instead of trying to escape into a comfortably numbing array of patterns and addictions. And right there, between the East and West of my painstaking effort to achieve love, came a feeling I thought I’d forgotten: freedom.
