My birthday month and the holidays had me thinking of my childhood, my ancestors, marriage and family, all tinted by the unnerving certainty that I would finally have a normal and respectable life after all.
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As the cold and dark season drew closer, I had arranged myself somewhat with the difficulties of my relationship and its almost comfortable inevitability. Themes of domesticity and a familiar domestic suffering were dominant at this time.
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My life starting revolving more and more around my highly charged but fragile relationship. Newly equipped with psychological knowledge, I was seeing everything through a lens of trauma and became a little bit too conscious of emotional patterns, which is, not conscious at all.
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In the sweet spot between falling in loving and completely drowning in it, I went through a period of exuberant creativity which found its climax in the 2022 Erfurt Graphit Festival, a beautiful gathering that made me feel sane even though things were starting to slip.
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In the cruelty of summer, and a newfound freedom to use public transport, my new relationship unfolded, but somehow it was fraught, like getting a plane off the ground. In a misguided attempt to overcome my fear of commitment, I was determined to do things differently this time, but scared of losing control, and at war with my own fear and desire.
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My attempt at maturity in love didn’t last long, so after putting up some resistance I surrendered to dating the intriguing stranger due to undeniable chemistry. I was like a newborn deer at this time, eager to apply the psychological knowledge I had gained during the past few months, and to pay for my sins in the only way I knew.
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After returning from Turkey, a new love interest appeared: A total stranger from a faraway country who made his lack of familiarity with my culture up in intensity. But especially since I had recently gained some self-awareness, I did not feel stable enough for turbulences of this kind.
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The feeling that hit me in Istanbul was very much the same one I had encountered 6 years prior, when I first did my art residency there: Like being on a ship, elated, but seasick with anxiety. Frantically trying to make sense of what I was experiencing, I finally became desperate enough to be honest and owned up to my year-long obsession with my former lover.
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In April I went on a group trip to Istanbul, the great love of my twenties. Newly equipped with audiobooks about anxiety and more aware of my mental state than ever, I was determined to use this trip to tie up some loose end with the city and the man who had been another great love – that I had failed to ever fully engage with.
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March was dominated by new way of leading my life in an effort to create peace in my body, a new permeability towards the world, but in the same masculine style of doing things, because it was all I had ever known.
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My psychological rock-bottom had driven me to finally read some of the books well-meaning people had been trying to give to me for years. I took this as an opportunity to question some long-held beliefs about my life, like needing non-monogamy to be happy.
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Following a nervous breakdown over New Year’s, which was induced by – but not to blame on – a recreational drug, I experienced a week’s worth of the worst anxiety of my life. Feeling completely out of control, I was forced to make the decision to fix my mental health for good this time, but I had no idea how.
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