THE THIRD PLACE

‘Why are you in Berlin?,’ people asked me when I was living in Berlin.

I certainly didn’t have the mindset of immigrating to Germany, which I had of moving to America — of mastering the new language and adopting the new culture, with the plan of not going back. I just knew that I had to move to Berlin in the middle of my 30s, without any expectation or goal of what I was exactly looking for. I had been going there every summer for five summers since I started an academic job. But this time, I somehow knew that the stay would be much longer, without any concrete plan of how the stay would exactly unfold or pan out.

I wondered if moving to Europe was an ‘escape’ from reality — I was running away from facing the reality head on and building up a fantasy world, with my head deeply burrowed in the sand. I also wondered whether being an English-speaking ‘expat’ trotting the globe was just another badge of identity I was holding onto. I also wondered whether being an expat — a ‘self-imposed’ exile — was not so ‘self-imposed’ after all, since what I identified with was being an outsider standing on the margins looking in, even when it was done by choice.

As I met some Germans, however, most of whom had lived abroad but were now steeped in the German system, who expressed envy for being an ‘expat’ myself, I began to see why I was in Berlin, which they seemed to see more clearly than I did.

They envied the ‘freedom’ that expats had of being able to function outside of the strict confines, structures and norms of the German society. They yearned to shed their old identities — what they have known themselves as and how others have known them — which they felt restricting, but were hard to shed when they were surrounded by people who had known them all along and expected them to continue to be that way. They sought a release from the confines of their old identities, something more lasting and permanent than temporary escapes via frequent travels, which no longer satisfied them.

I realized that I had come to Berlin precisely for that reason: to be away from my field of conditioning — parental expectations and cultural and social pressures placed upon me — that I felt had led me farther and farther from the truth of who I was.  Until I got in touch with my deeper truth — what I really wanted and what was true for me — and developed enough inner strength to follow it through, I would have been swayed by external voices that would pull me in different directions, creating more conflict and confusion, aimless drifting, and implosion of my energy not being directed  anywhere.

And for that, I needed to come to a ‘third place’ — not the first or second place, where I immigrated from or where I immigrated to, but by dislocating myself and inhabiting the space of unknown, even when the third place did have the inherited structures, confines and norms of its own. Placed in the vacuum, not understanding the language spoken around me and thrown into the culture and the system that I was not familiar with, I was able to go inward and get in touch with my inner voice: what I really wanted and what was true to myself.

Perhaps going to Berlin for me was like going to an ashram or a monastery for spiritual seekers, except that I was not at all aware that what was seeking or the journey I was on was, in fact, spiritual.

I realized that what I really wanted was to become a writer of my own right, which I was too scared to acknowledge or admit. Rather than going directly at it, I was going around it — going through different careers without any genuine interest or commitment and rejecting one by one — deep down knowing that what I really wanted was to become a writer.  I had slowly been inching towards my secret aspiration of becoming a writer, while letting all other doors close behind me.

Berlin, as it turned out, was the right place to be an artist, because it had its value firmly placed on the arts — that creativity mattered and striving to live a life as an artist mattered even against all odds — the notion that would be alien in America and would have even been considered ‘delusional’: ‘What does an artist do?’ ‘How can you make a living as an artist?’ ‘What is the return on investment?’ American pragmatism jarred against the idea of putting countless hours into something that may not even pay off in the end. As my German immigration lawyer told me Berlin prided itself for being an artist city and was particularly hospitable towards artists by granting more artist visas than any other visas. It mattered to be surrounded by like-minded individuals who shared the same value system, by choice, rather than being blindly moulded by the value system that they were born into.

If the environment didn’t value the arts and artists — that the pursuit and struggle of living a life as an artist mattered and it was worthwhile, it would have been very difficult to come out of my shell when I already had a hard time believing in myself and own myself as an artist — not as an image to live up to or another identity to latch onto, but simply being who I already was. There was a community of artists who struggled with the same thing: their own self doubt, figuring out how to make a living while being an artist, while knowing deep down that their task was to create. But even for those without creative goals, I realized that everyone was struggling with the same thing: to simply be themselves and be seen for who they really were.

Years after living in Berlin, I realized why I was there: to ‘dislocate’ myself, to remove myself from my field of conditioning, and get in touch with my deeper truth, and I did find myself in Berlin. And who we really were, as it turned out, was right inside of us. The irony was that if I hadn’t come to the third place, I wouldn’t have arrived at it. It was only after searching everywhere and not finding it, I thought of looking within myself.