Nine Lives

Lessons from Berlin on honoring your past

Berlin is not Paris. It doesn’t exude the immediate, accessible romance of many other European metropolises. Where grand, stately old buildings grace the avenues of Paris, London, and Rome, Berlin offers stark, linear, functional buildings graced with graffiti and street art.

Street art and graffiti around every corner

Its facade is a product of its history. World War I spared Berlin’s buildings, but left it economically fragile. World War II destroyed 90% of Berlin’s buildings, not to mention the Holocaust’s far greater toll in human lives. After 1945, much of Berlin was in ruins. The Cold War created new scars through the wall and the Death Strip.

But, Berlin is a city that reveals its character by keeping its history visible. Instead of hiding its scars, Berlin preserves them and builds with them. This past week in Berlin, I visited ZK/U, a center for art and urbanism built upon the remains of an abandoned cargo railway station. A glass roof rests on top of the original brick walls; an artist’s living quarters occupy a former cargo hold; a garden grows over the site of the rail lines.

I also visited The Fotografiska Museum, whose building was once an artists’ commune, a Nazi prison, and a high-end department store. The artists’ commune of Tacheles was born from creatives protesting the building’s demolition after the Cold War. They stayed for more than twenty years. When I first visited Berlin in my twenties, I explored the artists’ open rooms and stairwells, finding colorful graffiti and sculpture at every turn. When I visited last week, I explored the photography museum’s sleek exhibit halls, but admired the original graffiti-soaked stairwells and hallways.

Tacheles turned photography museum

Like countless others in Berlin, these buildings express the city’s commitment to building transparently alongside history, never forgetting. Memorials to the darkest parts of Berlin’s past stand beside new construction. Portions of the wall stand beside a riverside park. Berlin reveals its past and its present together, unabashedly.

My husband always jokes that I’m a Kat with nine lives.

Growing up, I moved frequently. Each time, as I mourned the loss of moving on, my parents reframed it as a fresh start, a chance to be whoever I wanted to be. I took the advice and ran with it. I even changed my name. From Katie to Katherine to Kat.

Over the years, I reinvented myself countless times. From prep school A+ student to small town artist goth. From Bozeman High School to Vassar College. From sober, studious college student to senior year rager. From actor to ad agency account executive. From corporate hustle to vegan yoga teacher and back again. From married to divorced to remarried.

As I tried on new identities, I left the previous ones behind. In each of my nine lives, I demolished the previous.

In the process, I grew. But at a cost.

My approach to rebuilding was a wrecking ball. I razed the past to the ground. With it, I leveled far more than prior identities. I flattened friendships. I shed witnesses to my prior selves like a snake sheds its skin. I obliterated memories. Inadvertently, as I tore down connections to the past, I tore down the scaffolding of memory.

The foundation of my approach rested on something immovable: a deep desire to avoid mistakes and missteps. My drive for the facade of perfection was painfully staked into the ground. I constantly plastered over the rough edges of myself, presenting instead a shiny and smooth wall to the world around me. For more years than I can count, this blueprint guided how I navigated the world. I engineered gleaming new structures of identity, discarding the broken bits instead of building upon them.

Now, I’m tired of the wrecking ball. Tired of the force that propels it. Tired of the cost of demolition.

Instead, I’m architecting a new form of reinvention. One that isn’t so much about the renovations themselves as the principles that guide their design.

I’m learning to take a more careful approach, one that remodels with caution instead of destruction. Rather than starting each year with an overly ambitious new laundry list of goals, I’m taking time to listen and simply take the best next step. Rather than cultivating all-or-nothing friendships to align with the entirety of who I am, I’m giving grace and space for friendships that fulfill parts of me, not all. Rather than charging off to accomplish some grand new feat, I’m staying in place. Observing the space around me to understand what’s true and enduring.

I’m learning to honor and preserve the past as part of this redesign. In prior lives, I never shared my deepest failures. Now, I offer them more freely. Surviving my twenties. Getting fired. Losing friendships. Struggling as a single mom. Grappling with my career. I fight the instinct to slap a fresh coat of paint over the graffiti. Instead, I’m letting the graffiti speak.

It’s a work in progress.

Last week in Berlin, I considered reaching out to an old friend, one of my closest friends in my early twenties. During that time, I was stumbling through life in New York, trying to find myself; she appeared to be on the fast-track to success. Her career as a curator took off, catapulting her into the public eye and high-end art scene. From where I stood, she seemed to have it all figured out. We were on vastly different paths. We lost touch. When I recently discovered she was living in Berlin, leading a well-known art residency she founded, I was compelled to reach out.

I didn’t.

When I asked myself why, a simple answer emerged. As much as I’m trying to reclaim and embrace my eight prior lives, there’s still a little piece of me that is embarrassed. Embarrassed by how many selves I’ve tried on. Embarrassed by my messes. Embarrassed by friendships I neglected. Embarrassed by the disparity between who I was then and who I am now. Even if I’m not razing the building anymore, I’m still hesitant to put the construction site on display.

But, learning new ways of building takes time. A demolition crew doesn’t adopt historical preservation skills overnight. Those skills are formed through patience, humor, compassion, and a whole hell of a lot of mistakes. I have a long way to go before I can pick up the little pieces of rubble and hold each one up to the light.

Berlin kept its scars so as to not forget itself.

I’m late.

I’m imperfect.

But, I’m trying.