It had been years since I was in the same room as a piano. That changed the other day, and I didn‘t expect how deeply hearing it live would move me—far more than a recording of the same piece would.

There’s something different about hearing an instrument played in person. Every speaker will always only be a representation of what the music is supposed to sound like. But when that layer of translation is removed something changes and you’re somehow able to feel the instrument as part of the music and room.

Now I‘m wondering if I should give going to the orchestra a try. Or even start a new side quest by taking piano lessons?

I feel like sharing thoughts with strangers online gets harder the longer you go without doing it. My plan was to write at least something in August so it wouldn’t be a month without any activity here. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Partly because my month was filled with great people, activities, and weather, and partly because I felt like I needed to write something of value and couldn’t manage to produce anything I was happy with.

As you can see, I decided to solve this issue by posting something about not posting anything. An age-old trick in blogging: blogging about blogging. That being said, I actually believe it helps to keep the sharing muscle from atrophying. These posts don’t cost me anything. I don’t have to be precious about them.

A lot has happened since I wrote about my intention to move back to Hamburg.

For example: I moved back to Hamburg.

The move itself went off without a hitch. My stuff was put into a truck, my cats and I were picked up by friends, and we all made it successfully to my new flat. It took far longer than expected, but it got done.

Since then, I have unpacked all the boxes, kind of arranged everything in a roughly pleasing way, and got to know my new neighborhood and even my neighbors. I have gone for lunch, dinner, and walks with friends. I continued running every other day, even together with friends. I went on a couple of dates, found a new dentist and hairdresser, and have thoroughly enjoyed where I live.

I can't stress the last point enough: my sheer existence here feels like bliss. I step out of the house and love every second of it. Life is happening all around me, and I'm taking part in it.

The last three weeks felt like reality has realigned with how it should be, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Let's face the facts: I could go on for hours and hours talking about how unhappy I am where I currently live. Trust me, in private, I sometimes struggle to talk about anything but this situation. Instead of boring you with post after post, let's just sum up what's going on and talk about how to solve it.

• I was convinced that life in a smaller town would be the right thing for me. Instead of trying it out for a couple of months, I moved there completely. Like an idiot. That might not have been the smartest decision, but it sure felt right at the moment.
• I was wrong. In terms of work, money, and negative emotions involved, this might have been the biggest mistake of my life. Which, all in all, speaks volumes about how good my life is going. It's a very privileged position to be in.
• At the same time, this might be the most important lesson of my life. I won’t ever have to wonder what life in a small town would be like, not to mention one of those dreamy cabin-in-the-woods situations people like me tend to fantasize about. Not for me, no thanks!
• All of this also changed my relationship with... people. Like, in general. I’m far more thankful for them. When visiting friends in Hamburg, I actually enjoyed being stuck in a completely overfilled subway. I enjoyed walking around the Alster dodging hundreds of people doing the same. It's a price I'm willing to pay for living in a proper city. It also gave me renewed motivation to work on my yearly theme.
• I was so convinced about moving here that I was fine with signing a tenancy agreement with a minimum rental period of two years. My thinking was that you'd have to at least give it a good shot for this amount of time to be able to figure out if you like it or not. Oopsie. (I can get out of it by paying a lot of money. The process is already underway.)

So, okay, whatever. Things happened, I was wrong about how I’d feel, and I went through all the necessary emotions to come to following conclusion:

I have to move.

Again.

Not great, not terrible. I learned a lot about myself and how I want to spend the rest of my life. That alone made this little, stupidly expensive intermezzo worth it. A solid 3.6 Roentgen situation.

So what's next?

I'll move back to Hamburg.

Before moving to Berlin about nine years ago, Hamburg was what I called my home, and it still feels like it. Most of my friends live there, I love the city, and I kind of can’t wait to come back.

So that’s it. I’m off trying to find a place to live in a city that is known for its horrendous housing market. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to all of you who reached out to talk to me about this experience. I appreciate it!

Oh, by the way, if you hear something about a soon-to-be vacant apartment in Hamburg: Let me know!

I even built this little site you could share with your friends and colleagues to help me on my quest.

https://eine.wohnung.fuer.marcel.io

Thank you!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

What surprised me the most about my emotional state after moving from Berlin Mitte to a city of 100,000 inhabitants was how much I miss... everything.

I never made much use of what Berlin has to offer, yet I took quite a few things for granted.

Restaurants, for example. I could have sworn that I didn’t care that much about food. Unfortunately, that seems to have been the case only because I was surrounded by fantastic food and restaurants ever since moving out from home. I miss it—all the choices of different establishments, all the culinary options. The fact that 4.8 stars on Google Maps actually meant something. I’m not even complaining about the lack of vegetarian options. It’s not even possible to get good fries anywhere.

I could live with that, though, if it weren't for the fact that absolutely nothing else is going on. Of course, I expected there to be less to do, but not this little.

