.SOMETIMES RAW.

1. Scene 1: (Married couple: A man and woman on a road trip to New York to take care of important paperwork/documents). It is very early in the morning. Everything seems fine.
2. They laugh. She falls asleep for an hour or two. She wakes up when he pulls over to get coffee. (A little break but he does not seem tired at all).
3. (They arrive in New York. She gets out of the car and walks to the office. He tries to find parking in the area).
4. She receives messages on her phone while walking to the office. She doesn’t know the person who sent the messages but it is disturbing nonetheless. “Your husband is having an affair with my wife”, she reads. She reads it over and over and feels that a huge hole opens in front of her – ready to swallow her up. She falls into this depth. It is dark, cold and painful.
5. “Who is she?”, she asks.
6. “Nothing is wrong”, he says and “this woman is just a colleague; a friend. Nothing more. The colleague needs help dealing with issues and he, of course, gives his advice. It is a war zone, after all. There is a lot of stress. Her husband is a psychopath”.
7. The man denies everything, and she cries out, ” Why didn’t you tell me?” “It means nothing because nothing happened”, he says. (Long silence)
8. They drive back. Ahead of them: an (at least) eight-hour drive (800+km) next to each other (trapped) in the car. (No escape, just silence). She stares out of the window for the first hour. Speechless.
9. (Neither of them is happy but nobody wants to leave. So they continue and call it love. )
10. She digs one more time through her bag to find her phone,
11. to gather information and missing links,
12. to check messages and emails,
13. to arrange everything in a huge pile and looks for her red lipstick (she needs red lipstick to make herself happy)
14. (She applies the lipstick.)
15. She then finally just stares blankly at all this mess her life has become. In one second (with one message) everything changes.
16. Outside: It looks sad, it is fall. November.
17. Back at “home”: She considers going to bed, to forget the whole thing. Maybe it is all just a bad dream?
18. His suggestion of what to do next, not a perfect one, but…. He suggests weird things and says them out loud while peace tries to spread out in her head. She does not want to listen to him anymore.
19. Her complaint, “We cannot live like this. I don’t want to live like this. How do you think this can be even possible….?”
20. (Change of scene. Both sit in the kitchen, brooding angrily. Trust is broken. There is no way back, she thinks. Maybe there would be, but he chooses to go on a Safari instead. “Alone”, to relax because he works in a war zone)
21. She knows what will happen next. Deep inside. At this point, there is no return. She is in charge. He won’t be any longer. Enough is enough.
22. (First change of scene: Months passed and no change but fighting and arguing). [Possibly insert a scene: Two people typing emails, one looking sad, the other one is denying] 😉
23. (Second change of scene: She walks to the car and drives to the lawyer’s office)
24. For her to eventually lean over the counter and
25. to take the stack of papers out of her purse,
26. to retrieve a paper fallen to the ground, to catch the other ones slipping.
27. The length of her explanation, her supplication,
28. and meanwhile (change of scene) he is furious. He does not want the change.
29. (A lawyer starts to work on the application- typing things, taking notes). She leaves the lawyer’s office and walks back to the car.
30. (At this point: heavy snowfall)
31. She glances back, to see the lawyer’s office entrance again. She sees her footprints in the snow while closing her warm winter jacket. She feels good and is proud that she had the strength to take this step.
32. (At home: Holds her marriage certificate in hand and thinks: What is she going to do now? This meaningless piece of paper. It means nothing after all)
33. The emergence of a slight headache. So much stress. Barely any sleep.
34. The emergence of thoughts in her mind, the suppression of it, its reemergence
35. The contemplation: She was too blind to see. It is better this way.
36. In emails, he recites a list, another list, of other things she has done to him in all those years. The punch lines. She does not listen any longer.
37. (Change of scene/Drive to the airport): In the car, she looks out of the window: A hawk flies overhead. Is he following their car? Woods everywhere, low red sky. Sunset. The evening then night)
38. (At the airport: Four blinks from him, seven from her [watery eyes). One last hug. He said, “I am sorry!” (Neither did she feel anything anymore nor did she say anything back but she hugged him goodbye. She walked back to the car without turning back.)
39. (Change of scene: After the drop-off): She wiped away one last tear. Then she sees a little boy next to a woman who both want to cross the street. The woman looks sad but the boy seems happy and jumps up and down. “It is not that bad, mommy,” he said while grabbing her hand.
40. The little boy looks at the woman and smiles.
41. At this point, she knows she will be fine.

My son asked me the other day, “Mommy, when will I be a grown-up?” “Very soon, my love because time flies,” I responded. This small conversation made me think. Maybe the issue was that there is a direction. Up. One cannot simply grow, one must grow up. Along with pencil notches on a door frame and candles on a cake, your ferocity, wisdom, and velocity must increase as you age.

Anyone who has reached adulthood knows that growth does not progress like a ticking clock. It usually means horrible missteps and innocence lost, betrayal, disappointment and broken zippers. It moves backward, inwards, sideways, finding new ways to humble us. Doesn’t growth most often feel only good in hindsight? Like running a marathon through the five stages of grief. Sometimes it doubles back on itself many times before it emerges as something remotely useful. Then, of course, we may forget what it taught us and repeat the same mistakes. Move back home, get lost, find ourselves again, get lost again, meet new people, get lost again, but be better for it. Ad infinitum.

We all know this chart and intellectuality it entails, right?

