I've never really trusted people who never change. In these days of facebook it's easy enough to run across them. People you knew way back when who still live in the same place, still dress the same, still like the same music, and so on. They are still completely the same person they were when you knew them all those years ago.
Part of me has always felt bad about this mistrust. If it works for them then who am I to judge or say it's strange? What it all boils down to basically is that I simply can't relate. I've lived in Berlin for over ten years and in that time I've lived in eight different apartments and led at least three different lives. Sometimes, when I happen to pass a building where I once lived I have a hard time believing it was actually me who once lived there. As though it were all a dream or a novel I read years ago and now I can only vaguely recall the plot....
These photographs are an example. I know they are all of me shortly after my 30th birthday and that they are self-portraits. I know I had just left my husband. We were married for three years and it was an incredibly entangled and emotionally abusive relationship and I felt so alive and free when I finally struck out on my own. I got the most amazingly huge one bedroom apartment for less than 200 hundred euros with coal ovens where I had to build a fire in the winter as though it were still the 19th century. In this photograph I'm posing by the largest of the ovens, the one in the living room.
Who is the woman in these pictures? I know she's thin. Younger than I am now with different thoughts in her head and feelings in her heart. She is both me and yet not me. Would she have believed six years later that she would be re-married and have two young daughters? Not in a million years....
But that's what I love about life. You just live it and see what the fuck it is that happens....
