Why you shouldn't burn down your house...

I am not a coach and this blog does not claim to show how to do something better. I don't want to teach anyone anything and I don't want to lecture anyone, I just want to inspire and say straight out what many people don't dare to say. That's kind of my thing. I can do truth. Many people don't like it, that's for sure. But truth is something I can do. Maybe that's why I became a journalist. Sometimes it can be ultra annoying with me, because often you don't really want to hear the truth. But here it is. And it starts with me being a shitty coach because my way is one way, but it doesn't work for others. We all have different backgrounds, different stories, different pasts, different environments, different families, different circumstances. Nevertheless, I would like to tell you what has helped me, what I have learnt and what has inspired myself and if needed, I would like to give you food for thought. Each of us has our own baggage to carry and we should not forget that we cannot compare our bags with each other. For each and every one of us, his or her own package weighs the most. There is no scale for emotional matters, for sorrow or pain. And I'll tell you frankly and honestly at this point, I've been pretty shitty with my baggage and have pretended for many years that it was very easy for me to carry it. And the worst thing about it is that those around me often admired me for it. But it is often precisely these "strong" people who end up falling flat on their faces, because they manage to walk upright for longer, but when they collapse one day, it is because they have exhausted every last bit of their strength. It would probably be better not to wait that long in the first place. Kind of like a fire. Better just blow out the candle. If the curtain has already caught fire, you can still save something with the fire extinguisher or a little knocking. But once the place is on fire, it takes time to extinguish the fire and it's a hard job to refurbish it and make it look nice again. My place had already burnt down about three times. But nobody knew that, because I just stuck a fancy photo wallpaper in the window. Looked great on the outside and people never questioned anything. At least no one ever asked me about it. One thing you can't deny either - I had an exciting and varied life. Always on the road, always new people, new places, new challenges and the evenings ended happily in a nice hotel bar. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, it was. Until the moment when the pandemic was suddenly on the agenda. Suddenly I realised that most colleagues are simply colleagues and not friends, work is a company that has no further interest in me and a hotel is not a home either. Everything that had previously filled my life in an avoidably wonderful way had suddenly disappeared and the essence? It was pretty poor. It was as if someone had robbed me of my personality. Who was I without my job? Nothing more than a burnt-out flat. Shit. And now? Well, I've been trying to get to the bottom of this question for almost three years now, and fortunately I can announce the first successes. It's a process that will take forever, but I notice that I'm feeling better with every day since I scraped off the photo wallpaper piece by piece and started to really rid my flat of the burn marks again. I still wake up in the night in a panic, thinking there's a fire, but the intervals are getting longer and longer. And at exactly these intervals, I feel better and better and only now do I realise how bad I actually felt before. Most recently I was paralysed. Not particularly sad, but not happy either. I simply endured life as it came. I sat between friends, at parties, in the most beautiful mountain scenery and simply felt nothing. And now I'm shocked to realise how unbelievably crass our bodies and minds actually are, because I had simply considered this horrible state to be normal. Because that's exactly what it was. Over time, it had become my normality. And quite honestly, I consider myself an ultra-reflective person, but when you're already so deep in it, you can be as fucking reflective as you want, you can hardly see for yourself how deep you're actually in it, let alone free yourself from this situation. And at this point I would like to emphasise again that I am neither a coach nor a psychologist, but an artist with a burnt-down house and I don't want to deny anyone that it might not be possible to somehow put out the fire and rebuild everything on your own - BUT 1. it is dangerous and 2. why should you want to do that? Why is it so frowned upon in our society to ask for help? A sign of weakness? Bullshit! Get help. What's the big deal? What's the big deal? Even if you don't need it in the end, it's not tragic. But it is if you don't. Help and support is great and I plead for it with a huge yes and want to break this stupid taboo! Everyone is pretending to be fine, when it feels like everyone is in a bad way, but because no one is talking about it, the pressure is only increasing immeasurably. So maybe we should just be a bit more human again and a bit less of an Instagrammer?