If you can, turn on this song before you start reading

“For mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.” I don't even remember where that is from, but it stuck with me for obvious reasons. It goes so far that we even dread our own grief, adding shame to the feelings of loss and desperation. “Arrête ces histoires”, my mother always says. Stop telling these stories. Coming from a working- class background, sucking it up is in her DNA. The course of her life did the rest. My mother's first husband, my sisters’ father, had died after a long battle with cancer, a couple of years before she met my father. Their eyes met on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea and they instantly fell in love. Later my mother would always recall him rinsing strawberries in salty ocean water. Today still, the infatuating effect of this gesture is lost on me.
In what can only be considered an immense leap of faith, my mother, not speaking a single word of German, moved to Germany with two small kids. My father's French was rudimentary, so they relied on music (my father was a musician) and eroticism to communicate. “Michelle” by the Beatles was their song. My father said the only word he knew she'd understand, marking the beginning of their respective second big love story of their lives. He vowed to be less of a flaky asshole musician and soon after, my surprisingly blond head entered the messy stage of their newly merged lives. He hadn't really cared for his first kids, so he wanted to do better this time. To him, I was Désirée, the first daughter he had truly wanted. The name, which I consider to be a slap in the face to my German siblings, was too posh for my mother's taste and was therefore demoted to my middle name. It not only foreshadowed the difficult patchwork situation in which I grew up to become the clown, the comic relief, I am (often by default) up to this day. It was also the expression of the grandiose plans my father had for me. I was to become a prodigious musician, as he would have been if only his parents hadn’t been to poor to given him the necessary  head start, something he never forgave them. He was determined to do better by me. This meant that, from the age of four, I was to practice the piano for hours on end with him sitting by my side. This became the battle between us. I wanted to go outside, but I wasn't allowed to do anything until I had improved. Despite all the practice, I failed to become the passionate talent, the Wunderkind he had so desperately desired me to be. I was too distracted, too interested in the world outside. Little Charlotte desired nothing more than to play pretend (still my favourite kind). I was passionate, yes, passionately hating the piano and what it meant for my life. Growing up in a small village in the countryside near Frankfurt, all I ever desired was to be normal. Having to wait for me to finish practising classical music wasn't exactly normal for the kids in my neighbourhood.
My mother speaking French to me in front of other kids didn't help much either. And even when she spoke German, as I had begged her to, she had this thick accent that my classmates would always laugh about. I was weird, and it was all their fault. Thankfully, as I know today, my mother was weird enough not to listen when she was told I would never graduate school. (The mean reviews my teacher wrote about me during that time turned out to be very helpful in my recent ADHD diagnosis.) When my father died, I started to talk about him differently. He was the only one who had really known me. I idolized him, as mourners tend to. He had, in fact, been my main caretaker, and from then on, I refused to accept any babysitter or nanny. I was all grown up now, whether they liked it or not.
Over the years, my feelings towards my father became more complex. A couple of years ago, a crisis hit: a separation followed by the loss of stable housing. As a consequence, I lost my footing in the theatre world that had only just let me in. It was then that the anger finally surfaced: Why did he have to set me up to fail with his insane standards and demands? I was not fulfilling anyone's desire, let alone my own. Wasn't it, in fact, his grandiose ideas about me that caused this crippling fear of failure? And wasn't the sheer panic I felt as a result what led me to push away loved ones and beloved collaborators?
Standing in the dust of the shithole of an apartment – the only one I could find – I watched people around me tending to the gardens they had built over the course of their lives. Meanwhile, I felt like I was buried, hiding under the pile of bricks from which I had to rebuild my life from scratch. This, of course, is an illusion. Everybody suffers, people struggle, people grieve. But we don't allow each other the grace of ruptures — these breaks in our biographies, moments in time that don't really make sense and don't really lead to anything but pain and maybe, just maybe, more empathy towards each other.