When the City You Love Stops Loving You Back

A raw reflection on belonging & identity.

After nearly a decade in Berlin, the city that once felt like home now feels distant. This is about the quiet moment you realise you no longer belong to a place in the same way and the search for what comes next.

Some days I wake up and feel like I’m not fully here anymore. Like I’m floating above this version of my life, watching it play out, but not really in it. Berlin has been home almost 10 years. It held me, shaped me, tested me, stretched me. But lately, it feels like I’m shrinking just to keep functioning inside it. I keep wondering: is this city still for me? Or am I just clinging to the version of myself that arrived here all those years ago, hungry, hopeful, and wide-eyed?

I’m not making any big declarations. I’m not leaving tomorrow. I’m still here. But my spirit feels elsewhere, quietly scanning the horizon for something softer, deeper, truer. I know what I need but I don’t know what comes next.

“I just know I want to feel alive again. Lit up. Rested. Connected.’

If you’ve been in this strange in-between too, maybe you get it. That quiet grief of still being somewhere but no longer belonging to it in the same way. That aching curiosity about what could be waiting, if you were brave enough to make a move, or even just to admit that something has to shift.

…So no, I‘m not leaving Berlin yet. But I’m not “here” the way I used to be either. I‘m opening myself to something else, whatever that might be. And I’m saying it out loud, just in case life is listening…

Some of you replied to my last story saying you feel the same way. And honestly, that’s exactly what’s up. Because it’s not just about me feeling “off” lately but also there’s something more systemic, more
collective, and it runs deep here.

It’s the quiet racism that never really left. The microaggressions, the cold stares, the way you’re made to feel like a guest even after ten years of living here. The institutions that bury you in paperwork while pretending to be neutral. The unspoken wall between them and us. And how exhausting it is to constantly translate yourself, not just linguistically, but emotionally and
culturally, to fit into a place that was never really built for you.

It’s also the disconnect in queer spaces. Especially as a gay person, it’s painful to say this, but the club culture that once felt liberating now feels hollow. People don’t look at each other anymore. They disappear behind substances, behind performance, behind a curated version of freedom that feels more like escape. I go out and see rooms full of people, and yet no one is really there. Everyone’s wired in and numbed out. Where is the connection?

And politically… this country feels like it’s on a slow, steady collapse.

“Everything is being polished on the outside while rotting underneath.”

The rise of the far right, the hypocrisy of greenwashed progressivism, the performative inclusivity. It’s exhausting. It chips away at your sense of belonging until one day you realize you stopped expecting to feel it at all.

Berlin looks colorful, but often feels dead inside. It’s full of brilliant people, but deeply lonely. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

I’m sharing this
because I know I’m not the only one. And if you’ve been holding these feelings in too, this numbness, this grief, this growing sense of not fitting into a place that once felt like home, you/we are not alone. We need to start naming it. Talking about it. Dreaming beyond it.

Because pretending it’s fine only keeps us stuck…

When the City You Love Stops Loving You Back

Credits:

Words: Eren Demirel / @erendemirel
Photography: Sergey Skip / @sergeyskip

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