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By a certain point, we all end up with a bit of “social fat.” You have a name, a reputation, and a social circle where everyone knows who you are and what your status is. You’re a completed puzzle. But the moment you land at the airport in, say, Frankfurt—or any other country you’ve chosen with a one-way ticket—that puzzle shatters into a million pieces, and you undergo a harsh, uncompromising detox of your identity.
Social Striptease
In your own country, you were “the guy.” In another country, you’re just a person with a stack of documents, broken English (at best), and a cat on your back (at worst).
No one gives a damn who you were in your past life, how long your track record is, or how often you’ve been screwed over. It’s a moment of terrifying but healing reset. When your usual “social capital” is taken away, you finally see what lies beneath it.
And it often turns out that half of your traits were simply a way of adapting to your surroundings. You were “convenient,” “understandable,” or “appropriate” because that’s how the system worked.
Here, nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody knows you, nobody’s waiting for you, and your past bragging doesn’t translate into euros here.
And this is where the real fun begins: when there’s no one to kiss up to and no one to show off your new car or job title to, you’re left alone with your true self. It turns out that Without social approval, you are either the emperor with no clothes or, at last, a free person. And it's only at that moment that you realize what you actually like, and what you were just doing to avoid looking like a loser in front of your friends.
The Freedom to Be an “Outsider”
Many people spend years trying to “blend in” so completely that they can’t be distinguished from the locals. For some reason, everyone wants to suddenly shed their Slavic, rarely smiling face, and before they’ve even stepped into the elevator with someone, they shout “good morning” in a foreign language, leaving the old lady from the next floor completely dumbfounded.
My biggest insight from living in Germany: being an outsider is the highest form of freedom.
When you don’t fit in 100% with the local landscape from the start, you’re free of all obligations. You don’t have to pretend to be the perfect neighbor or conform to centuries-old bourgeois traditions. As soon as you accept your status as an “outsider,” you get carte blanche to do whatever you want. You can rebuild your identity from scratch, choosing only the elements you genuinely like.
That’s the privilege of being an expat—the right to set your own rules of the game on someone else’s turf. To Germans, you’ll always be “that foreigner” anyway, so why go out of your way to fit in? As soon as you stop trying to be the “perfect immigrant,” you’re free to do whatever you want. You can wear whatever you want, sleep with whoever you want, and behave in ways your “reputation” back home wouldn’t allow. It’s an awesome privilege—to be a nobody in a foreign country—because it’s precisely that “nobody” who can get away with absolutely anything.
The vacuum in which truth is born
When you no longer have your old circle of friends behind you—the ones who “will always have your back” (but in reality often pull you back toward your old ways)—silence sets in. In that silence, I started writing articles without holding back, writing songs, trying my hand at porn, filming TikToks, being a drag queen, and working as a butcher (I’ll go back to IT eventually). Not because it’s trendy, but because it became the only way to let out that new version of myself, one that didn’t fit into the confines of ordinary conversations and my old social circle.
Music on Spotify and lyrics for Doberman aren't just "content." This is the chronicle of my reinvention. In this state of “total zero,” your inhibitions disappear. You’re no longer afraid of messing up—in the system’s eyes, you’re already at rock bottom. So you just go out and try everything you didn’t have the courage to do before. Today you’re cutting meat at a deli, tomorrow you’re on stage wearing feathers, and the day after tomorrow you’re coding in Python. And this isn’t “finding yourself”—it’s just the thrill of being alive and no longer having to squeeze yourself into a single narrow mold of “success.”
Emigration isn't about searching for better wine or clean asphalt. It's about the chance to go through a shredder and see which parts of your "self" can't be destroyed.
I lost my old circle of friends, my status as the “cool guy,” and my rose-colored glasses. But in return, I found the right to be honest without holding back. If becoming truly free meant traveling thousands of kilometers away and becoming a “nobody” to everyone, then that was the best deal of my life.
And by the way, if you haven’t broken up with your boyfriend by then, that’s the best sign that he loves you not for anything in particular, but simply for who you are. Because when all that’s left of you is “a stack of documents and a cat on your shoulders,” the only person who can see you as a person is someone who truly sees your essence—not your social facade.
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