My Berlin Is Not Your Berlin

My ode to Berlin. A first-person account of my life there, the places I found, the networks of care I encountered, and the ways it has shaped me as a person.

CW: Discusses sensitive topics dealing with, among others, mental health, suicide, addiction, and death, that some may not feel comfortable with. This was not done for shock value, but to illustrate the aspects of first-hand experience that contributed to insight.

I first visited Berlin with my family in 1992, staying at what was then the U.S. military guest lodging at the Tempelhof U.S. Air Force base, housed in one of the few Albert Speer constructs still standing. It was a freezing, grey November, something I would later get very used to. I remember a lot of walking around and witnessing a city attempting to be cobbled together, with the eastern half of the city still feeling quite barren. I returned with my brother in the summer of 1995, and the city already gave off a more settled, albeit manic, energy as it was being stitched together. Though that probably had a lot to do with the fact that I was a teenager, it was really hot, and I was away from home, exploring a big city in flux with my older brother and getting a first taste of freedom (although I would still have to stay in at our hostel at Mehringdamm while my brother went out to Tresor). I continued visiting through the late ‘90s and then very regularly in the ‘00s, through music, as well as my brother having made the very common post-9/11 move from NYC to Berlin. As Berlin’s popularity grew, more friends moved there, and being able to play in the city’s clubs and venues was always a fairly brag-worthy rite. Each visit brought with it new experiences and a feeling of ease and freedom. The standard impressions Berlin is known for. But it also hid something underneath I wasn’t initially aware of, something that subconsciously drew me to the city, and something I wouldn’t be fully aware of until I had settled there and lived through the most painful moments of my life. My life story is now completely intertwined with the city, and no matter what happens, there will always be a piece of me there.

My visits throughout the ‘00s were to the city that generated the reputation it still lives off today. It had slowly moved away from the cargo shorts, metal-welded sculptures, and white-people dreads of the ‘90s, and electronic music was beginning to be more accepted in the international mainstream, making the once unfashionable or even backward-seeming techno scene of Berlin something more broadly appealing. All the cliche scenes remained, as they still do today, but the city had become more dynamic through the growing influx of new inhabitants. Playing live in Berlin in whatever fashion was always a highlight and almost always guaranteed a cool and receptive crowd. Visiting my brother, we would go exploring the large swaths of empty cityscapes, peppered with abandoned factories and buildings. We would end up at some house party where a hole had been broken through the wall to connect two apartments or climb up on roofs to catch a bit of early spring sunshine. It always felt like you could do more or less as you pleased. Everything was cheap, and people were relaxed. Most importantly, I felt like I fit in, something I couldn’t say about most places I went. I usually either felt intimidated or unwanted wherever I went, though I obviously would never let on that was the case. Berlin was a city that was obviously full of life, but also one that was accepting. At shows, parties, or just meeting people for dinner, I felt accepted. The ease that gave me made me recognize the tension and weight I otherwise carried around with me.

One of my best friends had taken his own life in 2002, and that had opened the floodgates on my depression. Something that I had always written off as my own teenage lameness, adolescent obsession with people like Kurt Cobain or Ian Curtis, but something I just hadn’t been able to shake. I covered it up with alcohol and drugs and an overtly loud persona when those two substances were in play. But after my friend had died, I was not able to close the door on what I knew was an integral part of me, though I didn’t yet understand it. The parallel life of boring jobs, making music, and endlessly being at clubs and bars began exerting pressure on that core imbalance. My first attempt at taking my own life then came in early 2004. I hid this fairly well from most of the world and continued my life, looking to get a university degree (I had started working right out of high school), carrying on at my job, and making music. Berlin continued to be a draw as I always felt the fundamental imbalance inside myself reflected in the tangible imbalance of the city. The chaos, the visible disorder, the many people who were also clearly just trying to make things make sense. It offered some kind of perspective, though I wasn’t yet brave enough to make the move.

What I had thought I hid well and was not visible, as I was young and surrounded by people who were also struggling and/or coping, started to become more and more apparent as I moved further through my twenties. At some point, it was very clear that something was wrong with me, but before the full onset of social media and the omnipresence of mental health talk, I lacked the tools or insight to go looking for help. I slowly self-destructed, ruining friendships and relationships on my way, disassembling my life one piece at a time until suicide once again arrived as a viable option. This time, I followed through with more purpose, but was found by a friend, and spent a couple of weeks in the ICU and a closed psychiatric ward, before spending a year inpatient and then outpatient at a large psychiatric hospital. On antidepressants and antipsychotics, I ballooned in weight and lost the ability to write songs. I had quit my job, was severely lost, and felt that I had outstayed my allotted lifetime. I had put myself in a situation that forced me to make some kind of big change, and that change ended up being Berlin.