But it is different from knowing it in our bones. And aligning our senses of self to the inalienable truth that progress often means making a huge, disastrous mess first. #storyofmylife. Let’s dive into the complicated pool of human progress a bit: Growing up. Can you grow down? Laterally? Literally? In relationship and partner choices, I know of at least one example for sure. Can you regress and then grow as a direct result of that regression? Or can you grow in a bad way? In the wrong way? Can you grow by learning, and then grow again by unlearning what you learned the first time?

I told my son the other day that I don’t want to sound like a deflated balloon, but adulthood is exhausting. He just looked at me and proudly told me that he washed my new sweater in the little pond so I don’t have to wash it anymore. Now that I am here on this earth for quite some time as a fully formed adult who subscribes to The New Yorker, reads the Süddeutsche Zeitung and moves around to figure out where the best place to live is one might think I have it all figured out.

These days, life is awesome but a couple of weeks ago it was rather tedious and my happiness tended to look a lot more like contentment rather than non-stop joy. It is a constant up and down but this is okay. I could throw caution to the wind and hop on the hedonistic hamster-wheel of chasing perpetual youth, but honestly, that sounds exhausting, kind of expensive and I rather spend my afternoon in a hammock reading a good book to find perpetual inner peace. So in the interest of gratitude and thoughtful living and what have you, I am trying not to take adulthood for granted and will share a handful of things that make me feel blissful, like a full-on adult. These are little moments where life turned out exactly as I once thought it would.

Balancing groceries on my hip as I get my mail out of the mailbox. It is just something about this balancing act that is life just feels so satisfying. Little victories. And never walk twice.

Eating Chinese food straight from the container.

When I lived in New York City, eating Lo Mein out of a paper container felt like the height of working woman sophistication to me. There was this certain grace of giving myself not even a plate feels which felt like an indulgence. There is of course no moral value one way or another on eating Chinese take out, but something about the image of a woman alone on her couch, watching crap TV, eating takeout feels to me like a deep exhalation.

Standing in the aisle of a drug store comparing two toilet cleaners. Nothing says I have my shit together quite like taking my time to form opinions on toilet bowl cleaners.

Making chicken soup (any other soup) from scratch. Or actually cooking anything at home because it tastes so much better.

Unceremoniously stop jogging when I have had enough and to simply walk home. It is totally fine. No judgments. Not even the guy you just passed who challenged himself to squat deeper than he did the week before. He also trains for the Iron Man. I will do my thing. I used to train harder, run faster but in the long-run, all this nonsense did nothing for me but gave me pain.

Safety. If I knew what safety looked like, I would have spent less time falling into arms that were not. I know now. The key: Love yourself first. Unconditionally.

Chill in a hammock for a couple of hours and read. You are your own soulmate. Don’t mistake salt for sugar. If he wants to be with you, he will. It is that simple.

Don’t we all know that perfection is a condition experienced by many, exasperated by social media, and just causes frustration, procrastination, low self-esteem? If left untreated, it may lead to sadness, lack of purpose, and constant questioning featuring too many what-ifs?

I’ll do this after I do that. I’ll get to it once this happens. I can’t start this until this is perfect. Many times perfection got in my way of starting or doing something new. I used to think if I cannot do it perfectly or under the perfect circumstances, I simply do not see the point.

Perfection has made me procrastinate the bigger things like for example moving back to Germany, re-designing my blog, writing a business proposal, choosing a daily meditation to practice or the smaller things like planning my day off. Sometimes if I could not decide on the perfect plan for my day off, I would just end up staying at home or running errands instead of doing something awesome.

Everyone defines perfect differently and we all have varying levels of personal standards of perfection. I personally believe and think it is fair to say that perfection is an illusion just as social media is an illusion. It is mostly curated, edited, airbrushed montage of just a tiny facet of someone’s life. So, based on this concept, that perfection is an illusion, perfection does not exist. Sometimes people, and I include myself here, get caught up in living in a non-reality when life usually revolves mainly around the superficial things like status, money, job or to-do lists. Living in reality means connection with others, accepting myself the way I am, and feeling emotions; even the dark ones.

Progress over perfection.

The right moment may never come but sometimes it is important to just do what feels right even though it is not perfect. When I chose to make progress, move forward, and take action, that’s when I achieved my goals. It is simply letting the walls of perfection fall to reveal something so pure and unique to me. It is also about loving and believing in myself enough to trust that whatever I create is not perfect but it is real. And my best self is created from this space of honesty.

It is very easy to get caught up in the comparison of what everyone else is doing and then need to feel accepted. But what actually happens is everyone does the same thing and the perfection bug actually causes repetition. Many of my friends had to listen to me talking about moving to a particular city for months now but I wanted it to be perfect. Then I got to the point where I had to just take action and go or I would be waiting forever. This move won’t be that easy but manageable. I don’t think no major move really is but this experience will teach me to live here and now, and to actually do the things I talk about doing someday. Simply because, like perfection, someday does not actually exist. So, I signed the lease to my new apartment. It felt good to finally do it. Once it was all done, the pressure was off and having done it, I now feel inspired to finish it off.

The next time you are about to put off anything because you are scared it won’t be perfect, remember that progress is more important than perfection. It is okay to clean my kitchen just a little bit, let my dad work on my new vintage furniture because he knows what he is doing, apply for that Ph.D. without re-reading the application fifty-thousand times. Oh, and starting my new essay can wait as well as the laundry because I have to catch up with a very good friend who wants to make pizza with arugula, Proscuitto, and cheese. I will get a bottle of wine. I promised, didn’t I? Just be imperfectly you.