In this edition: other people’s heads, double-exposure memories, and the joy of gardens
Prologue: The Looking-Glass
It was a Friday night about a month ago, and Julian and I were up late talking half-nonsense, which has essentially been the bread and butter of our friendship for some five and a half years now. We fall into a pattern of talking that is very fun for us, and very rarely fun for anyone listening to us, which is why it’s the kind of talking best done late at night once everyone else has dispersed (and thus very well-suited to lockdown times).
Sometimes that kind of talk unearths some seriousness though, or things that feel serious in the way that discussions at sleepovers used to feel serious – you reach an hour of the night and a point of tired-brain in which all things are meaningful. In the midst of me explaining to him why I find it very difficult to have an argument with a friend, we stumbled across something.
“Is it because you’re like, my friends shouldn’t have this kind of opinion, because they’re my friends?” Julian asked me.
“Yes, I mean, it’s because I feel that my friends, the people I have in my life, are a fundamental reflection of who I am as a person.” I paused, toying with a thought that felt like a confession. “I think it’s partly because… I guess one of the main ways I build friendships is that I kind of strongly adapt myself to people. I pick up their quirks of speech, become invested in their interests, tweak my personality, just kind of. Adapt.”
“Hmmm.”
“I um… I think that despite maybe giving the opposite impression, I might not actually have a very strong sense of self? Like I have all these versions of me that arise out of friendships with all these different people,” I continued, sensing a rising internal panic, like I’d begun peeling back a particularly gnarly scab on my knee and realised oh, oh no, I really shouldn’t have started this but I cannot stop, “and they’re not totally consistent, and then when I gather lots of different people together from different parts of my life” – something I really love doing, incidentally! – “it can get really disorienting.”
He was quiet a minute. I was referring to my 30th birthday, back in the summer of 2019, where about twenty-five of my nearest and dearest all came out to a very haunted ex-hotel by a lake, and we had a truly amazing weekend and I also got scammed out of my 2000 EUR deposit by the unbelievably dodgy owners. (Worth it).
“I think that’s kind of true,” he said slowly, after a while, “I’ve actually thought about it since then. Because there were times that weekend where you did seem like a different version of you. Not that there was anything wrong with that person, at all – she just… wasn’t my Caitlin.”
I spent a good deal of 2019 thinking about the versions of myself that live inside other people’s heads. Isn’t it weird how I’ve leased out storage space in the brains of my acquaintances to store incomplete copies of myself? How do those imagined Caitlins stretch and warp to push forward certain attributes, and skip over others entirely? How would they sound to me, if I heard them talking? How would they look in the mirror, looming next to the reflection I see?
I became so ensnared by these imaginings that year, so worn out by heartbreak and too much work and the feeling that I just wasn’t measuring up in many unspecified ways, that I ended up losing my moorings to a coherent idea of myself in my own head. I can see myself on that birthday getaway weekend, a tiny bright island of time in a year that was otherwise pretty dark, adrift among people I love, letting them hand me pieces of myself. Blissful, and utterly disoriented. No wonder there were times I was unrecognisable. I had no idea who I was anymore.
There’s a concept developed by sociologist Charles Cooley that has helped me give shape to this problem, called the Looking-Glass Self: I am not who I think I am; I am not who you think I am; I am who I think you think I am.
Basically, I’ve created my own further distorted imagined versions of those imagined Caitlins, who’ve now all banded together inside my brain to tell me who I am. It’s funhouse mirrors all the way down.
Okay, look. So far, so navel-gazey. I’m not under the impression that this is somehow a unique problem exclusive to me (me! me me me!), but both back in 2019 and again last month, I started feeling the ground cracking under my feet. If my sense of self is so thoroughly tied to the people around me, and those people keep changing, and so I keep constantly changing – such that even other people notice! – then where the hell am I supposed to locate myself at any given moment? And what kind of self-respecting self is it in the end, if it has no sense of permanence?
Still with me?
Let’s pull the brakes on this rollercoaster for a minute. Here’s a great song by Orla Gartland to set the mood.
Part I: The Tower
God I love this city. You can confirm this with anyone who’s spoken to me for more than like two seconds since I first came here in January of 2007.
In general people find it very, very funny to hear that I found Berlin to be wonderfully friendly (“Berlin??? In January???”), which was maybe simply in contrast to the week we’d just spent in Paris where my four years of school French lessons were clearly insuffisantes, but it just felt very easy to fit in here. My relationship to Berlin is the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to love at first sight: before I came here, the prospect of me living somewhere other than Australia had never even occurred to me. After I left, it was all I could think about.
I was entranced by the fact that the whole city seemed to be mid-transformation, but that everything was transforming at different rates, and from one street to the next you’d find pockets of different eras jostling against one another, festooned with scaffolding and construction pipes. It was trying to figure out what it was, and apparently kept changing its mind, and as a dishevelled dirtbag teen I found (and find) this deeply relatable. I’d never seen a city behave so much like a person: Berlin is perpetually in therapy and would like to tell you all the things about its childhood it’s working through right now and what it’s learned about accountability, but it’s also going to spend an hour standing on the table yelling about how capitalism is bullshit and then go cry in the bathroom and draw elaborate pictures on the walls with a Sharpie and tell you how pretty you are.
