In this edition: swings, saunas, and a brief beautiful encounter
Pals, I hit writer’s block hard in the past week. Monday marked ten years since I moved to Göttingen, a time that feels like the Day When Everything Changed, a Very Big Deal, and I had this expectation of myself that I’d be able to write a newsletter that reflected that, at least to some extent. It felt significant and important that I process my feelings about the decade right there in that moment, so that I’d have a written artefact of commemoration.
Of course, as soon as there was any pressure on me at all to do the thing, my brain went “lol nope! Time to get your dumb phone games out and half-watch your way through three seasons of The Fosters instead of writing, thanks, see you next month.” I wanted to knit together a few things I’d been thinking about a lot lately, but it all got a bit existential in ways that left me staring furrow-browed at the middle distance a little too long for my liking.
Look, I’ll probably get there by the next edition (hahahaha maybe?????), but in the meantime I fought off my digital stupor by treating Monday like my Anniversary with Me. I went out into the sunshine, bought a nice Sudanese halloumi-falafel-magali pita bread sandwich and walked towards the canal, getting peanut sauce all over my face. Then I bought a little Earl Grey lemon meringue tart from this nice café next to the water, perched myself on the concrete beside the walkway, and sat reading a book in the sun for a while. Nice! Real nice!
As the weather in Berlin has shifted from winter to spring with shocking swiftness, we’ve all been talking about the rather upsetting realisation that the weather really does control like 70% of our happiness. “Every year,” Carrington said to me the other week (as he does, every year), “every year the sun comes back and I go, oh right, that’s why I moved to Berlin, because it’s actually a really nice place to live and not just a cold prison.”
Personally I really love that the seasons change so much, it’s still a novelty for me, but it’s unfortunately deeply true that my body would still like there to be more positive stimuli during the Dark Months. And that’s tough in lockdown (which we’re still in for at least another month), but at least we’ve now entered the bit of the year where, on sunny days, we get a lot of lovely golden late afternoon light to soak up into our sponge cake selves. I took advantage of this by going down to the Britz Gardens last week, as part of my quest to see all the big parks and forests in the city.
On the way there, I got a voice note from Lisa, one of my best friends, telling me that she’d been struggling with her own mood lately. “It sounds really pathetic when I say it now,” she said, “but I realised I was lonely.” She’s just bought her own place in a small town in Northamptonshire, and we send each other voice notes all the time, usually about twice a week. We’d talked about how it would be likely that she’d feel lonely at some point, living on her own and working from home. So on the one hand, I was surprised that she was a) surprised by this feeling, and b) calling it “pathetic”.
On the other hand, I wasn’t surprised at all. Of course, as well as being the ten-year anniversary of this big transformative butterfly moment for me, this month also marks a full year of all… THIS… and also, the fifth consecutive month of lockdown for much of Europe. You would think we’d have collectively managed to get over our weirdness around the term “lonely”, but nope! Being lonely is one of those feelings that has a lot of baggage attached to it, like if you’re a heroic figure in a novel or something then feeling lonely is terribly Romantic, picture the wide wild rain-striped moors, et cetera, but if you’re just in your pyjamas making tea or stuck in line at the supermarket then it feels a lot more pedestrian. Big sadness, but also without human connection! And whyyyy, asks our shitty mean inner voice, whyyyy don’t you have human connection? Is it… all your fault? A reflection of your worth to other people? Seems like yes? Hmmm?
We tell ourselves and each other a lot of stories about loneliness, the kind that build up a lot of fear about being alone. As someone who hasn’t been in anything you could call an “actual romantic relationship” with a straight face since I was a little baby teenager, I’ve heard them all, and probably internalised more than I’m comfortable with.
