When I was younger I didn’t really take my potential seriously. I always thought I had “other problems” or that come time I’d do something, but that it wasn’t that important after all. In the end it were only other people judging me and I didn’t like them very much. Why would I have wanted their approval? In fact approval from people who were “stinknormal” (literally “stinking normal”) was something I didn’t want. I wanted to be special, different and not like them, because they were really annoying me. They were not interested in things, didn’t know anything about music, they lived according to other people’s rules. No, I really didn’t want to be like them. Of course I wasn’t very special, most teenagers with a little brain power think that society sucks (especially because of their parents). One thing was for sure though: I was quite different than the rest. First I didn’t want to accept that, because it put me in an outsider position, but people didn’t stop telling me, that I was different.
I grew up in East Germany in a town that was called Karl-Marx-Stadt in the GDR, a town that flourished in the industrial revolution. It was full of workers and there was textile industry. My brother and me didn’t have the shiniest childhood there. When I was still little the Berlin wall came down and East and West Germany were reunified. In the GDR everyone had a job – the government just had to give you a job and that’s that. Everyone was taken care of and people who tried not to work got into real trouble. That’s how socialism in action looks like. Of course there wasn’t actually always “work” there. Often the production lines were shut down, because there were no materials and the workers were playing cards. They were paid anyway. When the wall came down all this changed. They closed down all but 2 textile factories and everyone ended up being unemployed. My family lived in the socialist concrete block buildings of the worker area, because there were no other places available at the time. And suddenly the worker area was more of an unemployed area. It always takes little time to find a scape goat for the situation you’re in, especially if you’re not well-educated and your whole entire world just broke down. Foreigners were blamed, because they could come into the country according to West German laws – one big change after the wall came down was that the borders were open.
My Mum is Russian, so it didn’t really take long for them to make us the scape goats. My parents stopped speaking Russian at home and didn’t try to teach us Russian anymore, because they thought we already had enough problems. My brother and me were the Russian kids. My childhood wasn’t exactly pleasant, because children are cruel and play the games they play according to their parents’ behaviour. And they were uneducated workers who just lost their job and there was no future in sight – as a result there was lots of violence in the families and again as a result of that the kids in the streets were violent as well. I got beaten up a lot and my brother had many problems as well. I can’t really remember anything from that time in detail, because human minds have a very good safe guard against traumas: they just forget. Only when I was 17 I started remembering things and that wasn’t really pleasant either.
In primary school I was different because I was the Russian kid, even though I was half German as well, and in secondary school I was different because I had a bad childhood. The secondary school I was going to was at the other side of the town and it was actually a nice and pleasant area with mostly old people and not so many classic working class people, who lost their jobs in the factories. Almost everyone in my secondary school class had a nice childhood. I certainly was different. I distrusted people. In primary school I was setting myself apart from the worker kids through being smart. Out of my primary school only one other girl even got into one of the better secondary schools, which lead to Abitur (German A-Levels). I’ve only seen a few of my primary school class mates again. Some of them became racist Skinheads and were trying to beat me up a few years later. I can only imagine how their life looks like now.
As you might imagine, people with a nice childhood end up not questioning their environment. I was used to pick out the bad things and see whether they might hurt me or not. I distrusted people until they proved they were trustworthy. I think people found me slightly weird with my melancholy and my distrust. They just weren’t used to these kind of problems. I envied people who didn’t have my problems and that’s why I actually disliked them. They were not aware of the bad things in the world. They were like Adam and Eve running around innocently in the Garden of Eden. I knew good and evil and was expelled from their little club of happy people. If you’re a teenager and don’t really understand what’s going on there, you think those people are stupid. Well, they’re not stupid, they’re lucky and that’s that!
It took a long time until I managed to live with all the bad things that happened to me in my life. I actually had severe depressions because of those things even one year after I finished school. With those kind of problems you don’t do an awful lot and you don’t achieve an awful lot. You’ll just end up thinking “Why me?” and you’re not in a position to change anything about what happened to you. Revenge won’t help you either. You’ll still be scarred for life.
I can’t really tell you how exactly I managed to cope with all these problems on my own. I was a severe case of borderline syndrome when I was younger with all the classic symptoms that you can find in the classifications. Now I only have half a symptom of those initial 10 and it only appears in very specific situations that are very easy to avoid. I was suicidal and managed to survive. I don’t know how exactly I did it. I only know one thing: I was really eager to change my life. Once I even wanted to see a therapist. The only way to get one paid by health insurance was to take antidepressants and I’m really against taking medicine that messes with your head. Even now they don’t really know what’s really going on in our brains and still they give people medicine that changes what your brain does. Not an awfully good idea. I basically laughed at them and coped with my problems myself.
There were two moments in my life that really turned things around: when I moved to West Germany and when I started doing what I really wanted to do. The first bit is quite obvious: you don’t really want to stay living in the town where you got so scarred for life that you didn’t know how to cope with it for about 10 years. Changing your life sometimes means leaving all the bad things behind you in another place. Of course this only partially works, because you can’t run from your problems, especially not if they’re within you. You’ll stay the same scarred person even if you run to the other side of the world. That’s where the second bit kicks in: if you’re stuck with things you really don’t want to do, you end up thinking about your miserable life and you end up right where you started: in the middle of your childhood issues.
There’s also a hint from the human subconscious here: I managed to actually forget most of my childhood just to make me feel better about my life. Forgetting doesn’t make the effects go away though. One day you have to think about all this stuff in detail and what it causes in you. And then you have to think about how you can deal with all that. How can you change your actions that just stem from your childhood trauma? How can you cope with something that you can’t change anymore? How? I’m no professional and I surely encourage everyone to talk to a therapist. If they want you to take antidepressants, well, don’t! I’ve seen what it does to people who have a slightly unusual brain chemistry and now they’re even worse than before. In the end, who is normal? How do those doctor’s know whether you will be the one case in thousands who has a bad reaction to it? They can’t and that’s why people end up with a psychosis after taking stuff like that. I’m not saying that this kind of medicine can’t help people – I’m just saying it should be the last resort. The last resort after talking to a therapist and trying to sort out your problems with his help. Talking to someone can really make a difference, especially if this person knows what to ask.
In the end it’s all about change, all about the desire to make a difference in your life and the desire to actually be happy. I managed to change my life and to get out of depressions all on my own. If I can do it, you can do it as well and the good thing is: even if you don’t manage to make it on your own, there’s still another chance: There is help available. You just need the desire to make a difference for yourself and the rest is a matter of time, a matter of thinking about what went wrong in your life and how you can change the effects it has on you. With or without a professional on your side to help you. Don’t just say “Well, I had a bad childhood and that’s why I’m like that …”: you and your circumstances are not set in stone! You can grow and change and make a difference. You can move somewhere else, you can pick a job that you actually like – people sometimes don’t realize that work is allowed to be fun – and it’s essentially your choice what you do about your problems. You can’t pick your past, but you can pick how you deal with it.
Make a difference for yourself today and start reflecting on your past. What went wrong? How does that change you? And how can you change the effect it has on you? Your life is your responsibility!
Related article: Why finding the reasons is sometimes only a first step
