Why the lack of "success" doesn't make you a failure

As an artist it is easy to feel like a failure. You look around and it seems like everyone else is doing so much better than you are. They're the same age as you; sometimes even younger, but while you still seem to play in the amateur league, they're riding that high wave you still have no idea how to even reach. And the time is ticking, ticking away and with every tick your life is just passing by - and you just sit in the front row and watch the show!

Stop chasing the "What If's" - you are worth more than an "Almost"!

Heartbreak always hurts. When you lose who you thought would be your partner through thick and thin, you don't only lose a past filled with diamonds of memories - you also lose a future that had slowly formed in your mind - those glimpses into a tomorrow where you see that ring on your finger or walk down that aisle - quiet sunday mornings when the kids are still asleep and you stand in the kitchen looking out of the window with the cafe mug your 5 year old made for you for mothers day in hand --- it is the vision of a life you have grown to love as much as the person falling asleep next to you and losing that doesn't just question your past, it also takes away a tomorrow you were relying on.

But sometimes they slip away before those visions were able to turn into diamonds for your treasure chest with their name on it. It is the "almost love" that haunts you the most because a "what if" is the sharpest weapon in the toolbox.

How traveling far away can mean coming home to yourself

“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher

If you want to know who you are, you sometimes have to leave the comfort zone of your home behind and go look for new colors in the streets of a new city. And no, it doesn't always have to be expensive, and no, you don't have to travel across the world, sometimes just waking up to a different sky, tasting a different life and breathing in different air is enough.

...and then; be humbled! When you walk through Mozart's Vienna, or Kafka's Prague. It doesn't mean your weak, it means you're taking a walk in someone else's shoes! Just for a moment, take yourself back and breathe, live and be. It doesn't mean that you are denying your own personality to blossom. It doesn't mean that you are disowning your own path. It means that you are opening your soul to experiences that might not just be about you but about what others can share with you that might just teach you something about your own life.

Of cruel teenagers and how Tokio Hotel shut up the bullies

If you could see the 12 year old version of me right now, whether you know me or are only acquainted with my face because of pictures, you would probably not recognize me. Picture a slightly overweight, shy wallflower; with not the best sense of fashion - ok, no sense of fashion whatsoever - a girl who's used to keep her face to the ground and is an absolute pro in being invisible. In my defense, I had to be! Ever since kindergarten I had been a target for the bullies, my wide open heart being a pretty welcoming canvas for those color bombs they threw my way, painting words like "ugly pig", "fat elephant", "loser" and many more artworks of hate on my soul  - so I learned how to shut up, stay low and make it through the battlefields that the hallways of my school had turned into.

And then Tokio Hotel happened, and everything changed...

Of new starts I never planned on making and coming back to a home I thought I had lost

There are times in life when control is taken out of our hands and things change in a way we never expected them to. I started this year in Chicago, certain I would spend at least another half a year there, happy where I was and pretty satisfied with how things were. Sure, I really missed performing which I hadn't done since I had left NYC last summer, but I continued working on my voice from home and I had my philosophy and literature studies that asked quite a lot of me - plus, I got to spend some more time in this country I had pretty much adopted as my own at this point, travel (what I couldn't do as long as I was still a musical theatre student in the big apple) - and simply live the "American life".