The psychiatrist and social worker who I mandatorily had to go see twice a week (by order of the health insurance company, otherwise they wouldn’t pay) told me I needed to have some sort of set-up there, so I began calling various clinics and institutions in Berlin, asking if they had an outpatient program or just someone I could see once I arrived. I remember calling one clinic and them being nice enough to put one of the more senior doctors on the line. He said, “I hear you, but we’re not the right place for you. The people we treat here…let’s just say they aren’t in the condition to make the call you’re making right now. But check in and around Kreuzberg, you’ll find someone there.” His voice was tired, but he sounded like he genuinely wanted to help. His allusion to Kreuzberg as, essentially, some part of town where everyone is crazy, but also where there is a concentration of people willing to help, got a sad smile out of me. It was the first time I felt that I was making the right decision. I spent months going back and forth to Berlin, trying to set things up, but also being in a bad state.

I finally made the move in late summer, finding a room in a WG that was headed up by a 36-year-old mom and her teenage daughter. Looking back on it, it functioned as a kind of halfway house for new arrivals. I quickly settled in, already being well-acquainted and having friends in the city, and made new friends as well. My first months were the stereotypical ones for any Berlin newcomer. Lots of meeting new people, bars, clubs, and shows. It all felt very electric; Berlin was still riding its high as the definition of cool, you would spot artists, musicians, and actors walking around the city, or just hanging out, living was still relatively cheap, and club door policy was a lot more lax. I even made it into Berghain any time I tried (only a couple of times), though I was blissfully unaware of how hard that was, so maybe my body language was indifferent enough to allow me access. Although it was a dark, very volatile, and vulnerable time, I still have fond memories of those first months and that first year. It felt like I had a new lease on life, and I felt truly free. I kept trying to apply for jobs, but was in such a frail state that I started making do with internships. All the while, I was trying to sort out my therapy and medication situation. I started to understand this new phase in my life as an experiment, as a test for me to finally leave some damage behind, and also simply what I needed to do to get back on my feet and shake the thing that had been hanging over me for as long as I could remember – to outlive the old me. Having to turn up for some random-ass internship as an adult was embarrassing, but it also pushed me to get over myself. Those experiences taught me that I actually was a sociable person, or at least someone who knew how to talk to people, that it hadn’t just been the alcohol or the drugs, that I actually was funny, and people liked hanging around with me. That realization in itself was eye-opening, just for the fact that it made me understand that I had been lacking any sort of healthy, positive understanding of myself throughout the previous decade, and how intensely lonely and shame-filled my existence had been that entire time – that I had felt like I was faking it the whole time.

Berlin winters are brutal, but that first winter was also historically cold. As it settled in, I found the darkness creeping in again and realized I needed help fast. I called the Krisendienst and told them my story. Once again, I was greeted with a kind voice that told me to come down and see them and asked if I would be all right in the meantime. I managed to get a few appointments there, and that got the ball rolling. From there, I went from one institute to the next, becoming well-versed in telling my story (something that I can now rattle off without thinking). After bouncing around to a couple of different therapists, I landed at one where it seemed like a good fit. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I would keep visiting that therapist on and off for the next 15 years. At the same time, I had met my future wife, and as the new year started, I felt I had found someone who, like the city, didn’t make me feel self-conscious, and who was on her own journey. After having already fumbled two long-term relationships, I had simply assumed that I had pushed my luck and would not be that lucky again. Climbing out of the hole I had been in was hard work, and there were lots of setbacks, but the structure provided by the city, its networks of care, and the luck of finding someone to share it with, helped me move slowly two steps forward for every step back.

Around this time, a friend was able to secure me a job at an art gallery. Essentially, I was one of the people telling you not to touch stuff. It was at a big Yoko Ono exhibition. I had also started playing shows here and there. Though I wasn’t anywhere near getting better, it really felt like things were coming together. The city was opening up more, I was interacting and participating in it, exploring the city, getting to know its many corners and strange little islands of life, going to shows, playing shows, being in on the art openings, and, as the weather grew warmer, getting out to all the lakes. I would do day trips on my own, finding forgotten people and places, enjoying the last bits of yawning emptiness Berlin still had to offer. This was still a very Berlin-type love affair, but underneath, the real tapestry of the city was making itself felt, supporting me.