It is, in short, a hot mess. Every time I came here it felt like a different city. It’s barely cohesive, the various districts stitched together and throwing shade at one another for being too cool, or being not cool enough, or being over-gentrified, or being Marzahn. Of course, that’s a symptom of the twenty-eight years (or rather forty years) of political and physical division, but the demarcation of the Wall itself is largely invisible now. There’s a bit of parkland pathway running along the Mauerweg not too far from where I live, a narrow stretch of green for a bit over a kilometre, but you wouldn’t know what it used to be if there weren’t signs up. The differences in the city are in character, in class, in architecture, in attitude, and they blend across the former border as barely a cosmetic disruption.
But for most of the city, no matter where you are, if there is enough open space (a road, a break in the buildings) you can see the Tower. The Fernsehturm (television tower) stands at the heart of Berlin, a legacy of the 1960s GDR that built the wall, and nonetheless feels like it belongs just as much to the West after thirty years of reunification. It’s not elegant, it’s functional and kind of bizarre, and above all unmistakeable: a lighthouse that always draws you back to the centre. When I go for long walks, I always look for it – hey, look, there it is – and take photos in which it looks further away than it seems to the naked eye.
I have a tendency to tell myself that if I can love [x thing], then I can learn to love [similar quality] in myself. I love Berlin not despite its constant changing and lack of consistency in who it is, but because of it. I want to see what it will become next. I get sad when some things disappear, but there’s always something interesting around the corner. It was once a swamp, which is why it has so many lovely artificial waterways, and why it’s flat enough that the Tower is visible from everywhere.
In the end I suppose it doesn’t matter too much how many different districts I’ve built within myself, as long as I can build a tower in the middle to keep me more or less oriented when I’ve wandered further out into the suburbs. The nature of both cities and people is to expand to accommodate different people and different times and contexts.
Interlude: The Streets
This newsletter was delayed significantly by the fact that Google Maps’ street view for Berlin is from – get this – July 2008. Two thousand eight! There are occasional little pockets where some enterprising person has taken it upon themselves to update a stretch of pathway or one lane of road, but as of the time I’m sending this edition out, the Google Maps multi-directional camera-car has not been through these streets for nearly thirteen years.
Why did that delay me? Because I can apparently spend hours – hours and hours – wandering around the virtual streets of the Berlin of yore. The streets around my apartment are especially eerie, since they switch between bright daylight and the deep gloom of what looks like a storm rolling over.
It’s incredible – the idea that I can walk around the city looking almost exactly as I first saw it. It’s like scrolling back through the photos of myself on Facebook from around the same time – visual proof that yes, things really were different then, felt different, looked different. Tempelhofer Feld is still an airport in this past world, that clothing shop we went to in Mitte still exists, the ditch for the A100 Autobahn through Alt-Treptow hasn’t been dug. I’m obsessed, clicking through each frame on every street, carrying with me in my head the way it looks now and laying it over the top of what was then, like double exposure in a photograph.
Part II: The Gardens
It’s been ten years to the month since I arrived in Germany, to live in Göttingen for a year in 2011. This is the thing I keep wanting to write about, and yet I still can’t really find a way to do it. I keep asking myself what it means, ten years. Maybe it just means that Göttingen is far enough in the past for me to hold onto it less tightly than I have been.
The thing about that year is that ever since it happened, it feels like it’s been playing on a loop underneath my current life, another kind of double exposure. I mark the time in my head – it’s March, so we would have been in language classes; it’s April, so we would have taken that trip to Munich; it’s September, so we were in Athens and Uppsala. I think a lot about the decisions I made then, and they filter through the decisions I make now.
The first of March 2011 is marked in my memory as that One Day When Everything Changed; the day for which I spent the three years leading up to it working in a job I loathed; the day I was longing for and dreading and dreaming of and waiting and waiting and waiting. I was so worked up about it, I made myself a mocked-up boarding card several months in advance, because I couldn’t hold my stupid e-Ticket in my hands and stare longingly out the window at passing planes.
When I say “Everything” changed, what I mean is I changed; as a person, as an idea in my own head, as a life. I had some fuzzy idea this was going to happen, or at least that I was going to have to reconfigure my self-image somewhat – I remember sitting in my sister’s bedroom in my mother’s house the day before I left, half-repacked bag in front of me, and literally sobbing inconsolably because I was so sure I wasn’t going to make any friends.
“Why?” Mum asked, bewildered.
“Because – I can’t – tell jokes – in German,” I wailed, punctuating my sentence by shoving t-shirts into my luggage. “Nobody will be friends with me if they don’t know that I’m hilarious!”
