How incredibly ironic, isn’t it? First I post content about releasing content and then I simply… don’t. Now I wish I had an amazing reason for this, but in fact it was, as it so often is, a combination of many things. They may not seem much by themselves, yet together they somehow pile up on a pile high enough to bypass the most noble of intentions.
Nonetheless, since I’m planning to continue feeding my blog here the old-school way, it seems only fair to give a little update on what has been going on in my life from my last post until now.
My last post, as well as my whole website actually, stem from a time when I was stuck at home with a sprained ankle. This may not sound like much, but for a person who needs to be out and about like she needs the air to breathe, this felt like hell. Every trip, even a little walk down the street, took me and my crutches about 30x the time it usually did. I felt maximally stuck.
Ever since getting laid off from my previous job (which I didn’t take too personally since I turned out to be one of about 600 colleagues), I had nurtured grand plans: advance my business, travel the world, start and finish my psychology masters. So I’d applied to universities, tried to get comfortable with business planning and my newly acquired status of an officially unemployed person in Germany, and started to look for tickets to India. However, literally everything went sideways.
Instead of India I was stuck at home feeling trapped and immobile. Which was when one rejection after the other started flying in from the universities I had applied to. As for my business, this was definitely happening, but did not at all feel like I had imagined it would: Instead of being able to fully focus on what I love, which is coaching and the stories of the people I got to listen to, I noticed that if I wanted to really live comfortably with this, I’d have to invest so much more time and resources to marketing and advertising. Not at all what I had imagined.
I climbed out of this very challenging summer (with lots of time to write), slowly. One hour long trip to the local park after the next. One movie night after the next. Slowly, the first bike ride (scariest thing if you don’t know if you can rely on your foot yet!) and more autonomy again. Finally, that magical evening with friends at an open air concert, after which I got home, opened the mailbox and found the letter that changed my outlook on life. The letter saying that I’d gotten accepted to university for my M.Sc. in Psychology.
All of a sudden life seemed very clear again. I had entered a tunnel that allowed me to see what my next step was. Because no matter what I wanted to do in the long run, getting my full degree in psychology seemed like the logical next step. Thus, I became a student again and dove deep into the world of books, lectures, note-taking, writing exams and essays and doing presentations.
While I was still coaching on the side, time was relatively scarce. Starting January 2024 I took on a working student job at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, which kept me busy for 20 hours a week. In addition to this, my desire to go on that wild and long trip didn’t go anywhere, so my partner and I made a masterplan: Use my first semester holidays of 1,5 months to travel through Subsaharan Africa and plan some bigger adventure while I’m still a student.
And this, basically, is the short(ish) answer to where I’ve been the past year. I powered through my lectures, seminars and internships of 1,5 years within one year and organised a master thesis topic I could write from a distance. Because since my desire to see the world before settling down didn’t go anywhere, I had to give in and make it happen. And this, my friends, is how I’m writing you from India now.