Berlin is an archipelago city with no real center. It is a city that was small, maybe medium-sized, for most of its existence, and then exploded into what was one of the biggest cities in the world during the Industrial Revolution, swallowing up all the towns and villages that surrounded it in the process. It has tried to create centers from time to time, but this always fails. Instead, you have a patchwork of districts that each have their own centers of gravity, and neighborhoods that also revolve around certain squares or streets. Each district has its own personality and history, from fancy to downtrodden, they all seem dead set on living up to their centuries-old heritage. As such, you can explore each one and dive into all kinds of different worlds, sailing along on the U-Bahn or S-Bahn, you can escape your current reality and become one with the various societies indigenous to the various islets and estuaries that stretch far out towards neighboring Brandenburg. My first year or two in the city, I made the most of this fact, like coasting out to Dahlem to visit the Brücke Museum, where David Bowie had also taken refuge during his Berlin years. Housing one of the largest collections of German Expressionism in a modernist museum, tucked away in the leafy, well-to-do suburbs of Berlin’s southwest, it offers a reprieve from the relentlessness of Berlin life. I had already visited it in 1995, when my brother had dragged me there. As a moody teenager, I had seen fit to complain about wandering around a random suburb in the summer heat, but I had also felt a connection to the area. It only clicked with me later that this was because this had been part of the American sector and had housed the U.S. consulate and military headquarters before the fall of the wall. It felt like home because it was dotted with the same, functional post-war military housing I had grown up in. Something I would later recognize across all of Berlin as the French, British, and even Soviet militaries apparently all had similar architectural taste when it came to housing their soldiers. All these small features were on their own islands and appeared like little coded signals that only I and a select few could understand, making it feel like the city hid secrets everywhere, visible only to the initiated. They allowed me to land and reorient myself as I traveled through the city and worked through the many issues and obstacles of that time.

This feature of the archipelago city, dotted with islands and outcroppings, all rotating around themselves, is reflected in what the city offers those who seek it out. For all its talk of community and the spirit of togetherness that the various scenes and political currents preach, Berlin is, in and of itself, a very self-centered city. It is home to dozens of communities, offers safe harbor to people from all over the world. This can take many shapes and forms, and because of all this, these communities are populated by individuals all looking for their own peace or what they think it could or should be. All these people, coagulating, dissolving, for different ends. It’s no coincidence that the more famous Berlin stays – say Bowie, Iggy Pop, or Nick Cave – lasted the very typical three-year duration. Anyone who has lived in the city for a while, indeed anyone who has known anyone who moved to the city, will tell you that the 2–3-year stay is very typical. That’s usually how long it takes for someone to arrive, have their initial honeymoon phase, run into the first obstacles, crash out hard, and then leave limping. Many people who flock to the city for its promise of freedom (whatever that may mean) get lost in it and are probably worse off for having come. I know a few myself. Over the years, and through the extraordinary pressures of geopolitics, the city has been made into many things for many people. From West Berlin as a frontline city and lawless enclave to a post-Wall refuge for alternative culture and aspirational capitalist fever dreams to an early millennial outpost for cheap living and creative freedoms; always rooted in a solid working-class consciousness and history; not to mention a century-plus-old haven for the LGBTQIA community; an urban landscape that lets migrant communities build their own homes away from home. Berlin often gets sold as one thing or the other, but Berlin represents a myriad of things, often siloed off from one another, with little or no comprehension that the other exists. As self-centered as it is, it creates a universe unto itself.

