On losing and finding your muchness
Now that I have finally started writing in English too, it feels as though I am constantly playing hide and seek with my own thoughts.
Which is almost beautifully ironic, really.
Artists, I think, are people driven by two opposite desires at once: the desire to be seen, and the desire to disappear. To communicate, and to conceal. I just happen to stretch that tension across two languages, as well as through the other forms of art I create.
And maybe that is why writing in English feels strange right now.
Not unnatural — if anything, English has always been the place where my thoughts arrived most easily. In many ways, it has felt more natural to me than German ever did.
Just shy.
Shy, because now I know it is no longer only me reading these words. To write in English like this is to open another door entirely — to let the world meet this side of me, too.
Maybe that is why it feels so tender.
Maybe English was my last hiding place.
I have this quiet belief that poetry happens to a poet long before it is ever written down. It lives in the body first. In the throat. In the chest. In all the places where feelings wait before they learn how to become language.
So maybe all those years of bottled-up thoughts and emotions are simply experiencing stage fright now.
And who am I to rush them?
So today, I am letting this text become something other than what I first intended. I am changing the subject halfway through. Or maybe I am just finally arriving at the real one.
Because above all else, I have to write for myself. Not for the version of me that wants to sound polished. Not for what I think people might want to read. Just for the truth of where I am, on this particular day, in this particular moment.
After all, art was never meant to sit there and look pretty.
It was meant to make you feel something.
And lately, what I have been feeling most is this quiet but undeniable need to return to myself.
This week, more than anything, I want to keep my mental health afloat. I want to keep my stress levels as low as I can manage. Because the lesson last week taught me — very clearly, and very personally — is that if I do not give myself rest, my body will take it on my behalf.
And it does not ask gently.
The last few weeks have been loud inside me. So much thinking. So much questioning. So much circling around what I want for myself, what no longer feels right, what needs to change, and what I want that change to look like.
And none of that is bad. I think dreaming, imagining, longing — all of that matters. The universe cannot meet us halfway if we never dare to name where we want to go. Everything begins as a thought. As a possibility. As something fragile and invisible, before someone becomes brave enough to speak it aloud.
But somewhere between all that stress and all that wanting, I feel like I lost the plot a little.
Because the point of life, at least to me, is not to constantly optimize it.
It is to be happy.
And a huge part of happiness is excitement.
Not the grand, cinematic kind, necessarily.
Just the everyday kind.
A cup of tea or coffee in the morning.
The next episode. The next chapter.
Buying yourself something small after a long stretch of saving.
Sunsets.
Short trips.
Tiny adventures.
A weekend away, or even just a day that feels different from the rest.
Dancing in the kitchen.
Sitting under the stars.
Standing somewhere in the mountains and remembering how small you are in the best possible way.
Loving the people around you.
Loving yourself enough to stay.
That is the life I want.
A life I am excited to wake up to.
Everything else comes after that.
And somehow, despite all the chaos, I have this almost irrational feeling that things will work out for me. Maybe that is optimism. Maybe it is delusion. Maybe the line between the two has always been thinner than people like to admit.
In moments like this, I always think of one of my favourite quotes from Alice in Wonderland:
“You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more… muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.”
And maybe that is something worth remembering.
To not lose our muchness completely.
Maybe growing up is not just about becoming more responsible, more disciplined, more resilient. Maybe part of it is also about protecting the part of yourself that still feels delighted by things. The part that still knows how to be enchanted. The part that has not made a personality out of exhaustion.
Because joy is not a place you arrive at.
It is a garden you tend to daily.
And the day we plant the seeds is not the day we get to eat the fruit.
I think the first half of life, for many of us, is about becoming who we needed to be in order to survive. That has certainly been true for me. For a long time, survival was the deepest pattern running through everything.
But I do not want survival to be the most honest thing about my life forever.
Maybe the second half is about unraveling. About peeling away the versions of ourselves that were built in fear, built in grief, built in necessity. About returning to whatever feels most true underneath all of that.
Not a crisis. A rebirth.
A phoenix heart, through and through.
And now that this text has wandered so far away from where I first thought it would go, maybe there is only one thing left to say:
A lot can change in a year.
Or a month.
Or a week.
Or on a Monday morning.