I moved to Germany exactly eight months ago. When I first arrived, I temporarily lived in a very sad part of Hamburg in an even sadder living accommodation. My first night in Germany I cried so hard that my lungs ached and my eyes became swollen shut. I felt like I had jumped off a cliff and was falling in slow motion. It’s one of the worst feelings I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I was terrified and had an immense feeling of regret as I had left a nice apartment, a good job and many friends/family behind. For what? To move abroad? While this was something I’ve always wanted, it was excruciatingly difficult to do—more so than I imagined.
I arrived right on the cusp of what would be a long, dark winter. Unbeknownst to me, these would be some of the most grueling, taxing months to date. My life had changed in almost every way possible. During those months I was working non-stop, welcoming the darkness at 4pm and fighting off a very scary, looming depressive episode. I was now living in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language well enough to connect to the people or the culture, I was working remotely and cut off from the world and worst of all, my dog was not here with me yet. I look back at those months in awe of how woefully unprepared I was for such a massive life change. I tried to make the best of it and go for walks despite the unforgiving temperatures or throw myself into the Christmas season (which I never do) as an attempt to bring warmth into my house. It was a very bleak time, especially when compared to the lovely summer and fall I had in Virginia prior to moving.
At the time I decided to move to Germany, I was desperate for change. I had been running from my problems and avoiding addressing wounds from within for quite some time. Moving or planning for the future was a coping mechanism or rather a distraction. It’s only recently that I’ve had the realization that I’m a rather avoidant person when it comes to my own problems. I think about things very deeply but actually confronting them in a critical, honest way has not been my strong suit. As I moved into the next season of living abroad and the sun started to rise earlier and set later, I began my emotional upheaval and a journey of self-discovery. (I do realize this sounds very Eat, Pray, Love but please go easy on me…)
I consider myself to be fairly self-aware but certainly not perfect. There are many things I’m aware of, e.g. patterns, reactions, faults, etc. Some of them I dig into and try to understand more than others. Over the past three months, it feels as if I have attempted to understand every emotion and shortcoming all at once. Then as time has gone on, I’ve categorized and parsed them into smaller, more digestable compartments. I’ve assessed these deeply suppressed feelings and insecurities only to quickly realize why I’ve kept them out of sight: self-protection. How selfish is the concept of self-protection, generally speaking? Acting conservatively or distancing myself to protect my own emotions potentially (and more often not) at the expense of someone else’s? It sounds pretty selfish to me.
I’ve never claimed to be a simple or easy person to understand. A good friend of mine recently told me that I’m “fickle” and change my mind often. When he told me this, I wanted to know why—I needed concrete examples. And then I actively listened without having my feelings hurt and replayed memories through a different lens. I looked at things through the lens of operating out of self-protection after I had been hurt or merely out of fear. I analyzed the root cause of this over several weeks. I got to the bottom of it and really tried to understand why I had been acting this way for so long. I knew I couldn’t go on like this and I didn’t want to, either.
Connecting with people is one the most important parts of who I am. I really make an effort to let the people in my life know that I’m thinking about them or care for them. It doesn’t make me a perfect person but it’s the driving force for everything I do, this need for connection. As I’ve recounted many relationships and friendships, I realize I often position myself anxiously and with little boundaries. I do this out of the fear of abandonment. I’m often worried that people are upset with me even when they haven’t given any indication that they are. This is also a driving force in how I approach situations and overall how I operate as a person.
Every day for me is a challenge in some regard living in a new country. Every connection I make is one of my own doing and requires effort and the will to show up. Small talk and shallow connections burn me out as a person which is why establishing these connections can be so difficult for me. In Hamburg through my depression and feelings of loneliness, I managed to push through. I forced myself out of my comfort zone to make connections and establish friendships. I wanted to lay a foundation there and finally feel like I was home. I maintained a few friendships that I grew very fond of and appreciated. All of the sudden, I felt like I was building something—a community and network of people that I could depend on and vice versa. Living abroad didn’t seem so scary, until it did again.
Almost anything in life can be routed back to your childhood experience. I once took the ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) quiz with my old co-workers as we were working on a project related to the topic. We all took the test and started sharing our results. I didn’t share mine with the group as they came back pretty revealing. The quiz suggested that I had been exposed to quite a bit of adversity and trauma as a kid and suggested resources for me to explore as someone who might need to heal as an adult.
When I was a kid, I always had a suitcase packed and sitting in my closet…just in case. Stability and routine severely lacked in my childhood experience and I often times felt like an afterthought. As an adult, I have the awareness to realize how this impacts my patterns and the way I see the world. I can directly correlate origins of my anxiety or attachment style to the lack of attention, patience or support I received as a developing person. I can also further understand my need for independence and why relying on another person for comfort, security or love is a terrifying/unrealistic thought to me. But how do you solve that? Where do you even begin?
As I created my life in Hamburg and started to feel secure, life would happen. Things would crumble right in front of my eyes and I felt, again, as if I were falling off a cliff in slow motion. That deep fear and sadness consumed me like a tidal wave and I couldn’t escape it. I needed support and love in a way that I’ve always been afraid to accept it, fully. My greatest fear had become a reality and here I was once again, crying until my lungs ached and my eyes were swollen shut. I look back on the last three months with astonishment of how I got out of bed every day and took care of my dog. I’m amazed that I was able to continue working and savor small moments of joy as I was experiencing one of the hardest moments of my life without my support system.
You learn things about yourself in the moments of silence. I have always had a disdain for Sundays because of the itchiness I felt around the day. The day was a looming reminder of the week to come and I spent many Sundays laying on the couch, staring at the ceiling, contemplating how I would spend my day only to find that I spent the entire day thinking about just that. Being alone when you’re anxious, sad or depressed can feel like a never ending Sunday. I want to call someone or sleep or completely disassociate from reality and escape this feeling of uneasiness. What I’ve learned in the silence is: you can’t. The real growth happens when you’re forced to think about uncomfortable things or when you’re faced with situations and thoughts you never thought you’d be faced with.
Despite feeling all of this shittiness at a rapid non-stop rate, I have grown more as a person in the last 8-9 months than I have in the past five years.
As I write this, I’m moving towards the other side. I’m now living in Berlin, a city where I never saw myself ending up. A place where I have to start over and find new friends and establish a completely different routine, again. Despite this fact, I have a new home in a beautiful neighborhood and I feel grateful as it’s been my grounding force. Creating a home where I feel safe and secure has been my primary goal as an adult and I think I’ve achieved that.
Currently, I’m at my writing desk next to my bedroom window. My window looks out onto a peaceful street with old ivy covered buildings, french bakeries, cocktail bars, restaurants, yoga studios and parks. I can hear kids laughing at the playground, people conversating over drinks and birds chirping. I’m playing classical music and drinking coffee while my dog is sound asleep behind me on my bed. Outside, the weather isn’t too hot and it looks like it might rain.
I didn’t think I would feel this safe. At least not here or right now and yet here I am.