This essay contains discussions of trauma, retraumatization, institutional harm, medical and bureaucratic stress, family estrangement, and financial precarity. Please listen with care.
A year ago today, I sat in this same grey, snowy Einbeck. I spoke of an ache in my chest and a debt that was never mine.
Today, I am 58 and the reckoning has arrived.
I am the organism that made it through 2025—a year where retraumatization didn’t just pass through. It moved in and unpacked its bags.
The year began with an assault. In February, a former colleague looked me in the eye and blamed me for twenty years of company failure. She accepted no responsibility. In her story, she was the lone victim and I was the villain. My whole body hardened to steel as she spoke.
By March, the insolvency was filed and a reality.
In April, the betrayal reached my bloodline. My brother told me it was my former colleague who had been traumatized. When I shared a glimpse of my future, he said: “Yes, that’s what dropouts often do.”
He didn’t mean school. He meant life. With that one sentence, he erased twenty-three years of sacrifice. I felt the isolation as a sudden drop in core temperature—cold, unmistakable, cellular. It hurt like hell.
May was a gasp for air preparing the “Pride on the Page Challenge”
Come June I feared the approach of the Medical Occupational Rehab. My body knew what this meant. I feared losing my agency. Still, I managed to keep my pain signature between 1 and 3.
In late June, I drove to the rehab program. Within twenty-four hours, my body reacted.
An inner doorbell I hadn’t heard in years—a migraine anchored at the base of my skull—rang after the first class of every day. By noon, I was a coiled spring. Tension. Bracing. Coping. My pain signature climbed to a 6. On the eighth day, I pulled the ripcord. I left the program to protect my life.
Only after I stepped away did the full picture sharpen. What had been rising all year crystallized into clarity: German is the language of my traumatic biography. It elicits immediate vigilance—a reflexive bracing for impact. English registers as safety. German registers as threat.
For decades, dissociation and exile kept me from feeling the weight of my native tongue. I stayed numb to survive.
The change arrived on January 3rd, 2025. Your reaction changed it.
When the immediate thread of bankruptcy arose a year ago, I was falling at lightning speed toward a new trauma. The experience was overwhelming; I was losing my floor. And you stepped up together. You became my empathic witnesses. You caught me mid-fall. That collective “seeing” prevented another traumatization from taking root.
And what freed me also sharpened me. Because you held the space for the fall to stop, sensation began to return. Yet returning sensation is a double-edged sword. The body started registering what language and environment actually do. Sensitivity became recovery. As the numbness wore off, it became clear: even this inherited house is a sensory trap. The walls remember. The skin reads them as a dungeon.
In that moment—fresh out of rehab—I thought it couldn’t get worse. And still, I had no idea what was coming. The tsunami that would swallow me whole hadn’t even begun to crest.
I knew my sick pay expired now after eighteen months. I needed unemployment benefits, yet I found that path partially blocked. The insolvency administrator had seized all ledgers, including my private contracts. I had no documentation for the state.
They redirected me to Bürgergeld—Citizen’s Money, the lowest level support.
In Germany, this is a ritual of public stripping. To be considered, one stands figuratively naked in the market square. On July 12th, I had no income. On July 14th, a message arrived: I no longer had health insurance. I had €900 left. Roughly €90,000 in debt loomed.
Then my credit card was canceled. Then my main bank account was blocked and a loan was called due. Each step followed procedure. Each step closed another door.
Again, you stepped up. You were there as witnesses and prevented the worst. Thank you.
I spent my 58th birthday—July 31st—completing the application. I sat alone, exposed on the bureaucratic square, granting the state access to every financial and personal threshold. Artikel 1 of the German Basic Law declares human dignity inviolable. In that room, it was conditional. My pain spiked to an 8.
In August, a temporary grant of unemployment money provided the first relief. The investigation into my body continued. I waited for the verdict of the medical service.
In September, a ray of light: the medical service of the unemployment office assessed my body as unable to participate in the German workforce anylonger. Their conclusion matched my own. For a short time, my system settled.
Then, in October, a distinct ring of the doorbell at my family home triggered a severe retraumatization. My body dissociated instantly—about 80 percent. It took eight weeks—until late November—for some stabilization to return. I used everything: somatic practices, regulation tools, my therapist.
