{Resolution 3} Expect a Miracle.

Oh Berlin, how sneaky you are.  You crept up on me & took me completely by surprise.  Wrapping me up in your bosom & making me feel at home.  Now I am so settled within your urban scape, that I spend each day somewhat terrified of being parted from you.  The very thought of leaving your presence reduces me to tears, each & every time.

I remember back when I was fourteen & miserable, I decided that I would escape to live in Paris the moment I turned eighteen.  By the time I got to twenty, I was still living at home & still dreaming of Paris.  When I finally said goodbye to England for the last time, late July 2013, I thought I was setting off on a journey that would finally lead me to my dream life in the city of lights.  However, over a year later, it appears I have taken somewhat of a detour & ended up here in Berlin.

There is a somewhat magnetic pull, between my heart & this city & I am struggling not to give in.  I feel safe in its fluid energy.  Happy in its creative buzz.  Relaxed by its groove.  However, this feeling of settlement that washes over me, day in, day out, provides both a level of comfort & a pang of pain & trepidation.  It's been a while since I've genuinely had something to lose & I'd somewhat forgot how scary that can be.

With only a few hundred euros left nestling in my bank account, still nowhere permanent to live, my lack of the language keeping me from gaining the simplest of employment, my 'project' is all I have left to cling to, in hope of making 'shit happen'.  Whilst I have great faith in my ability to be abundant & manifest a positive outcome, I still can't help but stifle a pang of panic every now & then.

The thing is, in some ways, I'm happy to feel the bubbling nervousness.  It shows me how much I want it.  To be here, to finally be settled & at 'home'.  To have reached the end of what has been a tumultuous but life changing journey.  To be able to put into action, everything I've learnt over the past twelve months.

In essence, it is those very lessons that I need to put into practice now.  Like the final test of faith.  How much do you really believe?  How far are you willing to go?  At times it makes me crap my pants, the very thought that, despite having given up everything, from my money, to my possessions, to my security, my home, basically my entire life, now, in order to really start again, I need to be prepared to give up what's left.

What is left, I hear you ask.  Fear namely.  Fear of failing.  Fear that things won't work out.  Fear that I'm completely wrong with everything I believe.  Trusting in life, in the natural flow of things, is not easy & with the majority of society on the wavelength that you must think logically & be 'realistic' with your expectations, it's even harder to have a little faith & hold on to it.  Yet, every time I let go & trust, the lesson proves itself to me, time & time again.

I reach my cliff edge & I give up worrying that I might topple over, falling down into the abyss & all of a sudden a bridge appears before me & I'm able to carry on again.  The more this happens, the more I believe & the less & less I worry when I get to the next edge & the one after that.  Soon it all becomes one fluid movement, from one scenario to the next & all the seemingly negative situations that arise, suddenly seem like opportunities to reinforce my beliefs.

As I begin to approach, what feels like, the edge of the world, the final & biggest test of faith, I can only hope that I have it in me to let go completely, shed away the fear & make use of everything I have come to learn over the past twelve months.  To have sacrificed everything & learnt nothing, would be the ultimate fail & I'm too stubborn & too head strong to give up now.  I feel a connection to this city, like I've almost never felt before & I trust that if my gut says to stay, then I'll find a way to stay.

“The doors will be opened to those who are bold enough to knock.”

— Tony Gaskins

N.B.  All photos accompanying my Happiness Project posts will be taken from one of my Pinterest boards, which hosts all the images that make me happy.  Feel free to check it out in the meantime, for more happy snaps.

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It's my birthday & I'll sodding cry if I want to.

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Last weekend saw me celebrate my twenty seventh birthday & I think it's safe to say, my hatred of birthdays is now well & truly set in concrete.  Why is it that birthdays are such a giver of joy when you're young & then they slide into this category of doom, once you reach a certain age.  I really can't understand it.

With one friend packing up to flit off to Vietnam for three months, another unavailable & the Swede working, it was entirely down to Katie to stop me falling into a deep depressive, age turning coma.  I give it to her, she tried her darnedest!  Unfortunately, by the end of the evening we'd gone way past the state of melancholy & had arrived squarely in the state of catatonia.

The morning had not started well & let's face it, a bad morning has a tendency to cause a ripple effect through the day.  Having set off on my bicycle to meet Katie in Prenzlauer Berg, I wondered what the peculiar noise emitting from my back wheel was, only to find that it was as flat as the pancakes I was craving. 

I was forced to retreat back to the apartment, tuck my bike back in the courtyard & take the dreaded U-Bahn, something I begrudge shelling out for on every level.  It's expensive, it takes longer than cycling & battling with crowds is nothing short of stress inducing.  It brings on the memories of my once daily London commute & that is something I am definitely happy to forget!

Attempting to stifle my growing sense of despair, Katie & I decided on a plan of action for the day, which was to finally go indulge in vegan chocolate crêpes, then head for a stroll around the Botanischer Garten, snapping the florals along the way & then finally ending at Bite Club in Mitte for dinner.  I really needed the day to improve vastly by this point.

In search of quelling my crêpe cravings, we headed over to OhLaLa (Mainzer Straße 18, 10247), the French vegan patisserie, nestled in Friedrichshain, which was the first place we frequented together, upon my original arrival in Berlin back in May.  Unfortunately, as it was a Saturday, they were only doing their brunch buffet & so my lust for crêpes was left to linger & we simply gave way to the food on offer.

