Leaving Berlin

To start, we're going to temporarily ignore the fact that I've neglected this website :) Life truly ~~happened~~ and many posts are to come (I'm planning to reflect a lot over break and write the posts about all of my trips and thoughts that I intended to write during the semester.)

But back to the point... I left Berlin yesterday. And truly, it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. It doesn't even compare to breaking my wrist or heartbreak or anything other pains I've experienced. Even writing about how painful it was has me crying as I write this.

It's like leaving somehow crept up on me, despite me talking about how I dreaded leaving from the moment I got to Berlin. But suddenly I had finished writing the papers I had to complete, and I realized that my time was up. The string holding together the box containing my emotions regarding leaving must have snapped, and I really lost it.

Fortunately, I see humor in all of my feelings, so I laughed and cried my way through my last few days. I'm not even one to cry in front of others, but recently, I guess I've completely abandoned that. I cried through our goodbye dinner. When I left the dinner, I sat outside alone and sobbed, then literally sobbed THE WHOLE hour-long walk home (broken up by laughs to myself about how funny this whole situation was.) I also sobbed the next morning at 6 AM as I desperately tried to jigsaw all of the furniture in my room back into place before my flight, accidentally spilling a whole bottle of water everywhere in the process and nearly entrapping myself in that room. (My whole body hurts from this.) I sobbed as I threw the trash out. I sobbed as I sat on the plane writing an email to someone important I was leaving behind. There's a lot of sobbing in my future, but fortunately, it has mostly become the good kind of sobbing (I think!)

My time in Berlin was wild. There are so many emotions that I think will take me ages to process and disentangle from one another, but the ones I'm experiencing now are already overwhelming. Berlin happened to be a place where I really hurt. Starting to see a therapist unleashed a vengeful fury as I finally began to acknowledge a lot of feelings I've always held back, meeting a bunch of incredible new friends helped me to see the world differently and connect with others in a new way, and Berlin opened my eyes to... way too much to even try to put into words. Maybe I can figure out the words later, but honestly, most of what I'm feeling right now can't be put into words.

I think that's why I recently began communicating emotions through songs, and I think that this is a method I'm absolutely going to use moving forward. In a 250-year-old bookstore in Dublin today I saw this amazing quote about music that I failed to write down and unfortunately can't find through google, but it was something along the lines of "Music communicates emotions too complex to explain," which is how I feel a lot of the time.

The songs I used to describe my feelings about leaving two days ago were:

Love It If We Made It -The 1975

South London Forever -Florence & The Machine

Dog Years -Maggie Rogers

I'm in Dublin right now--my airline has a layover here anyways, and I thought it was a good excuse to finally explore one of my motherlands. In the midst of my 6 AM breakdown before my flight, I just wanted to go home and tried to see if I could move my flight. Fortunately, that wasn't possible, because being here was just what I needed. That being said, I am not at ALL looking forward to navigating the airport tomorrow morning. Wish me luck :) And I didn't know what media to add to this, so here are some pictures of me crying! hahah enjoy