Yet, the state didn’t lift entirely. Into early December, I remained suspended. Mid-air. Handcuffed. Ankles bound. No floor. No way forward. No way back. I couldn’t even find the words to write.
I couldn’t even ask you for help.
By mid-December, I managed to release the shackles and the cuffs, though the bruises stayed with me through Christmas. By Christmas Eve, I was slipping again..
This was my final Christmas in this house—the house that has been my home since the 70s—and I had imagined one last moment of closure, a final celebration to mark the end of an era. Instead, my brother and his family made other plans. Without me.
I spent Christmas alone with Monty. The silence in the rooms wasn’t quiet—it echoed. Every corner held the weight of what I’m about to leave behind. I felt unmoored. Grief moved through the floorboards. Even the light seemed hesitant.
Once again, it was this community that held the floor. Solace came in small, vital doses: a Christmas call, a conversation about Japanese traditions, a gentle thread of messages the next day.
You were there when the walls pressed in—when the house felt most like a cage.
Just before this New Year, I uncovered the piece that made the rest of the puzzle click into place: a 120-year history of obedience and submission carried in my lineage—buried deep, yet shaping everything. It was the hidden blueprint behind the sacrifice, the silence, the self-erasure I’ve lived through.
I am the generation that finally turned toward it and said: No more.
I wrote about it here:
Today is January 3rd, 2026.
I am in the process of finalizing the sale of my real estate shares and my home to my brother. He fell ill in December, which delayed the final step, but once the papers are signed, this part will be settled.
The proceeds will go directly toward paying off the debts: the remaining loans, the bank, the insolvency administrator. Altogether, roughly €90,000 ($106,000). When this is done, I will know what remains as starting capital—perhaps €10,000 ($11,800) to €20,000 ($23,600).
This part, while heavy, is at least concrete. It will be completed.
The second current is the wildcard. I applied for a disability pension. The Pension Office holds the pen. They can give me 10%, 100%, or nothing—the difference between a few hundred euros and a livable foundation. The verdict likely drops between mid-January and March. I have zero influence. I can object later, sure, but for now, I’m just waiting for a letter from an office that doesn’t even know my name.
Only when both currents settle will I know where I truly stand. Right now, I half-stand. I know the debts vanish and a limited capital remains, and I don’t know if I’ll have a monthly income, and if how much.. That one fact changes everything.
Do I have to look for a job to make ends meet? Will my car become a moving shelter? Might I go on an epic road trip? Do I find a path I can’t even see from here?
Until those currents meet, I’m suspended. In this house. In this body. In this pause.
Two things aren’t up for debate. I will leave this house shortly after the pension decision arrives. I will leave Germany. Both movements are set. What remains open is how they will unfold—how much space they will hold, how much structure they will require. Life ahead will be modest, pared to essentials.
I keep working with what is in front of me. The past still reaches through everything I touch, and the horizon keeps shifting. It is neither blank nor fixed. I live inside this threshold with steady attention. Nothing here is permanent. Everything moves.
Uncertainty sits beside me. Grief and anticipation take turns. Small traces of imagination appear and fade. Ideas move in and out, shaping the outline of what might become possible.
Images of the near future gather around what already feels true: centering life around food and the people who bring it into being—producers, growers, cooks. The languages of spices, herbs, and heat continue to speak to me. Creativity stays close: cooking, baking, photography, maybe film. A life shaped through connection, through what nourishes and creates culture at the same time.
There is no map. The decision from the Pension Office has not arrived. Paths shimmer at the edge of sight—each one a potential, none decided. For now, I remain in this hinge between worlds. I have lived between chairs since childhood. I still live in-between, only the texture has changed.
I stay within this suspension, listening to a body learning presence one day at a time.
This year, I move with three intentions: Healing, Probability, and Serendipity—the quiet companions of a life re-forming itself in real time.
I’m so grateful for your listening and your support—not just today, not just for the weeks and months ahead, but for the overwhelming weight of the care you gave me last year. It carried me through.
I’m so grateful for you and for what you’ve enabled me to withstand. 2025 was one of the hardest of my life.
xo
Jay
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What are your intentions for your future? Tell me. I’d really like to be inspired.
Monty to Jay, in one sentence:
I will guard the memory of our mornings, the smell of your coffee, the rhythm of your steps, until the air no longer carries your scent—then I will wait by the window, where the light once found you.