The Britz Gardens have these really great swings in them – long chains, for getting a really good swoosh happening, and nice wide seats. I went and sat in one and thought about what Lisa had said. For the record, those narratives about romantic relationships being the be all and end all of loneliness solutions are hot garbage that lead too many people to invest all their time and energy in finding and keeping a romantic partner instead of building strong networks for themselves. That hadn’t even been what Lisa was talking about. She literally just hadn’t spoken to enough people in the space of a week, and the days were all getting a bit sludgy and hazy. I can feel that happening, too – feel it actually in my body, in my stomach and my limbs and my neck whenever I start missing people. Like mud, at an unpleasant temperature. It’s a very embodied feeling.
I think this past year, and likely more of the year to come, is kind of high-level training for dealing with loneliness – for how we strategise around it with others, and within ourselves. Sure, sure, we were all doing Zoom catch-ups last April, but nobody really has the willpower or energy for that anymore – and yet we’re still here in our little sunlight-craving connection-needy little bodies! And we’re always going to be! And loneliness only gets more important to deal with, the older we get. Marriage and romantic relationships and all are nice and often important, but they won’t solve it – I’ve seen too many people I love be so incredibly lonely within their relationships to believe otherwise – and there aren’t quick fixes. But realising what’s going on, naming it, counteracting it, it’s helpful. My most utopian vision of the post-pandemic era is that we all start valuing our communities and support networks way more, and recognising how important they are for the long term. It’s all practice, in a way. All training.
I’d been swinging on the swing for a while now, getting very high up, feeling my own tilting weight propel myself through the air, my centre of balance shifting and my thigh muscles working. I truly dread the day my body stops feeling able to go on a swing, and before that day comes I intend to swing on every swing I can. Eventually I slowed, and then got off, and started walking away.
And then I stopped. Do you ever have that feeling like, yeah okay, that was nice, but I could have made it like 30% better? Like sure, look at this sun, look at these trees, look at that large cow over there in the field, this is all great – but it could have had MUSIC? I pulled up an album on Spotify, hit play, walked right back to the swing, and swung my way through two whole songs. And it was absolutely three thousand percent worth it.
A Romanticised Image of Embodied Loneliness that I Nevertheless Like a Lot
8.30pm, 14th February, on the Landwehrkanal, on my way home. I don’t know what this person is doing out there on the ice of the canal but whatever it is, they’ve committed to it.
The Perils of Pink Floyd
Here’s a story I wanted to include last edition, but didn’t. It’s about rituals, but also about the body, and mostly about how I love saunas so much. God, my most cringeworthy white-woman-in-her-30s reaction to lockdown is the fact that I’m just so upset I’m currently missing a whole winter’s worth of sauna time.
If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d become a fan of saunas, I would have been utterly incapable of believing it, since it primarily involves being (1) sweaty and (2) naked in (3) rooms full of strangers, three components that just seemed like the worst possible combination of things. Like full-on nightmare material. You may as well have told me I’d get really into taking out the compost bin by bungee jumping while nailed into a coffin.
I really had to kind of sidle my way into sauna appreciation. I think I soaked up some curiosity about it just from being in Sweden long enough to wonder why the Scandinavians were so into it. There was a tiny sauna room at the local pool in Uppsala that my friend Magdalena and I would sit in after doing laps, self-consciously leaving our swimmers on and staying only a few minutes. I still didn’t really get it, except that I was starting to understand the appeal of being very warm after having experienced being very, very cold. The cold-water component of saunas never really puzzled me – as a kid growing up in Australia, I’d always loved cold water, even going so far as to take cold baths like some kind of infant psychopath. I went for morning swims at the beach when I was home in Newcastle, no matter what the temperature was. I have had people telling me to wear warmer clothing since the day I started having the autonomy to (under)dress myself, and likely will until I die. But living through a couple of winters where it hits -20 Celsius can give you some new perspective.