As I settled into the city properly, made a home, I returned to recording music and playing shows as one of my main focuses. I struck out and promoted myself in a way I had not been able to muster previously. Making music and teaming up with my new group of friends to either compile album artwork or make videos, going out and meeting new people, and generally annoying people with my stuff, opened up that world for me. My various jobs at art galleries and working at and attending art openings gave me an understanding of the dynamics of that world, as well as slowly opening the door to working as a translator. The memory of the trainwreck that had been my life, as well as the ultimatum to myself that had been the attempt to end my own life, and the intensity of the stay in the psychiatric hospital, had fostered a hardline stance within myself that I had to lay off any pretense of being cool and take whatever opportunities came my way. That energy led me through so many doors, not to mention embarrassing situations and setbacks (especially for an adult to be facing), but it also made me at home in all kinds of new worlds and led to slowly building a solid foundation, thanks to the help of many people I met on the way and the various, vast networks Berlin has to offer. It led me to working for random tech start-ups and establishing myself as a translator, which led to working at big conferences and, eventually, at an agency with big-name clients. All of which had never crossed my mind as possibilities. When the wave of immigration triggered by the Syrian Civil War opened a housing facility for unaccompanied teenagers in my street, I was able to volunteer and co-organize football practice and tournaments for them. Spending nearly a year communicating and organizing was also revelatory in that it again dispelled my idea of being socially inept and lacking drive. Not only that, but I was at ease with, and enjoyed organizing and helping, these teenage boys who were going through something so unthinkable. That experience later led to my getting work at Germany’s largest immigration center, located at the former airport in Tegel (again, a world into itself, that few people in Berlin even know exists). Repeatedly, through circumstance or purpose, the city saved me simply through my engaging with its core dynamism and nature, while offering opportunities to recuperate, learn, find myself, and become the person I always wanted to be.

Even though depression, near suicide, drinking, and drug-affected chaos and dead-ends had brought me to the city to find my center and orient myself, the harm and negativity in early adult life had always been something I had done to myself; these were things I had broken or taken away through my own actions. My biggest lessons, and biggest growth as a person, and the way I learned to see Berlin in a wholly new light and feel the vibrant safety network and humanity of the city happened when life came knocking in its realest sense – when it started taking things away from me, when I no longer got to define who I wanted to be or what I thought my life should look like. In most of these instances, it also wasn’t simply that these things happened, which would have been hard enough; it was how they happened. It was the harshness of these experiences and the metamorphosis they triggered that made getting to know the other sides of Berlin all the more vital.

The first thunderclap was the death of my older brother. He had battled addiction for years, and that struggle was especially fraught in the last years of his life. Although always (more or less) functional as an alcoholic and, in the end, drug addict, it took a heavy toll on his body. He was the person I was closest to in my life, though we were not so close in the last years – not even speaking for nearly two years at one point. On the one hand, it’s no surprise that one cannot be close to an alcoholic or drug addict. On the other hand, it’s extremely painful to have the person you are closest to in life, the person you have looked up to all of your life, be purposefully hurtful towards you, though you know it is not truly them. Berlin was the backdrop for this time as well. It was seeing myself apart from my brother, seeing myself at a loss in the face of addiction, seeing my brother walk away into the darkness of a Berlin street. Trying to get better myself also meant standing up for myself in the face of certain behaviors, and that didn’t fly for an older brother. Despite the conflict and tension, one of my most insightful moments came when our forced silence ended abruptly, and he texted me, asking me to bring him something to the hospital where he had checked himself in to detox. As I rounded the corner of the staircase and saw my brother standing there, I thought, “he’s back.” The addict wasn’t there anymore; my real brother was back. That insight has stayed with me forever; it helped me differentiate the person from the pain and addiction and helped soothe the suffering that would inevitably come later on. The doctors did an ultrasound of his liver and told him, 35 at the time, that if he didn’t stop drinking, his liver would give out in two years. Almost exactly two years later, he was dead, but that was due to opiates.

He died in his apartment, alone, and wasn’t found until days later. His body, already decomposing substantially, was taken by the police for an autopsy to make sure there hadn’t been any foul play. This is where I learned what death smells like. We had to hire crime scene cleaners to clean and disinfect his apartment off of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The same apartment I had visited, where I have some of my favorite memories with my brother, just hanging out, talking, and listening to music, was now seared with those impressions. I do not use the word “trauma” lightly, but those weeks and months were truly traumatic and changed me forever. For a full year, I saw the city in a completely different light – police, undertakers, crematoriums, the incredible bureaucracy of death. I navigated new worlds within Berlin, familiar places became deeply sad, and I had to become used to a world I had never imagined without my brother. For all its coarseness, when confronted with tragedy, Berlin is full of caring, helpful people. No matter what you are currently going through, there are hundreds of people and whole associations out there waiting to help, free of charge.

