An alternative life

His room a refuge. An intellectual dream capsule that represents him in many ways.

Perlmuttfarbenes Meer und rostrote Felsen und eine Stadt dazwischen.

Noticing contrasts. Old - New. Liberal - Traditional 

Taste and longing. You can't have everything.

Barely isolated windows and lonely books looking for new stories.

This calm regarding arousing events. Let the world flow by for a minute. 

The joy of doing nothing with a coffee in your hands.

When the sun comes back and you realized how you missed her.

Zines, illustrations, appreciation for art and for being different.

Diving into a world of caring kind people who turn saved food into soup and do jam sessions in green houses.

Being funky. Seeing light things.

Lastly, people who you want to see smile, smile at you. 

Getting back on track takes a bit more but we'll make it.

Thanks, Edinburgh. 

December 2016

Be my friend, stranger

On: New friends.

New friends. You don't know if you'll keep them. You don't know who they really are. You like them for the version of theirselves that they represent right now. More especially for the version they decide to show you.

Who were they last year? Who were they in desperate teenage years? 
Are they consistent? Are they opportunists? Are they psychopaths? Are they loyal? Are they going to stick around or are they going to vanish?

One of the dearest friends I have, wrote me once that up to this point, friends had always been variables in his life. But some just should not be. Apart from being one of the nicest things someone has ever said to me, this quote is meaningful in general, too.

It's true: We change constantly and with our personality changes, friends come and go. We move, we start a new job, we change subjects in University, we go to a different gym or try a new hobby - BAM! So many new friends! 

As new people with interesting thoughts and conversations, with great humour or the same taste in shitty 90s music come in our lives, they take up our time and space in our minds. Their problems become important, their worries, their enchantments, their love lives, their everythings. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm always taking part in people's lives and I do it really fast. I get invested. 

For example last night, in the hallway of our neighbour's house I talked to a new friend. His love interest rejected him recently, because "her head is not in the right place" and despite all my (already existing) loyalty, I get it. Nobody is to blame - it's just this unrequited love thing that happens way too often, but does not actually when you look at propabilities. 

She is confused, she likes him as a person, she misses to be around him, she's afraid that his friends and house mates don't like her anymore (I get it). So she texts him. And instead of keeping his distance and trying to get over this shit, he comes running to her. He knows that it's shit. We know it's shit. So as a friend (even as a recent one) I felt the urge of keeping him from doing that. From hurting himself even more by not letting go of someone that doesn't like you as much as they do. While doingt that, I realized that I already cared. 

I cared so much for a person that I've barely known for a month. I couldn't stand his sadness and his disappointment and his eyes as he told me he can't help but doing it although he knows it's not good to do it.

Participation, sharing and being invested in someone's life are precious features of a friendship. Although they can weigh you down. As your friend shares a problem or a worry, a sad story with you, you can't ignore it, it affects you, makes you a witness, a confidant. Not that every worry they share with you is how to bury a body, but some things are not easy to process for you. Friendships sometimes get mistaken for therapy, people might tell you things that aren't harmless - there has to be a line.

Another problem is that some people mistake you not only for therapists or problem-solvers but also for a rubbish tip where they can dump all their shit so that they don't need to process it themselves. If you feel like you're becoming this kind of pain relief for them that is unhealthy for both of you, try to make it stop.
Some friends are just slowly pushed off screen by others, because you have only limited time and capacities to keep in touch with everyone. 

And all my friends have gone to find another place to let their hearts collide. Just promise me you'll never leave again. - Ed Sheeran

Others, like the ones that use you as a dumping place for anything, you should actively push off screen yourself. In the movie that is your life, in which you are the protagonist, there shouldn't be people treating you like that. Remember that! (getting all self-help-book-life-advice-ish over here)

Some people may say I care too much, I get too invested - but what would life and friendships be without that? If everyone only cares about themselves (we all are narcissist assholes in a way) where do we get? We already live in a world that is cruel and egoistic, where human nature is too often seen in a pessimist way: "it's a dog eat dog life". (Learned that saying from a not so good movie I saw recently). 
We don't need friendships to just mirror ourselves and confirm how good we are, to support our egos and sometimes dump or worries-

We need friendships to develop our identities, to share our thoughts, our feelings, our lives with others, making small moments and achievements and feelings meaningful.
I get the unsettling feeling of not being able to keep all the people around that I really like to have around. Not only in the obvious literal way, me being in Wales at the moment and them all over the place (Freiburg, Paris, Tessaloniki, Hamburg, Halle, Tübingen, Potsdam, Heidelberg, Erlangen, Edinburgh, Konstanz...), but also in a sense that I might lose them because other things become more important and we're slowly drifting apart, even virtually. 

What still makes me hopeful for the future is on the one hand, the endless possibilities of meeting best friends that I haven't met yet. On the other hand, what my aunt said on her 50th birthday last year when she explained how she knew all the people that were there at the party - It was like a puzzle, a mosaic of people that were once or still are important in her life, she told us about how she got to know them and how she lost and found them again.

Someone recently said to me that he does not believe in randomness, he rather believes in patterns. So if this one pattern makes me meet a person, maybe it makes me find them again when we lost each other? I put the question mark there because I don't know if this is possible. I lost friends, that's true - But by now I never managed to become friends with them again. 

