DEAR STRANGER DIARY: BERLIN

A CITY NEVER LOOKS THE SAME TWICE

It’s wild to think how much we change in a lifetime. I feel like travellers are a fucked up species of Pokemon, constantly fighting through the grass of life, melting and morphing as we stumble from one place to another. And when we occasionally return to a place we had already passed through, we barely recognise it or ourselves. Maybe the reason I felt like Berlin has changed so much is not because it has, but because I am the one that has changed. Loneliness probably has a part to play in that. Ever since I contracted the disease: the cost of spending too much time on the road, I’ve never been able to find anywhere I truly belong. Ironically I’m more lost now than when I began travelling all them years ago, but this feeling of being lost is not wholly bad. I’ve come to terms with its beauty too. Loneliness keeps the boots moving, it forces you to work hard at whatever you are doing so you can afford to move on before the demon starts freezing your heart. It ingrains a desperate sense of hope, wonder, and curiosity into you because you truly want to believe there is somewhere in this wild world that feels like home. You genuinely want to meet people because you want to try to understand them to hopefully understand yourself. Most importantly, it forces you to wake up to the bullshit around you because there are no enabling people around to masturbate your ego. When you are riding the road alone, you always arrive as a stranger and usually leave as one because you’re never there long enough to be anything else, so the idea of you believing you are a somebody is constantly punched out of you wherever you go. A bitter-sweet poetic cocktail.

The reason why I felt bitter-sweet about Berlin this time round is because the last time I was there, six years ago, was probably one of the most exciting times of my life. The two months I was there, selling my (badly written) first book in techno club toilets, was a time when I felt completely free and distracted. A time of dark rooms, sweat, strobes, slithering bodies, open arms, invitations, and concrete ecstasy. But now, after retuning to a place that had such a special place in my heart, I feel so out of place. An intruder. What once was a welcoming, free-thinking, accepting city in my mind, has now become a self obsessed, judgemental, who do you know, what music do you like, hell-scape. Maybe it had always been a judgemental place. It probably was. Maybe I was one of them people who was so swept up in the hedonism and artificial ecstasy to see through the bullshit. But I still like to believe my experience there was genuine. I like to believe I was genuine. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I wasn’t. What I loved most about the place was the welcoming magic of the city. I truly believed the city had a place for you, no matter what you were into, a city to accustom to your greatest fantasy. But this time round, I felt like a lot of the people there were experiencing ‘underground’ fantasies more as performances, like I had stepped into a movie where everybody was playing a role. I’m pretty sure it is me who has changed. But the one thing I got from this revisit is a valuable realisation that I no longer want to be cool. I no longer want a guest list ticket into the hottest kink club if all the people there are social climbers. I don’t care about upsetting ‘artists’ and ‘cool kids’ if that means writing my truth. I feel like a lot of people in this city desperately want to be themselves but are too afraid to be just that because they are worried what their ‘open minded’ peers will think of them and the opportunities surrounding them will evaporate. It’s sad because many people, deep down are lovely, and they want to be authentic, yet it’s a burden to be so. Ironically most of the self proclaimed open minded people are more closed minded than an everyday person. They are just open minded in their way and their way only.

Somebody told me Berlin is a city of extremes. A monster with multiple faces. Good and bad. Its eyes, distorted mirrors that reflect energy in extremities. When you are sad, extreme sadness finds you. When you are happy, extreme happiness finds you. And same goes for the people there. Many of the ‘artists’ I met were extreme too because a lot of them who moved there didn’t look outside of themselves and wondered why nobody was looking at them, so they went to more and more extreme efforts to be seen without looking inward. Also, only a few of the people who call themselves ‘artists’ or ‘freelancers’ are working night and day at their art. They think they are constantly creating art because their idea of creating art is living like a destructive artist, aka getting high too many times a week, fucking a bunch of strangers, and bragging about who they know. And these kind of artists are not always teens, (I do think it’s important to have a rebellious stage in your youth haha) they are middle aged people too. Don’t get me wrong, people go to extremes for different reasons that I can respect (who gives a fuck what I respect) but this city especially seems to attract the vulnerable moths. It eats them alive and spits them out deformed, scarred with ink, and riddled with drug issues. I think this city more than most forms relationships and friendships around drugs. Ecstasy, GHB, Ketamine, MDMA. Safe harmless party drugs. Until their not. The darkest story I heard while I was there was from a beautiful soul who had just escaped the grips of GHB. We met at a house party. He told me how him and his girlfriend got addicted to GHB after frequenting Berghain and making friends there. He said his life fell into a hole once he found himself stuck in that friend circle. He said his entire day to day identity crumbled and he only became somebody at the weekend when he was in Berghain. He made an effort to always dance naked on GHB, so people could remember him. And for months he did the same thing again and again so he was seen and known. He said the moment he realised he was entering hell was when his friend overdosed by the toilets. He said, “She was on the floor, lucid, needing help. But I was too high. Looking back I feel awful but I was so lost, Jay. I couldn’t stop laughing at her while a man masturbated over her." You might think I’m writing this to disturb or cause a shadow over Berghain, which I’m not. This could happen in any club. But that was his words and his story. He said the most difficult part about getting off the drugs was not the comedown but the isolation from his ‘friends’ and the departure from his girlfriend because they no longer found him fun to be around if he wasn’t going to partake in their chemical rituals. I remember when I was in Berghain six years ago, (I never got in this time round. Not cool enough) a guy in a leather gimp costume came over to me while I was pissing into a urinal, he unzipped his mouth zipper and begged me to piss in his mouth. I’m pretty sure he too was sadly playing the part of the piss hungry gimp so he could have been seen too. Or maybe he just enjoyed it.