There's something about buffets.  I feel as though they trigger off this knee-jerk reaction in me to over consume.  I think I had about eight miniature puddings & three platefuls of the savoury options.  It was nice, but expensive & unfortunately, it failed to satisfy the desires I'd been harbouring, in contemplation of my birthday breakfast.  Alas, we moved on.

Having been left without our wheels, it took two tube rides & a further two buses to reach the Botanischer Garten.  By which time, all notion of karma was out of the window & I actively encouraged Katie to probe for the student tickets.  Hey, we're enrolled in the school of life, that's good enough, right?

Thankfully the weather was kind to us, being nicely warm & sunny & we strolled around for a few hours, taking it all in.  Me snapping up some petals here & there.  Finally leaving the gardens, we hopped back on a bus, then onto the metro, followed by another bus & finally walked up Schönhauser Allee, to Bite Club for dinner.

To my disappointment, there weren't a great deal of vegan options.  I don't know if the venue in Kreuzberg is bigger, but the Mitte site is quite small & variety is limited.  I ended up indulging in a Taiwanese tofu burger from Bao Kitchen.  Served in a steamed bun, it was actually rather scrummy, so I may track them down again.

As the evening loomed, Katie cycled off to a party in Kreuzberg with her Californian calligrapher man shape & I, despite enjoying my day for the most part, had reached saturation point & solemnly walked to Eberswalder Straße station, attempting not to crumble into tears along the way.  Fucking birthdays.

The evening disintegrated further with some drunken Swede behaviour & some Rabbi rejection & by the end of it, I honestly just wanted to throw myself out of the kitchen window.  Poor mère received the brunt of my frustration through the power of Whatsapp, which I felt rather guilty about the next day.

I don't know what it is about birthdays that brings out this traumatising feeling of loneliness, that I seem to feel each time they come around.  In the past I have simply tried to avoid it by flitting off on holiday, but whilst I'm not exactly at 'home' in England anymore, I'm not really on vacation here in Berlin either.  So I found myself in a kind of limbo that forced me into the submersion of all these unwanted feelings.

Thankfully by Sunday morning, after baking & subsequently eating an entire tray of brownies, whilst watching a film, I started to regain some feelings of normality & emotional balance.  All I can say is, thank the heavens I only need 'celebrate' my birthday once a year!

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{Insightful Sunday} Self-Belief

There can be a very fine line between self-confidence & arrogance.  Trying to manage the perception of the former, so as to avoid appearing to be the latter, can often prove difficult, especially when you have invested a lot of that confidence & self-belief into something others simply either don't understand, or can't see to be viable.

Often in life, we fail to aim for the things that our heart desires, because we are surrounded by people who tell us that we are being unrealistic, either in our approach, or our goal.  They perceive that what we intend to achieve is nothing short of impossible, impractical or overly optimistic.  They are the naysayers & the fearmongers, who like to hold us back, so as to keep themselves content, in their own state of lacking.

Sometimes it's important to separate yourself from others, allow yourself to be in your own company & ask 'am I being unrealistic.'  If when asked the question, you feel a gentle, but distinctive, buzz of excitement in your gut, that feeds your desire to prove those who would doubt you wrong, then the answer is no.  It is that very grumble of energy that lets you know, you're on the right path.  As difficult & unrealistic as it may sometimes appear.

Believing in yourself is one of the key elements to succeeding in anything.  No one can see your dream as you do.  Even if you were to describe it, down to the minute detail, you would find that others conjure up different visions to your own.  It's also important to recognise, that everyone is on their own journey, having reached where they are by varying paths.

These different experiences are what individually feed us & our drive for something, but equally so, it can be those same differences that pull each other's ideas & dreams apart.  We must remember that each of us reach our destination via different methods & routes & to respect & accept those differences, we help to encourage other's objectives & aspirations, instead of tainting them with criticism, based from our own experience.

There is not one solution to every problem.  There is not one road to every destination.  Our journey is as individual as we are & we should remember that when faced with opposition.  Remember, if you don't believe in yourself & your direction, then it's likely that others will doubt as well.  This is not to say that it is easy, especially should you choose to set yourself up with a seemingly impossible task, however, it is that same self-belief that fires up your dogged determination, which in turn is what picks you up & pushes you on, when everyone is telling you to give up & life itself is throwing you a curve ball or two.

Of course, self-belief comes with confidence & if you are meek & timid & find yourself unable to speak up, you will most likely be lacking in it.  There will no doubt be that grumble hiding deep inside yourself, but where is the confidence to let it out.  It needs to be fed by your belief in its ability to turn from a simple grumble, into a seismic roar.  You may be afraid that you're unable to be as ferocious as you need to be, but believe me, your fear itself is the only thing to be afraid of here.

When you want something enough, when it's all that fills your mind & excites your soul, then you must trust that you are capable of achieving it.  You must believe in your ability to create that which you see in your mind.  You must have the confidence to stand against the people who will doubt you & know that you can prove them wrong.  Don't waste another second doubting what you already know to be true.  Believe in yourself & the rest will happen.

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