I’ve lived in Berlin for nine months now and I have stopped thinking of myself as “learning German”. Instead I hunt daily for German I still don’t know. I enter new words into a flashcard app on my phone and slowly the proportion of German-yet-unknown-to-me diminishes. If I happen to emerge from this process a Germanophone, well and good. But I have never achieved anything by obsessing over a long-term goal; I need to be having fun in the here-and-now to see any sustained project to completion. All the same, I’m easily amused. My flashcard app delights me.
I moved here last summer from London, where I had essentially lost my mind. (This rationale doesn’t go well in small talk, so I tend to claim instead that I wanted a change of scene.)
At the time, my debut novel had been published two years earlier and had garnered a lot of attention. That might sound like a dream come true – but over the months that followed, I was driven progressively more insane by my chronic inability to say no. I tried to be thankful for the deluge of media requests and speaking invitations, and told myself that most people would regard it as a nice problem to have. These “most people” grew in my head and soon they adorned my every thought. Most people have harder jobs and could do mine in their sleep. Most people don’t miss all their deadlines, then extensions on those deadlines, then extensions on extensions on extensions. Most people manage to both do their work and see their friends, at least when pandemic restrictions allow. Most people can get out of bed each morning without a million internal rounds of “What’s the point?”
I would never speak to anyone else in this manner. I’m not “anyone else”, though. I’m me, and I’m not allowed to struggle, make mistakes, or miscellaneously be human. (The cruel irony is just how many other people silently subject themselves to the same double standard. But I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to remember that in London, on account of the having-lost-my-mind thing.)
Two things can be true at once. You can be achieving a level of career success that many equally deserving people would love to have – and it can also be giving you a mental breakdown.
For as long as I could, I denied that anything was wrong. From decades of masking my autism throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was used to hiding my difficulties and criminally neglecting my own wellbeing in an attempt not to burden others. But by early 2022, I could no longer even vaguely pretend to be holding things together. The nadir came when I couldn’t sleep for three whole days, by the end of which my feet had very sexily swollen, I twitched at background noises and my own voice sounded as if it were coming from several meters away. After finally managing to sleep on the third night, I woke up 16 hours later to several missed phone calls. Someone from my literary agency had come to a nearby coffee shop with a contract I urgently needed to sign, had waited in vain for an hour. At lunch with my agent later that week, I broke down crying. “I don’t know why I can’t do things any more,” I said.
Around that time, I visited an Irish friend in Berlin. The idea was to relax for a few days, return to London, carry on with life.
My first night in Berlin, I took the tram in the dark, carried my suitcase up the communal stairs in my friend’s prewar apartment building and slept more soundly on her polyester couch than I ever had in my London double bed. In the morning I walked around the neighbourhood, enjoying the wide pavements and abundance of trees. The fresh blue light made the world look new.
A few blocks further along, I saw suspended pink pipes lined along the road. I searched “pink pipes” on my phone and discovered that the Berlin local government had chosen this rosy tint because it’s the most popular colour among all children until they start school. Then the boys learn to hate everything associated with girls and the girls in turn begin to hate themselves – but while we’re still innocent, we all love pink. The pipes are there because Berlin is built on a swamp, making it necessary to drain ground water from building sites. Even this made me smile. I grew up in Dublin, a port city, but my family are from a notoriously unarable region of rural Ireland. To build on bad land feels brave to me – or perhaps it just feels like home.
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Consider this January trip the first beat in my spiralling romance with Berlin. I returned in the spring to stay another few days with my friend (beat), I accepted after my three days of no sleep that London life was making me miserable (beat), and I noticed how much better my writing went in Berlin (beat beat beat).
It was a no-brainer. I moved that summer. Relocating to Berlin has improved my mental health in two main ways. The first is that I’m less professionally overwhelmed. I’m asked to do fewer things now, since it’s a hassle to bring me to London – and when I do feel inundated, I’m finding it easier to speak up. Daily exposure to German directness has cured me of my once-consuming need to be liked.
Better yet, learning German has moderated my perfectionism. Soon after moving to Berlin, I had period cramps and asked a drug store employee if they stocked “Ibuprofen-Tabletten”. She blinked and replied that of course they didn’t sell that. (You’d think drug stores would sell drugs. Not in Germany they don’t!) At least she didn’t switch to English; many young Berliners do so instantly when they hear the slightest trace of an accent. At first I took this personally, saw each interaction as a test, interpreted each English response as an F-minus. Over time, I toughened up. Nowadays I rarely get hit with English – and when I do, I choose to see it not as a reflection of me, but of the other person, of their assumptions about foreigners or their own desire to practice. I ran the “Why do Germans reply in English to anglophones who’ve just spoken perfectly fine German?” thing by several Germans and they were uniformly baffled that anyone could take offence. Of course you speak English with English-speakers – it’s polite!
Anyway, I’m getting there. My German isn’t proficient, but it’s competent and I’m improving each day – not despite my mistakes, but because of them, treating them as chances to learn.
Also, Berlin is fun. On my road lives a stray cat that I and several other neighbours feed. He runs out to headbutt my hand whenever I pass the car under which he sleeps. There are posters for classical music all over the city: Beethoven, here, is for everyone. The theatre, too, is affordable and often packed, though this does entail the disadvantage that my view is frequently blocked by tall Teutonic heads. I love the Berlin accent in German, its strange mix of softness and snarl: the very German filler phrase “ganz genau” (“completely exactly”) becomes “janz jenau”, the Gs mellowing down into what anglophones would consider a Y sound. To understand radio presenters and to understand my neighbours are two wholly different endeavours. Most days as the sun sets, I like to write in my front room with the window open, eavesdropping on street exchanges with the worthy pretext of language acquisition.
Even buying bread is an adventure. I love going to the supermarket, selecting a loaf and using the cutter to chop it up. There’s a dedicated guillotine-style machine for this, including a touchscreen where I select desired slice thickness: 8mm, 10mm, 12mm or 14mm. Then I bag the bread, pay and munch the heels on the walk back to my apartment. A few months ago when I Googled these bread-choppers, the search engine suggested I ask “Was schneidet ein Allesschneider?” – what does an everything-cutter cut? “Alles”, I thought, and laughed; an everything-cutter cuts everything. It was one of the first times I’d felt truly myself in German, my dire dad-humorist self.
Did I need to move to Berlin to get happy? Maybe not. But I needed to do something and this thing worked. I love writing again, love people, love being alive and learning words. There’s no more “What’s the point?” when I wake up. As morning breaks, I reach to the bedside table for my phone, open my flashcard app, and chip away at another chunk of German-yet-unknown.
The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan (W&N, £16.99) is available from guardianbookshop.com for £14.95
If you have been affected by any of these issues, contact the Samaritans on 116 123 (samaritans.org) or Mind on 0300 123 3393 (mind.org.uk)
