If you had asked me in the past what I wanted to achieve in this life, the honest answer would have been: get thicker skin. To be able to endure more. Stop being so damn insecure. In my head, my insecurity was basically the only obstacle on the way to happiness. No longer be a victim of circumstances, but create something yourself and finally become self-confident.
But as the saying goes: everything has its price. For example, if you are married monogamously, you are no longer free. Finally have money, become comfortable. If you continue to develop, something will always be lost.
I recently met an old friend again. And that triggered a series of memories that I wasn’t prepared for. We sat at the dinner table together with her husband D, who is an old friend of mine, and their two children. And we remembered the time around 2002. I was only 17 years old and fell into a clique of people that I quickly looked up to. Then D picked up a box of photos from the shelf. And when I saw myself and everyone else making faces in the pictures, it all came back.
Dream city Osnabrück
It was the 00s: flip phones, chipped nail polish, 7/8 leggings under petrol-colored smock dresses and we felt bad. And at the same time, I have never been in love so often again – and probably never again so hard. For example, the one in whose shared apartment in Dortmund I lived as an appendage until I graduated from high school and beyond. Those were the last years when people still cooked and played games, watched movies and went on vacation somewhere together without the constant distraction of their attention from the iPhone.
The next friend also lived in a shared apartment, this time in Osnabrück – “a city where dreams remain dreams,” as someone once said. For me, Osnabrück was my magical land. A place where a shared apartment of nerds made themselves comfortable in a spacious apartment with a large terrace right on the ring. Whether it was because our minds were even slower or our hearts didn’t have to concentrate on more than five men at a time, but in the good moments there was something that many perplexed philosophers are trying to pull out of their fingers today when they have to describe again what this “happiness” that everyone is always talking about actually is.
The Badass School
The shared apartment at the ring was a strange mix of guys, some of whom were pursuing a course of study that would supposedly one day deal with “artificial intelligence.” (Which at that point sounded as crazy as if someone had said they were studying “time travel.”). There were many nights in the warm summer air in which people talked (sometimes with chemical support) on the said terrace and found bizarre solutions to problems that no one had previously known were actually problems. I believe that many things that now exist were invented there. For example the Meta-Verse or a mirror that answers you. But also really crazy things.
It was a school of independent thinking. At least that’s how I, a stupid young thing, perceived it at the time and was madly in love with my boyfriend at the time. He also came from Romania, which in my world was like a seal of approval, because of all the brass music and being badass, not yet hopelessly effeminate by capitalism like the rest of us.
Back at today’s kitchen table, my friend’s husband remembered that the shared apartment appeared in a different light when it turned out that T, a massive guy who was the only one sitting in his dark room all day, had equipped the entire apartment with cameras. Back then I was closer to the human abyss than I imagined.
“We all hated each other.”
At this point in my life, I had barely accomplished anything other than a respectable high school diploma. But as we all know, that doesn’t count (especially not in North Rhine-Westphalia). And so I was amazed at the beautiful C, the sweet A, the tomboyish L, the funny D and the cool U. And I actually felt rather bitchy and ugly in the midst of these charismatic, smart, funny people.
In response to this retrospective realization, sweet A wrote me a consoling message after dinner together: “Those were the noughties! We all hated each other.” But I’m not so sure about that. Really have each other all hated? The boys certainly didn’t seem that way. They didn’t seem like they were going into each of our meetings, consumed by self-doubt and secret eating disorders, internally shattered and afraid of being noticed. Or afraid of being laughed at if one of them said “something stupid.”
When I think of the Charlotte of 2006, 2007 or 2008, I see a person who wasn’t even remotely aware of her external impact, who cried desperately into her boyfriend’s futon at night as time went on because she didn’t know for the life of her how she was going to tackle this damn life, had no plan, just a diffuse fear of being a musician at her core and having to somehow get through it, great.
Internal security
Powerlessness and self-doubt were so firmly embedded in one’s own DNA that hundreds, if not thousands of nights together in female company were spent talking about men, interpreting their behavior or their words, alternately attesting to them as good or bad. In the end, we always bravely complimented each other, about our own deep-seated pain, inadequate, flawed, above all ugly To be a woman, to heal in the other. Which of course didn’t work.
How many sheddings, moves, jobs, cities, apartments, male and female friendships, performances, engagements, bands, negotiations, conflicts, successes and studio stays and albums I was still away from myself and my inner security at that time. It’s definitely better today than it was back then.
But this younger version of myself was also miles away from the current brain redness of the iPhone…
Back then, the nights were long and the days were full and our hearts beat excitedly at each of our meetings. We worked on each other, laughed our heads off together and still didn’t let anything get away with us. There was a regularity of being together and it was never certain whether it would end well. But that’s exactly what kept you alive and awake.
The age of Adidas pants
With these people I trained my repartee and allowed the first, delicate calluses to grow on my soul. At some point everything fell apart, and you can see that quite clearly from the outside. Today, if possible, I no longer wear wrap dresses with leggings, but rather Adidas pants with silk blouses. Back then I would have “never in my life” gotten a tattoo, but today, depending on your point of view, I’m a bit hesitant. Back then, it was the most normal thing in the world for my worth to depend on other people’s opinions. Today, uh – you are welcome to think whatever you want to think about me, your thoughts are free, haha.
All of these developments feel right. And still. The world will probably never be as intense as it was back then. And that’s sad.