i wish it was warmer and felt like summer but i gotta say…i love a summer thunderstorm.

Yesterday, I went on a 30 minute walk with Russ to get away from my desk and clear my head. On the walk, I decided to listen to a podcast and attempt to stimulate my brain versus numbing it with music. The podcast touched on Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses of spiritual development.

1. Camel
2. Lion
3. Child

In camel, you carry the weight of “Thou shalt” and adhere to societal rules and expectations. Meanwhile in lion, you’re in a rebellious phase, destroying old values and finding out what you subscribe to. I came to understand that in this phase you’re finding out what you don’t like and auditing your belief system. Lastly, in child, it’s the innocence and rebirth of your creativity and establishing new values.

I thought about various areas of my life and where I’m in different phases. The nice thing about camel is knowing you’re on the brink of changing things or shaking them up. Any time I’ve felt stuck or burdened by something, I’m motivated by the fact that the only way through is to change something, even though it will come with temporary discomfort.

In the podcast, the host talked about her own metamorphose as someone who was raised Southern Baptist and dismantled a belief system that had been put in place for her. To me, this topic in particular is deeply personal and one I empathize with. Expectations and oppression surrounding religion, denomination and lifestyle choices are a connector for those who have felt them at any extreme level.

Right after I graduated from college, I was lost and unsure of my path forward. Where would I live? What kind of job would I pursue with my degree? The bigger question: what did I want out of life with everything at my disposal? While an exciting feeling, it was also daunting and paralyzing. During this time I started going to a church but I use that term lightly. To describe it more accurately, it was a meeting of people in a dark little theater downtown where they had coffee and donuts. The music wasn’t religious and the “sermon” was more of a spiritual conversation. It felt like a room of people who felt very conflicted about religion and wanted to feel connected to something greater than themselves. I feel this same energy in a yoga class.

One Sunday morning, the conversation was about unlearning things. This isn’t a prolific topic but it hit me at a particularly timely moment. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment how much baggage and guilt I carried for not wanting to live a certain way. I didn’t feel it was an option for me to subscribe to my own belief system or to explore alternatives. Things of interest had been demonized or cemented into my brain as the wrong way of doing things. In many ways, I view most of my 20’s as a lion phase. I was constantly running from these expectations and myself. I didn’t want to be put into any box (career, religion, relationship, etc.) and I spent a lot of time and energy rebelling against these ideas. Now, I feel that I’ve entered a child phase where things are more aligned to who I am, or who I’m working towards becoming. I feel lighter and creatively inspired with more of a focus on what I do like instead of what I don’t.

Maybe that’s just getting older and having more experience to draw from? I’m not sure.

In Berlin when you go to a club, they put a sticker over your camera to keep places authentic and free. Despite missing my friends and family back home at times, that’s how my life in Germany feels—like having a little sticker over the camera and I can be my authentic self. There’s no pressure for me to be anything except who I want to be. It’s a feeling I don’t want to take for granted and one I’ve been working towards for a long time.

side note: we’ll be entering leo season here shortly… and as you know, i’m the sign of the lion so who knows what will happen.

a list of things that make me feel good in no particular order:

• writing letters to my friends
• watering my plants
• sitting outside with Russ
• starting a new book
• hearing a song for the first time
• going to the movies
• going to a yoga class
• cleaning my house
• going for a run
• fresh towels
• taking a long weekend trip
• riding my bike
• finding a ripe mango
• buying flowers
• wearing earrings
• jumping into water
• writing in my journal
• making someone laugh
• feeling inspired to write something
• getting rid of things I don’t use
• making myself a coffee
• having someone over
• sitting in the sun
• clean sheets
• looking forward to something

trying to do more of these on a weekly basis!!

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”

This book has been on my mind lately.

