Everything is Different | What does it mean to Belong?

Well hello! Welcome to The Serendipity Lifestyle: European Edition!

I’m writing from my charming new home in Germany.

But today, when I say “everything is different,” I’m not referring to this new home of mine… I’m talking about the heart-sinking feeling that happens get when you go back to a place you haven’t been for a long time and, even though everything looks the same, it’s completely different than you remember it. Know what I mean?

Author Jessica (Vera Lee) Bird photographed by Rachel Renee at Java in Downtown Boise, Idaho USA | All rights reserved

The pandemic has been going on for nearly two years now.

I’m writing this in October of 2021. Back in the US, especially in Idaho where I was living, it seemed to be over even as the Delta variant started making its first rounds in the US… but here in Germany, precautions are still strong and the pandemic doesn’t feel over at all.

I Feel a strange sense of safety, peace, and gratitude

I’m having the experience of a lifetime - and I look around at the many, many bridges burned in the past several years of my life and feel the chilling realization that I have very few to share my experience with who partake in the joys and the ups and downs with me. It’s a strange sense of safety, peace, and gratitude coupled with guilt and shame, as if I should have a list of hundreds of people to share every waking moment of my life with.

I want to share more of my life in Europe, but social media is the only way I can share and it feels more exhausting with every passing day.

With my bipolar disorder finally diagnosed and my treatment working well, my closest companions are the tiny pink pills I know each morning and night… I think of my pills as tiny little treasures that make it all possible, and I’m grateful for them even if there isn’t anyone else who completely understands. I’m myself again, and consistently, for the first time in so very long… but the people I am surrounded by never knew me before I fell apart.

Becoming more of the version of me I know and love so much means becoming more of a woman they’ve never met before (and it’s so scary to realize I’m terrified they may not love the real me and that I owe it to myself to be her anyway).

I don’t know if it is Germany’s stereotypically literal and blunt way of thinking rubbing off on me, or awareness of myself and the world around me growing as I age and experience more in life, or if it’s the Lithium helping to still my mind long enough to notice such things… but I feel more aware of my own disabilities, losses, and shortcomings than ever before.

I am confused at how to show myself grace and love…

and what that really looks like in complicated situations.

Complicated like being the girl with a lung disease (one that usually ends with a slow death by multiple organ failures) who has fallen in love with a smoker and moved to the German country-side. If sitting with my love in the tiny, smoky room they call a bar in this town delights me, but it sucks the life right from my lungs, and the alternative is to sit at home or go find myself a little cappuccino and wish I was at the bar instead, which is self love?

And as the daughter of alcoholics in a long line of addicts, is it irresponsible to have such frequent glasses of wine and beer in this ancient country where this is nothing more than ordinary? Is it rude not to? What if I want to? What if I want nothing to do with it? Where is home now? (Ahh!)

I was a good student and I always loved school.

Assignments with deadlines, essays with rubrics, philosophy and debate where thinking differently was a strength that came with high rewards was so much fun… it was effortless. Now it’s “the real world” and I’m at a loss for what to do with myself. Where is the rubric for living as someone with Cystic Fibrosis? What is the best way to think about addiction? Who are sociopolitical icons for self-care and where do I find a textbook on the four classic types of relationships - with pros and cons clearly listed for each?

And bills? Oh my god, bills.

I distinctly remember talking about bills at 9 years old saying to my mother:

“Bills are just like homework. Pay attention to the deadline and get it done, what’s the big deal? There’s no reason for a bill to be paid late…”

Ahhahaha. Baby Jessica. Where have you gone? The more I learn, the more uncertain I am that I know anything at all.

I’m trying not to let the realization that all things change scare me; I want to be inspired instead and use the shifts of the world inside of me as a nudge to buckle down and dive deeper into what allows me to be a light in the world and for myself… to commit to a path, because running after every shiny balloon these past three years has exhausted me and I crave home and simple fantasy more than ever these days, even if it comes steeped in a reality that is harsher and colder than the picture in my head.

For a moment, just a moment, I want to belong.

I want to feel like I’m doing something right…

There’s no certainty for me here, other than the certainty of my own commitment to myself… Now, it’s up to me to not take that for granted. Can you relate?