On a positive note, Berlin is still a magical city full of incredible music, people, and stranger than fiction happenings. What I’m ranting about is the ‘art/rave’ scene specifically. There are hundreds of dimensions to this city I am yet to wander into. And my opinion is my opinion, I hope you go there to develop your own. Somebody told me, “Berlin is a Peter Pan city. For good and for bad, everybody stays the same age here. You can see a 60 year old raving with a 19 year old as if they are the same age. This city is for the forever kids.” Somebody else said a similar thing and added, “You can relive the same day again and again and you will believe you’re happy. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of beforehand, that you may wake up one day and realise you have lived exactly the same for the last 10 years.” If you come to Berlin searching for an elixir of youth, this city does have it. But one must be aware that this elixir comes with a price.

Overall, I do believe Berlin plays an important role in this world, for the thrill seekers wanting to escape reality. Whether that be somebody slaving away in a 9-5 office without any excitement to cut up the monotony or somebody who wants to lose themselves inside a hedonistic underworld for a weekend, to release some pressure built up inside of them from their world back home. I do believe letting loose once in a while is very healthy. I’m not sure how long this hedonistic underworld will last though. Judging from what Berliners have been telling me, it’s already on its knees waiting for its authentic execution thanks to expensive developments and companies profiting off the term ‘underground’. I’m sure today is far different to when the wall fell down, when things were truly underground. A time I never had or deserved to see since I didn’t live through such evil hardships. At its roots, the mystical Berlin club culture spawned out of a desperate urge to express oneself after being sadistically subdued for so long. A safe space for the queer, straight, kinky, freaks and freakettes of this world to get freaky.

I still want to believe Berlin is just as authentic as what I saw six years ago, but in a different way, hidden in different corners. Somebody told me something interesting, “The charm of Berlin since the late 90s is people would say, ‘6 years ago Berlin was totally different.’ When I came back in 2009 I felt it had changed a lot. And in 2016, “Too many Bourgeois families in Prenzlauerberg, too many hipsters in Kreuzberg, rents rising…” Apparently this all happened before you went there for the first time. Perhaps, at this very moment someone is falling in love with Berlin for the same reason we did. Maybe in 6 years that person will say the same thing.”

Maybe I made the mistake of coming to Berlin with an impossible intention. To try to relive the same experience twice. I was looking for somebody who had already died, and when I found their ghost, it would never be the same. So with that been said, I still believe this city is still able to heal souls, to give one a chance to let loose among the strobe lights and chemical fantasies, or to roam the city like your Peter Pan traversing through Alice’s concrete wonderland. But if one arrives here to indulge and bathe in Berlin’s complete freedom without an end date or if somebody moves here to consume, consume, consume without intending to give anything back to pay for its treats, it can be very very very deadly. You know what they say about eating too many sweets. Only eat a few because if you eat too many, cavities will erupt and diabetes will creep in. Same goes for indulging in Berlin. It’s a dream in controlled doses and a nightmare when you get greedy.

As for my Dear Stranger letters, it’s safe to say they reached a certain demographic. And thankfully I got to meet some real gems in doing so. They helped me escape my obsession over trying to relive my clubbing days. A stupid thing of me to try anyway. Overall my trip to Berlin was a mixed bag of intense emotions. I certainly stared into the monsters eyes. And thankfully I met some real diamonds to make me believe the city is not just a bag full of fakes. It’s a city of one thousand dimensions. I’m excited to return to try out a different dimension. If you are one of those kind souls I met on the street, thank you for making me feel welcome. You’re a rockstar.