Space Girl

I had made a massive leap, only to land on my head.

This past summer, I moved out—out of the Neukölln flat I shared with my partner Dylan and our perfect dog, into an attic room in Kreuzberg my friend had severed from her own sleeping quarters with a bolt of heavy red fabric nailed to a corrugated wall she installed herself. I thumb tacked photos of Dylan and I (largely stolen from my fridge at home) to that wall. I burned through three boxes of Ananda Astral Rose incense and two seasons of Dear White People. I doused myself in my host’s imperturbable party energy like it was holy water, beheld her kaleidoscopic raver wardrobe like a grimy peasant in the presence of all the queen’s riches, and wondered if I would ever feel like myself again.

A grimy peasant with a dirty mirror

I moved from Chicago to Berlin without a plan and, frankly, without a clue. Near the end of 2017, I put my collection of 1950’s prom dresses in storage; entrusted my vintage mannequin head, Balinese goddess marionette puppet, and two dozen of my grandma’s plants to my closest friends; and packed my remaining aspects of Self into two moderately sized suitcases bound for Deutschland. Detached from so many of the artifacts that had always helped me convey my inner world, I thought I was already primed for reinvention. But you can’t build a new sense of self on uneven ground—there needs to be a demolition, a wrecking before the reckoning, a death before rebirth. I didn’t know that at the end of 2017, and so I wasn’t prepared to spend the next two and a half years incinerating my ego to smoldering embers.

Programmed for survival mode, I did my best. Buckling under the financial strain of keeping our little single-income family afloat in a new country, and advantageously unaware of my martyred money patterns, my shame (not having a real personality outside of achieving, not practical enough to appease concerned family members) reared almost every day. Whenever my unaddressed childhood trauma provoked conflict, I would then talk and talk in circles—infinity loops—while a sodden fog leaked out of my brain and into my body. I had made a massive leap, only to land on my head.

Long before the pandemic set in, I, a typically remote worker, occupied a series of tiny flats with Dylan. There was no solitude and no respite, and without those things, there was no learning—no moving through, just this pervasive stuckness. I missed my people in Chicago, and my poofy dresses, and my indoor jungle, and my spacious apartment with stained glass windows and a conveniently forgotten mouse problem. I missed feeling like I had any fucking clue who I was, and I knew I needed space to unearth that feeling.

So, last July, I moved out for four weeks. A few months of pandemic living had, ironically, already given me more mental space than I had grown accustomed to, but I needed some physical space, as well. Dylan was supportive, as always. I slunk around my new housemate’s place in sweatpants, ate pasta, did guided meditations about my shadow shelf. I went to one forest rave that I love bragging about, but otherwise I leaned into my seclusion hard. I think said fabulous housemate might have been very, very worried about me, but thirty days to sit with myself—as drab as that looked—was what I had needed all along. 

I was not exaggerating about my housemate’s wardrobe or queenliness. Please note the actual crown.

They say to write what you know, and I know this: space heals. While COVID has bestowed many of us with much too much physical space, there are also those for whom one ounce of solitude is an unimaginable privilege right now. I’m writing this to remind you that whether you’re alone and inundated with soul-deflating news, or trapped with your partner in a one bedroom without your usual outlets and places to retreat to, this situation is not forever. And if you can give yourself any amount of space—by taking intentional breaks from media, going on a daily solo walk, waking up before everyone else in your house just to sit and drink coffee and hear yourself think—I believe you will move through this, and your Self who emerges blinking into the post-apocalyptic sunlight will be all the stronger, wiser, and more stable for it.