The first time I actually enjoyed a sauna, I was alone. I had an entire spa on a cruise ship to myself, pretty much for the sole reason that it was 9pm, so you couldn’t see the panoramic view of the Swedish-Finnish archipelago that was so popular during the day. I had very little idea of what I was doing, and just kept walking around stiffly like someone who’d forgotten how to walk, looking at things with forced casualness and thinking “I’m naked! On a ship! Just hanging out!! naked!! in several glass rooms of varying temperatures on a ship!!” Once that wore off a little, I started tentatively enjoying the sensory delights – the eucalyptus-scented steam of the sauna, the crisp air of the ice room, the jacuzzi. At the end of the hour I was hooked.
So when I moved to Flensburg, I took the leap into the local sauna complex. But adding the component of Other People is really a whole new – ahem – ballgame. You know when you go into a new environment, like a new school or workplace, where you’re suddenly very aware that you don’t know the unspoken rules, and you desperately don’t want to get it wrong, so you become hypervigilant in observing other people? Adding in a lack of clothing to that situation really ups the stakes. Do I… should I keep a towel wrapped around myself in the sauna rooms like in the photos? Is that just something they do for marketing? Do I make eye contact with people? What’s the etiquette when you unexpectedly run into someone you recognise from a professional context?? (The answers, respectively, are no, yes, depends on your mood, and internally scream “hahaha oh no oh no oh godddddd” while you make polite conversation and pretend this is very normal and fine).
By the time I moved to South Tyrol, not far from the Therme Meran, several years later, I was a pro. I had my colour-coordinated sauna towel and bathrobe. I had perfected my system of sauna, cold shower, swimming pool, nap – let me just take a moment here to emphasise the nap thing, because that’s the real beauty of a sauna day, it’s just naps and book reading and nice hot-cold-warm-cool good-smelling spaces, with no electronics allowed anywhere, for obvious reasons. Plus, I’d absorbed the blissful benefits of learning how to be comfortable around naked strangers, truly, nothing has been as healthy for my preoccupations around body image as just seeing a whole bunch of human bodies.
I was also a connoisseur of the classic sauna ritual: the Aufguss, or infusion.
Ahhh, the Aufguss.
Here’s how it goes, at least in Therme Meran: ten minutes before the Aufguss is scheduled to begin, everyone starts crowding around the entrance to the largest sauna room (it’s actually the one in the photo up there), until one of the staff lets everyone in to try and maintain a peaceful glide in their step while also jostling for the best spots on the benches surrounding the hot coals. Once everyone is settled, a guy in a towel comes in – it’s not always a guy, but the best Aufguss guy was this dude probably in his sixties, about five foot five, I can’t quite remember his name so let’s call him Marco. So there’s Marco, he comes in, he says (first in Italian, then in German, and reluctantly in English if anyone’s still looking lost) “Hello, I’m Marco, our Aufguss is going to last about twelve minutes with three rounds, you can leave at any time, I have a selection of aromas for you,” and it’ll be a combination like mandarin, pine needle and lemongrass or something. Then Marco goes and turns on the music. And then he pours the oil-infused water over the coals, picks up his towel, and starts dancing.
Usually there’s not dancing, there’s just the use of towels or large fans to waft fragrant air around the room, but Marco dances. It’s amazingly great, especially because the music will be like a piano cover of a Justin Bieber song or something. Please try and absorb this vibe: you’re sitting in a room full of very chill naked strangers with a stunning panoramic view of the lower fringe of the Dolomites, inhaling the smell of rosemary and blackcurrant, while a soft-jazz rendition of an Ariana Grande song plays and a gracefully ageing Italian dude dances around in a towel, waving another towel. And then there’s fruit slices afterwards on the terrace. It’s a dangerously good vibe.
Made more so by the fact that one day, I decided to be… a little edgy. A little daring. The benches in the sauna room are in staggered tiers, and the higher up you are, the hotter it gets. Normally I’m at a solid second-from-the-bottom kind of level, but this time I was like… hey. Let’s try it out one level higher.