After scouring the internet for hours in February, I found one (ONE!) interesting thing to look forward to: a lecture about salt and its history, with a tasting of salts from all over the world at the end. I knew I'd be roughly half as old as the other participants, but I was ready to mingle when I booked it for mid-April.

The one real museum is being renovated and won't open for more than a year. Things that do happen, like cocktail nights in the sole co-working space, result in a gathering of like four people. Two of them are the owners of the place.

I'm not even kidding.

Going to the movies was always a great solution for me to get my mind off things. The one good cinema doesn't offer screenings with original language, though, and I won't watch American and British movies with German dubbing. I haven't lost all of my self-respect.

Even though I didn’t make much use of what Berlin has to offer, it was good to know that I had options. If I wanted to do something, there was more than enough, sometimes even too much. All the options felt paralyzing at times. Now I long for them. I expected a reduction in possibilities to feel freeing; instead, it’s just depressing.

By the way, that lecture about salt I mentioned earlier?

It got cancelled.

For lack of interest.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

I grew up in a small village near the coast of the North Sea. Six thousand inhabitants, all of them very concerned with what the other 5,999 could think about them. This never felt right to me, and I thought there should be more to life than that. Even going to school in a city of 26,000 didn't change that feeling. The people around me didn’t share my interests, but I connected with others online who lived in big cities. I wasn't able to communicate exactly what I was feeling back then but I knew that I needed to get out.

Fortunately, 16 years later, I somehow found myself in the same situation again and am now able to express what it is that bothers me.

After living in Berlin Mitte for eight years, I was completely convinced that I needed a cozy small town without the depressing anonymity and all the noise. How great it would be to walk outside and not have to dodge others left and right.

I was wrong.

I miss what I was despising just a couple of months ago.

Yes, it was a lot and I wished for quieter surroundings at times. Of course, I wasn't happy with some aspects of my situation. Yes, I've seen a surprising amount of penises from randos pissing on the street. Not great!

It was interesting, though. Things changed from day to day. People were weird. Normal. Exciting. Profane. Loud. Quiet. Something. I stepped outside and life happened.

Schwerin, with it's less than 100,000 inhabitants, most of them teenagers or pensioners, is... boring.

Not in the way I thought it would be, where I expected the quietness and solitude to magically expand my mind. Walden Pond style. On the contrary: I kind of feel alone and mentally under-challenged.

I don't want to come across as contemptuous. A different version of me could love it here. I just don't want to be that version. Even though I respect everyone who finds what they're looking for in a place like this.

I've found that I want to be surrounded by people my age, with a high likelihood of shared interests. And as cringe as it might sound, I'm afraid mine are big-city-people interests. Internet-work people. I want to see, meet, and talk to people... like me. Or at least me-adjacent.

Here's the catch, though: People like me feel like they don't belong here.

I know because — and this might come as a surprise to you — I am a person like me.

And that's just one aspect. If you had asked me about this six months ago, I would have said something completely different, but here’s the reality: It’s too empty here. I can go for a 45-minute run and only meet five people—all of them pensioners, of course. I can walk from the main station to my flat on a Saturday night and not encounter a single person. That’s just depressing.

I haven't felt like this since moving away from where I grew up.

What I expected before the move was an expansion into a new way of being. Of feeling content with smallness, of finding joy in normalcy. Instead, it feels like a regression to something I left behind for a reason.

A reason that hasn't changed since I first felt it more than 16 years ago.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Many of you (nobody) asked how moving from a 3.8 million inhabitants city to a less than 100,000 inhabitants city is treating me. In the last couple of months, I went through quite a lot of thoughts and emotions and arrived at some new opinions that surprised me. I won't be able to fit them all in one coherent post so here you go, in no particular order and in good-old blogging style. Welcome to part one of who knows how many instalments of IMHMAO.

Today: Local Retail.

I wasn't expecting this, like at all, but I seem to have demands for the quality and diversity of stores around me. Every time I tried to buy something in a store in Schwerin, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. We're not talking about heavily exotic stuff here. Pants, for example, were nowhere to be found. None of them fit me, they were all far too big. I'm not weirdly shaped, on the contrary. It won't get more default than me. I ran out of stores to try before I found something I liked. That never happened before. Another time I tried to buy brushes: Nothing. Same for sketchbooks. Same for pretty baskets to store stuff in or colorful decoration. Nothing.

This might seem like a small matter but I like walking somewhere, browsing a limited but plentiful offering of wares and going back home with whatever I needed as the result. It makes me feel connected to where I am.

It doesn't help that online shopping became a pain in the ass at some point. There's just too much to choose from, everything, even Amazon, is full of scams and I hate the whole process. Choosing, ordering, waiting, tracking, receiving, returning. I don't need that noise.

So that's an insight: I would not have guessed that a heavily limited selection of stores would influence my mood this much but it does. The more you know!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg