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Digesting my month.
I can't remember what prompted the thought, but sometime this week I was sitting at my desk, musing. It's a round, vintage dining room table made of teak. The wood is slowly becoming more familiar to me. My "studio" is in a corner of the furniture warehouse, teak chairs stacked on teak sideboards that stand on teak desks tower around me. The warm, red wood is a delight to drown in. As I sat, lost in thought, the massive windows beside my table illuminated the room in a cold, foggy white. It was raining outside.
I am a photographer, the thought appeared. When people ask me what my job is, I can tell them I'm a photographer… The work I produce isn't groundbreaking. In fact, I'm not convinced I'm using my two lights in conjunction with one another particularly well, but it is true. I am a bona fide professional photographer. As a kid, I never dreamt of being a photographer in particular, but I certainly dreamt of a job like this, I think. Creative and colorful and varied and interesting. I wear black jeans to work, because I'm a photographer. I work with SD cards and lights and vintage furniture all day. There's grunt work: this week I waged war against an Excel spreadsheet in order to wrangle all of our customer contact data into the correct cells, but I finally have an answer that I like when people ask me what I do for work. I imagined myself sitting at a dinner table with friends of my girlfriend's parents. They'd ask what I did for work, and I'd answer them in (mostly) perfect German. No umming and ahing. No explaining my trajectory or plans. No justification needed. I'm a photographer, plain and simple.
Sometime last week I got a message from my au pair family, letting me know that some letters had arrived for me since I'd moved out. I went to fetch them on Wednesday evening and ended up staying for dinner. It is an eternity since I have stepped through their front door. Nothing has changed. I served the kids their rice and veggies at dinner. I served their dad, too. We chatted. Our conversations were consistently interrupted by eager children that love their father and love commanding his attention. I told him all of my news. He told me all of his. Told me how the kids were. One dropped a sport to pick up music classes. The other is really enjoying kung-fu. I put my knife and fork on my plate, said, "thank you very much for the dinner, it was lovely," picked up my letters and left. The building I lived in for sixteen months. The building I lived in last month. The home I was a part of. The elevator door snapped shut behind me.
That morning, my boss had told me that my health insurance registration had been finalized. I'd be on the public healthcare scheme along with eighty percent of the German populace. He also told me that all of the other admin stuff had been finalized, too. I now had a public retirement fund and identification number. Wednesday afternoon I got my first paycheck. Sure enough, the fees for my retirement fund and health insurance had been deducted, I paid tax. I paid tax.
All at once I realized where I was. There, in my makeshift studio in the furniture warehouse, lit by the Berlin sky, sitting at an old, yet-to-be refurbished dining room table, it hit me like a teak sideboard. The fight I had fought, tooth and nail, for the last five months—for the last two years, perhaps—was finished. Sweating and exhausted, I stood in the octagon, the referee holding my hand in the air. After leaving university and going on an adventure in America, hoping to flee from Cape Town to Los Angeles, only to end up wiping snotty noses and packing dishwashers in Berlin: all I had dreamt of and prayed for had materialized. I was (am) a working man, making a wage and paying my own way. I had health insurance, I was finally just like every other German citizen. Not to mention a proper adult, with a job in my field, and one that interested me and that I was good at, no less.
It is just hitting me how astonishing a journey it's been, and how immeasurably grateful I should be. I've even applied to change my residence permit to extend my stay and entitle me to even more rights and working hours. What a month!
And all of that in the shortest month of the year no less. Truly a miracle. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.
Enjoy basking in this mountain top moment Jeremy, you’ve done so well and God is so faithful!
Jeremy, I have been following your journey through all the hardships and victories and rejoice with you for where you are right now. Our immigration story has also been a challenging one. In all of that God really comes through and in the process builds our character. I guess if life was easygoing at all times we wouldn’t enioy the victories as much or trust as much.