Setting aside the retrospective hilarity that I really thought I was going to spend a whole year speaking German with Germans in Germany – I did not yet have any kind of grasp of what it was actually like to be an exchange student, and after seven years in this country and a more or less solid grasp on the language I’m still not even close to having spent a cumulative year speaking German with Germans in Germany – I genuinely was worried about who I would be if I couldn’t express myself properly to other people. It was about that time that I started documenting everything with my camera, so that at if I couldn’t find my reflection in other people, then maybe I’d find it in my own records.
So I decided to start making video blogs, and taking hundreds of photographs a month. To get to Göttingen, we flew from Sydney to Singapore to London to Frankfurt, and then took the train from Frankfurt to Gö. If you’d like to hear what my tiny baby 21-year-old self sounds like with my original accent, before a decade of moving around mangled it into its current state, you can watch a video I made of that trip. It’s absolutely excruciating for me to watch now and I love it very much:
But after I’d stopped filming partway through that video, I looked out the window of the train and saw… something strange. Dozens and dozens of little plots of land with tiny houses on them, lined up against the railway tracks in the middle of Frankfurt. I turned to Josh and Adiba, my classmates who were travelling with me.
“Are those… slums? My god. I had no idea Germany had such a problem with poverty.”
We looked at them for a few minutes. “Although…” I continued, confused, “they’ve got quite a lot of yard space, for slums, honestly.”
It was the tail end of winter – as it is right now – so of course I couldn’t really tell that they were, in fact, gardens. Allotment gardens (called Schrebergärten or Kleingärten) are extremely popular in German cities, thanks to the large percentage of the population living in apartment buildings while also nursing a driving, ceaseless urge to tend to some hedges and stick ceramic gnomes and plastic meerkats around the place. What I had taken for poorly-insulated shacks for the inadequately housed turned out to be poorly-insulated cottages for the insufficiently gardened – people don’t actually live there, though they might spend a night or two in them during summer.
I guess at the time I thought the whole thing was sort of charmingly exotic, but mostly dismissed it as weird – in Australia, the notion of house and yard/garden is indivisible, the latter doesn’t make sense without the former. They are aesthetically and functionally contiguous, the garden an extension of the living space in the house, and a representation of the inhabitants. Hello, yes, welcome to Suburbia, this bit of land is where we contain our entire existence and the expression thereof. We live here all the time, it is our realm of the everyday.
But lately I’ve rediscovered my interest in Schrebergärten. I get an immense amount of joy from wandering around the vast “colonies” of these little garden plots – Plänterwald, a nearby suburb, is like 40% Schrebergärten by area. I love them so much! They’re like tiny towns-within-cities, villages unto themselves, remixed neighbourhoods. They don’t get a lot of foot traffic except from the people who are renting the plots themselves, especially in winter, and they rarely have roads through them. So they’re quite peaceful, but so cheerful – people are spending dedicated garden-time in them, not just gardening as a maintenance chore, but gardening as a source of joy. It might be less convenient to have your garden space so separate from your living space, but there’s also something to be said for giving sufficient dedicated room and attention to this space that is dedicated more to whimsy than to pragmatism. Where residential streets are often pleasingly consistent, Schrebergärten are eclectic and kitsch and sweet and a little chaotic, every tiny cottage distinct, every garden bed laid out differently. For someone who is very curious about other people’s lives and creations, they’re also very visible in the way that the inside of homes are not, but only to the select group of people who either are interested in walking through the gardens, or have access to the “colony” at all (they’re often gated, which is understandable but also very tragic for me).
I took a lot of photos in my twenties, and uploaded them with great meticulousness to Facebook, creating a dominant narrative of my life for myself – and for others – on the platform that, at least for a little while, almost everybody was using as their home base on the internet. I have ten years of detailed records visible to me and 924 other people out there in the world (more, if you count friends-of-friends who can also see particular photos).
At some point in the last two years, I stopped feeling the compulsion to do that anymore. Instead of putting together this big cohesive story, contiguous with all the other content that I fed into the news feed, I’ve started tending to various little garden plots here and there – writing music and playing it in little bars on open mic nights, or with friends; investing deeply in conversations with specific friends by exchanging lengthy voice notes that I sometimes go back and listen to, rather than an open-platform broadcast of posting status updates. I guess writing this newsletter is also a new kind of narrative-creation, ten years after that Day and Month and Year where everything changed.
Epilogue: The Library
We are, in the end, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, and the stories they tell us. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt stirred by a city-as-self metaphor for my existential crises, I actually wrote a Facebook post alluding to something similar back in 2019:
Depression snips away at the connective tissue of memory, and some thirty-four people came into the comments (and more in private messages) to give me the gift of stories they had about me – things I’d forgotten, things I remembered, things I could stitch together to get a better idea of the Caitlins living in their heads. They are infinitely precious to me: a small library of the self.
In a lovely little bit of serendipity, I came across this video Hank Green made recently about identity and the internet and making oneself that reminded me that we’re all asking ourselves these questions all the time. “Do I manufacture my quirk…? I don’t know! That’s a terrifying question… There is no authentic self, I was not born a “way”, I have created this person that I am.”
Tell us about the tiny gardens or libraries you’ve built within yourself over in the comment section:
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