The time after my brother’s death was a blur, a rollercoaster of highs and lows – I got married, pushed to finish a university degree, recorded and released albums, videos, tried to help my wife settle into our Berlin life in the wake of all the tragedy, plus a string of health issues, culminating in my developing epilepsy. The seizures I experienced, though I have no direct memory of them, were intense and always left my body aching, once also leaving me with a huge open gash in my tongue where my teeth had clamped down during the seizure. The experience of the auras – eerie sensory tsunamis caused by neurons firing wildly, that build up over hours until the seizure erupts – combined with waking up in intensive care or a hospital room, not knowing how I got there, and the ensuing sensation of having your brain slowly piece itself back together over weeks, provided new perspectives on the precariousness of myself and my perception of the world. Again, I was introduced to new worlds of caring, travelling around the city to new doctors, different hospitals, and becoming even more acquainted with the city’s ICUs. One thing I began to notice, and which would keep occurring almost every time I ended up near an emergency room in Berlin, is that I would overhear a nurse clearly and patiently explaining in near-perfect English to some unseen person that “You have had a seizure, an ambulance brought you here. You are in a hospital in Berlin. Do you remember if you ingested anything out of the ordinary?” As strenuous as Berlin staff can be, I learned a new level of respect for the many nurses and doctors across the city who have to deal with multiple drug-addled tourists a night, every night, next to the usual Berlin chaos.

What I didn’t know at that time was that these would be some of my last visits to the hospital as a patient, and soon, I would take over the role of caring for the person who needed help. A welcome switch of roles and a deeper dive into the infrastructure of care and communicating with its many actors. As I moved away from being the eternal patient, I finally got my degree, grew into my role as husband, and my vocation as a translator. Metamorphosing through the grief for my brother, starting new creative projects, and beginning to assume a more outward glance, I navigated the different worlds of start-ups and weird “normal” life in Berlin. When working for the translation agency, I often worked on texts on real estate or investments that would lay out certain frameworks as the backdrop for the positions they were selling clients. Here, I always had a couple of months’ head notice on certain trends and headlines, and learnt a lot about economic-political ties, real estate, and immigration statistics concerning Germany, but Berlin specifically. Through that, I could see that many of these facts and numbers were actively ignored, misconstrued, or simply not known to precisely those people having the most vocal debates on any of these issues. Again, another dynamic world that exerts a massive force on life in the city but is largely invisible to most. I returned to education to get my master’s and began my life now as a father. Furthering my education in my thirties was a forceful reminder of my initial rule that I had to get over myself. It is among the more humbling things to have to sit in a room with young adults who could technically be your children, give presentations, or work in a group with them. I could tell they were sizing me up and wondering what I was even doing there. That was also one of the places I learned that I just have to get on with stuff and focus on why I am where I am. Spending the day away from adults and constantly being reminded of my skewed life timeline really was an ego death of sorts. It paid off as it gave me the epistemological tools I needed to shore up everything I had learned in therapy and provided a sustainable chance for understanding many of the aspects of my thinking that had left me feeling so alone through the years. Besides that, it was another window into the dynamism of the city, with world-renowned speakers and thinkers regularly visiting the city and discussing hugely interesting and pertinent topics.

Parenthood was the other massive change during this time. It amused me to realize that it shook me in almost a similar fashion to losing my brother. While having my brother ripped away had me permanently missing an integral piece of my life, becoming a father was the shock of having a new, huge, defining piece of life added, and one that I also had no conception of beforehand. The lead-up to our first child had been marked by a miscarriage and all the strange, lonely, insecurity that can bring. It underscored another situation in which people – especially women – are made to navigate loss and pain on their own. Especially in our current social media age, the public square is reserved for displays of strength, happiness, and growth. Even when discussing loss, people frame it as growth. A person is made to feel immensely lonely when navigating pain, and many women are forced to navigate a combined physical, emotional, and mental pain, mostly on their own. Through these experiences, and very much so later, once we had our first child, Berlin opened itself up with the many forms of support, counseling, and countless other offers for parents (and parents to be), navigating the insanity of the whole undertaking on the ground and in the real world. As you move through your daily life, real life, catching U-Bahns filled with stressed people, walking along grey sidewalks, you find offices and small buildings all around the city, with people whose job it is to try and help if you come asking. The Berlin for families is an entire ecosystem of its own, with infinite ways to keep your kids occupied and distracted, as well as help for the many people struggling under the weight of trying to keep a family together and sane in the city. The last, or second-to-last chapter that Berlin had in store was maybe the most painful, but it opened the most caring side of Berlin I had yet seen.