And then the music started. And it was Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond, all thirteen and a half minutes of it. And friends, if the vibe had been dangerously good before, this was straight up hazardous. I was in clear violation of good sauna etiquette (stay as silent and still as is comfortable, until you want to leave), because I was absolutely grooving to this soundtrack. Normally if I was up on the higher tiers I’d leave before the Aufguss was done, because I hit my limits of tolerance, but I was heavily distracted from monitoring my limits. To the extent that my balance was pretty shaky as I got down off the benches at the end of the session, and as my foot hit wet floor – bam. Down I went, straight on my butt. Marco and his co-worker rushed over to help me to my feet, but luckily as I was one of the last to leave the room my dignity was only lightly bruised. “But be careful,” they said, “just go easy for a while.”
I sat down briefly, but what I really wanted was to get under a cold shower and shake off the heat. Normally when I take a cold shower after an Aufguss I get a pleasant sort of head rush that leaves me feeling very peaceful. This time, however, the head rush was headier than normal, and I was like, ah – time to head to the terrace for the fruit, get some fructose into me. So I grabbed my robe and towel, just held them in my hands as I walked, and then –
So here’s a literal back-of-the-envelope map of the area.
And that x marks the spot where, mid stride, my knees just folded up under me, my vision went black, and I passed right out. Except I didn’t really, I was still effectively conscious, but nothing in my body would respond to any of my instructions. Curiously, this didn’t worry me. In fact, I was so extremely blissed out that the whole thing seemed extremely funny. There I was, absolutely naked, sprawled on the deck of this outrageously pretty sauna facility as worried voices gathered around me, and totally unable to move. “This is… happening,” I thought, “and there is literally just… nothing to do… except let it happen.” I listened to everyone exclaiming, and then a couple of pairs of hands lifted me very carefully up and onto a deckchair, where three or four people immediately threw towels over me and someone lifted my feet so they were propped on the headrest.
Someone was speaking Italian at me. I tried, largely unsuccessfully, to shake my head. The voice switched to the heavily accented German dialect spoken in South Tyrol, which was only marginally better. Eventually enough blood came back to my head that my eyelids listened to me, and opened, and I saw a bunch of patrons sucking on orange slices while looking mildly concerned, and also Marco and his co-worker looking at me and coaxing me to drink some water. When I managed to sit up, I thanked everyone who’d lent me their towels, wrapped my robe around me, and lay there for a while longer until the crowd had totally dispersed. I felt a little bruised from where I’d slipped in the sauna room, and my knees had some light grazing from the concrete, but otherwise I felt great, especially for a swooning maiden. I wasn’t keen to repeat the experience (did you see how close I was to that pool!?), but it’s really hard to argue with a vibe so good it knocks you the fuck out.
One More Nice Vignette Before We Go
I know this newsletter’s already pretty long, but this other thing happened this week that I wanted to include. While I was out walking on Wednesday, I passed through a park not far from Kreuzberg’s Festhalle, currently being used as the Impfzentrum, or vaccination centre. An elderly lady – almost certainly in her late 70s, perhaps early 80s – walked right up to me with a grin from ear to ear. I pulled my headphones down.
“Excuse me,” she asked in German, “but which way do I have to go to get to the Kiehlufer?” There are like half a dozen Ufers, or canal banks, in this part of town, so I had to pull up Google Maps to check.
“You can just follow the canal this way, down along the water – and it’s very nice right now with the sunset, but,” I paused, suddenly realising I hadn’t really been this close to a person of her age since the start of the pandemic, “there are a lot of people down there, I don’t know if -”
“Thank you, that’s great, I just couldn’t get a taxi from outside the vaccination centre,” she said, and started off in the direction I’d been pointing.
“Oh, well uh – you’re welcome, and, and… congratulations on the vaccination!” I called after her. She turned briefly, called “thank you!” and waved, and continued on towards the crowds.
And I smiled so hard it almost hurt, turned back to the direction I’d been walking, reached the street just as the last rays hit my face, and without further ado just started crying – tears just rolling down my face again and again and again.
Tell me about your thoughts on loneliness and/or the experience of living in a body over in the comments section and let’s unpack all our weirdness together.
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