Making new friends can be tough (I'm trying really hard at the moment, you know), but at the same time, like I said in the beginning, it can also be very easy. You can define yourself differently, be a different version of yourself and they'll still like you for who you are or show them to be. But I think if you're always choosing new friends over old friends because you're changing that might not be the best idea. The friends that have stuck around for a longer time, they really know who you were, where you have gone wrong, how you changed, and maybe even who you want to be later. Do not dispense of these people. You need them. As a mirror. Not a mirror that always reflects how cool you are, but a mirror to show you the real you, that is not always funny and beautiful and stunning and creative. It's sometimes mean, ugly, desperately sad, hopeless, an asshole, an arrogant prick, a stupid irrational depressive person. They see who you really are. They know you - and they decided to stay. You know them. You both committed. That is something special and the trust and work you put into this relationship pays off. You sometimes have to let your friends go, but don't let them go easily.



So what about me? I let my new friends feed me with cheese cake and try not to put their faces on the internet (too much) without their knowledge. All the pictures you saw are potential new friends. Will they stay around? God knows.

PS: The hat is back.

Could you please fix me?

On: Friends suffering from serious heartbreaks and me trying to deal with it

So I crumble completely when you cry. It seems like once again you've had to greet me with Goodbye... Arctic Monkeys 

Why is it so freaking hard? To love and to be loved back. Why does not everyone we admire feel the exact same for us? Why isn't it always 1+1= 2 = Love? 
We grow up into a world full of fairytales, where the two protagonists, after several obstacles and the big misunderstanding, still get each other in the end. Where love is real, between two people and can't just fade with time or get broken by the betrayal of one. 

We grow up to believe that we could find that special somebody by whom we won't be hurt, we will just be loved into eternity. We grow up and see our parents divorce one another, we see how love is not eternal, it's temporary. And that there are different extents of love. A crush, a fling, a romance, a relationship, a marriage, a soulmate...

I know it's German but...They say:
"You're my favourite person"
"That will pass, too"

We realize that some people love other people so much they would die for them while the other person just doesn't care. 
Or parents who love their children so much they break completely if something happens to them. We experience our first very own heartbreak and begin to understand what this feeling is that every singer sings about and that every band has covered. 

Love is irrational. So is heartbreak. 
Hence it is hard for your friend to emphasize with you when you lie on your bed just crying about her, her and only HER forever. In your mind, there's only her face, her hair, her voice, her smile and the worst of all: her rejection of you. The bitter feeling that day left in your gut.
But it's easier for them when they got through a similar situation in their past. Like always. We can't put ourselves in the skin of others, we can just relate to some things they experience.

So that's what I did, two times in this year's cursed christmas holidays. 
"We just practically broke up. Can you come over? I need you!" said the Whatsapp message and you guys know how fucking hard and disastrous it can be to receive texts like this. Texts that scream from all of their letters: "I'M HURT! Could you please fix me?" 
Because to watch a real friend, a person you love so much, being sad and heartbroken, brings a bit of their bitter feeling in your gut, too. They are supposed to be happy! They are supposed to smile! Noone is allowed to hurt your baby! 

A similar situation with my best friend. Different lover, different length of the relationship - 
but the same fucking destructive feeling. Maybe it is typical for us humans how universal heartbreak is and in the same time the most personal and individual thing of all times.

His text says "I'm in the car in front of my house. Can you come?" . Without any emojis and with the background that he just talked to the person he's in love with, to clarify things, you know that he sits there alone in the dark, crying. That he doesn't want to go inside to avoid talking to his dad and explaining his red eyes and his terrible mood. 

We'll be there, talking and shedding tears in the dark. (source)

You know that nothing is okay. Everything is so wrong. It feels like it will never be right again. 
"Why can't it just be okay? Like it was in the beginning: We were so happy, I was so happy at the time. But now...?". He looks at me, sobbing, suing. But I can't answer his questions. 
Only these old dumb and lame phrases come to my mind. They are true. But they don't really help. "Time heals" and "It'll be alright" and "You're to good for them anyway" and "You don't need them to be happy" and "you'll find someone else".

I wonder if I am good at comforting people. I imagine the pain I went through in some times in my life. How I called them and cried for help. How I was a crumbled mess on the floor. How I thought that "It will be alright" was the biggest of all lies. 
And suddenly it gets easier to feel them, to console them and be there for them. It is a really important part of a friendship to be there in this time, to lend your hand when your friend is at the bottom. Help them up and get a new start.

Since I know this video by TimH, I've shown it all of my friends who were in a similiar situation. It really sums up in a wonderful slightly funny way how you feel after a relationship ended and you are still in love with the person. 
And I have to say thank you Tim, for making it, because it really helps. You may cry more at first, but you start to reflect about the how and why and that there is a way to move on. 


And yet here is your friend. So vulnerable, so weak, like you've never seen them before. They cry they look at you and beg you to fix them. But you can't. Only time is able to do it, and they themselves have to "get over it" (oh how I hate that this is true). The only thing you can do, is hug them, carress them, acknoledge that they're great people and the time/situation/person just wasn't right. Because, even if I sound like my mom, it WILL get better. There WILL be someone else. And... time really heals. 
Noone knows it better than you.