Pain is hard to measure, as is trauma. Losing friends, suicidal depression, or the death of my brother – I tend to measure them in how they changed me. As such, they are formative. But I think they formed me the way they did because I either experienced them, or was able to process them, in Berlin – a city so shaped by destruction and death, where mental health issues are on daily display and people’s suffering is not swept under the carpet. For better or for worse. Losing our second baby was a protracted experience with doctors’ visits, hospitals, finally induced labor, and, unexpectedly and in total shock, spending an hour with the baby as it passed. There really are no words to describe that experience, especially because there has not been enough time to fully digest it. I won’t go further into the experience other than to say that passing through all that pain, we were accompanied by some of the kindest people I’ve ever met. We learned of the cruel regularity with which parents have to live through something like that, and that was only in Berlin. We attended grief counseling and met other parents, all invisibly navigating the same heartbreaking reality. Some of their stories will stay with me forever, and they were some of the most normal, run-of-the-mill people you could ever have met. And they were broken by life. I often think about them when people talk about “Berlin” and whatever they think it is and think about all the people we encountered and all the lessons I learned on the way. Now I have a child buried in Berlin. Now I know multiple people specialize in doing funerals for parents like us. Now I know there are people whose whole job is counseling and helping people like us. I still haven’t fully worked through that last chapter, but I have already been changed by it. For one, it solidified all my past insights and processes beyond all possible doubt, as well as adding new ones. I have no time to judge anyone for their behaviors anymore. I know that I can have my opinion and understanding of someone’s actions, that I can disagree and vehemently oppose them, but it is never my place to judge how someone arrives at their opinions, no matter how wrong I think they are. That is a product of living the life I lived in Berlin. And that is not a given – Berlin can be just as superficial and judgmental as every other city.

Berlin has shown me so many of its sides, the cliched, the tired, the annoying, the strenuous, the dirty, the loud, the broken, the violent, but also the kind, the smart, the wise, the loving, the caring. I could tell dozens more stories and offer dozens more details to everything I’ve laid out here, and it still wouldn’t encompass what I experienced or feel about the city. It isn’t even love; it is an acknowledgment of the wholeness and wholly contradictory nature of life. The city was the backdrop and the fuel for my reorientation in life. It’s worlds of vibrant life, the traces of histories, the infrastructure of loss and care, the ecosystems of grief. The many invisible worlds. When I take the M8 tram to get to my neurologist to pick up my epilepsy medication, I always glance out and up as I pass by my brother’s street. I look up at the window of his old apartment, where I hung out with him, where he died. It’s not oppressive or overly sad; it’s just there. When I get the U7 over to the west of the city, I see Rathaus Spandau and know that’s where the undertaker was who took care of my brother’s cremation. When driving on the A100 in the south and seeing the exits for Neukölln, I think of the hospital in Süd-Britz where our second child was born and died in my arms. Or the courtyard where we said goodbye to my brother, not wanting to take a final look, as the lady said his body was in bad shape. When I’m getting the S-Bahn back up towards our flat and see S25, I know there’s a crematorium up in Hennigsdorf, and I can remember the heat from when they opened the door and the tiny coffin of our baby went in. U8 to Osloer Straße heads up towards the Jüdisches Krankenhaus where I rounded the stairs and saw my brother again, for the first time in two years, and had the real him back again. Jungfernheide is where the buses arrive and leave to take everyone to and from mainland Europe’s biggest refugee center. Knowing different neighborhoods, strange social housing projects from a century ago, because that’s where I ended up in an ICU or went to a specific doctor. Savigny Platz, where I stopped by a client’s beautiful, huge apartment so that he could fill me in on how he wanted a translation done. Right around the corner, there was a weird doctor I went to because I had to get a certain prescription. Huge spaces where there was some strange art opening. Ending up in Alt-Tegel and realizing that it was where I had been exploring old, abandoned factories with my brother in the early ‘00s. Taking my son out on the Ring on the weekend and realizing I had been there some 15 years earlier at an illegal rave. When I’m back around parts of Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg, I look around and see how much has changed. So many places that had been there forever are now gone. Passing by, remembering where clubs and bars used to be. Remembering I played a show where that weird coworking space is now. It’s all tangled up now, years of living in every sense of the word. A lot of life. My Berlin is not your Berlin, nor should it be. Everyone’s is different. But there are millions out there. It is a sprawling archipelago of invisible worlds, communities, and lives. The city is a multitude of things at once, and each one of these individual worlds is fiercely alive and dynamic.