–

Song of the week.

from the archives: a horrible summer with a few people and days that made it much lighter.

to the people who spent time with me that summer, it meant everything to me.

i have a lot more to say about this time and particularly this summer. it haunts me in many ways and i have to live with a lot of regret. it needed to happen and i experienced a lot of firsts… but i still wish it could have been different. i guess it’s not productive to explore that thought too much. 

to be continued ~

i did my German tutoring session today and didn’t feel like an idiot. there’s hope for me lol

I’ve been thinking a lot about how reductive my thinking can be at times and how I actively try to work against it. It’s a knee jerk reaction to feel definitive about something one way or the other. A few years back, I saw a therapist and she pointed out I might be exhibiting perfectionist tendencies. This was quite a shock to me because I’ve never considered myself to fall anywhere close to a perfectionist. In fact, my life at that point felt very messy and nothing I was doing felt close to striving for perfection. Perhaps a blindspot in my knowledge around the topic, but over the course of several months she explained to me in detail what perfectionist tendencies look like and it revealed how wrong I was about the definition of a perfectionist.

One of the main takeaways from our time together was the idea of “all or nothing” thinking. She detected in stories I told her or feelings I was having about a person, situation, etc. that I would immediately reduce the person or experience to one of two camps. I left little room for any nuance or gray area. She asked me to imagine an encounter with someone and instead of saying it went well or poorly, to imagine a middle which indicated it was fine and neither good nor bad. Then, she said to imagine mid-points on both sides that say it was not good but not bad/horrible and the same for good but not great/fantastic. By adding these points on the imaginary rating scale in my head, I started to realize how reductive I had been in my thinking or analysis of things I was experiencing.

It feels like the default or lazy thing to do. I can tie this into a thought I had yesterday which was: I hate rating things at all. I can come to a conclusion on whether or not I liked a meal, or a movie but I don’t want to take the extra steps in assigning it a certain rating from 1-10 or 3 stars, etc. This way of thinking kind of sends my brain into a temporary overload and I begin to malfunction. Honestly, I don’t care that much about how good something was anymore but rather if I liked it or not overall. For this reason, I don’t like sharing recommendations with people for restaurants, movies or music hardly anymore. If I do share something with someone, I always slap the big disclaimer on it that I enjoyed it, but that’s all I can really say. The most I can do is refer back to that scale in my head and check-in when necessary to evaluate my feelings on a topic.

When my mind feels bogged down or foggy, I feel myself drift back into this line of thinking—a state of categorizing things as simply good or bad. My brain, on a bad day, feels like an overloaded mail room sorting envelopes into bins. I wonder why that is? Decision fatigue has always plagued me and perhaps making a decision about how I feel about something is all in the same. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I want to fight against that habit and keep allowing room for context, nuance and the opportunity to be surprised.

Maybe I’m just rambling, I don’t know.

After months of waiting, my German drivers license application was approved.

That’s my win of the week.

It’s hot today and it’s going to get so hot it’ll likely be unbearable. Back home this wouldn’t be so bad with air conditioning but here, we’re going to feel it.

I took Russ on a longer than usual early morning walk. He’s now laying in front of the fan in an attempt to cool off. He has a little ice pack sitting next to him that he keeps licking, too. As I was walking this morning, I was thinking about how much I enjoy summer. As a kid I always loved when it got warmer and the activities you can do during this season. We used to have a pool in our backyard growing up and I’d wake up early on a Saturday morning, put on my swimsuit and go running out the back door and straight to the pool. My birthday is in the summer and we’d have pool parties with ice cream cake.

Despite the unusually hot temperature today, I’m glad it forced me into a longer, earlier walk. I wish I could get into a better habit of going that kind of distance at that hour of the morning. It’s so peaceful and quiet outside. We walked on the greenway and I’d see a person every once and while go by on their bike on their commute to work, I’m assuming. I saw a girl standing on the corner in a cute outfit eating a baguette straight out of the bag. She was taking big bites from the loaf while she stood in the sun.

I have a pilates class later and I’m sure I’ll regret it as it’s a loft space with lots of light and heat. I am, however, looking forward to getting a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream after. I recently discovered a vegan ice cream place in Kreuzberg that carries it. I almost cried because it reminds me of my birthday and summers back home. This will be my reward for enduring the heat this afternoon.