Preparing to Go to Berlin – The Lessons in Leaving

Ballet has offered up so many gifts to me. I look at the themes of ballets and how they have powerfully influenced my life even when (at times) I did not quite notice the powerful interconnections that they were cosmically weaving through my psyche.
I have noticed (in varying degrees) how the ballet, Giselle, holds powerful keys to doorways that have given me significant insights into myself, the conflicts in life, and into the complex psyche that is within me seeking to understand myself and others.
When I got to Berlin, there had been so much trauma and drama just to get me there that I have to say that I was barely in my body, not fully present, and struggling with so many things that were all … new.
Getting out the door from my home in Dallas was filled with many confusing moments and powerful lessons on boundaries.
My father was against this choice on all levels and yet he knew that he could not stop me. But he would put boundaries and limits on his perceived “delusional” and childish behavior that he believed I was doing.
I am sure that he expected me to come to my senses at some point.
Though he never said it, I believe he wanted me to become an engineer like him. I was good in the math’s and sciences and I had a fabulous mind that often gracefully moved through school with minimal effort.
I am grateful to my quick mind because with the constant demands of dance and the long hours it required, I really did not have time to study in regular school. I learned early on that the teachers were constantly telling us in lecture, what they wanted us to remember and that was going to be on the tests. So if I just paid attention and took good notes in class, then the tests were a breeze for me.
My father required me to do all the college prep classes to be prepared. Including vocational office education, shorthand, and typing. Tools I never thought in a million years I would ever need!
And here I am now, having run my own business, done my own advertising, and writing my many articles and books. So I am very grateful to him for giving me essential foundation tools to be successful in something other than ballet.
But to me, regular schoolwork seemed mindless and repetitive. It held no passion or creative expression for me … most of the time.
Ballet had everything that school did not, and it offered so much more for me.
Preparing to go to Berlin was a whirlwind of things that needed to be done. I needed a passport. I needed a plane ticket, I needed a place to live in Berlin and I needed to have a glimpse into what life was like in Germany.
At my mother’s work, there was a German born woman who had become an American citizen when she married her husband. She invited my mother and I over to have a traditional German Kafe so I could be introduced to the traditions of her country.
That was a huge insight and much more of a surprise than it seems.
We go over to her house and the living room is a feast of tasty treats and coffee.
Honestly it was overwhelming!
I was a middle class raised girl with no experience with fancy china, strange, shaped sugar spoons, and a veritable feast of food in front of me. I thought she must be expecting a large group, but this was all for me or … us!

She taught me some German manners, how to respond and how to ask a few basic questions in German.
I quickly realized that life was going to radically change and culturally I was in for a very different reality than Dallas Texas.
My mother bought me a very warm, double-lined coat that would withstand the harsh Berlin winters. I did not realize how cold it was going to be until that first winter in Berlin. And I was so very grateful for this coat on many occasions.
In fact, I still have this coat. It is something that holds now many memories and I appreciate how well-made it is that I can still use it.
My father gave me a gold American Express card on the condition that I only use it for an emergency. He said that if he called me and told me to leave Berlin immediately, I was to leave everything I owned and just take my purse, passport, and wallet with this card and buy the first ticket out of Berlin.
It seemed like such an odd request.
But he was very serious about it and demanded that I promise to do exactly that if he asked without question. The look on his face was so intense that it was confusing and a bit scary to me.
I (of course) agreed!
I did not know that he had a laser guided, nuclear missile pointed at East Berlin for NATO.
My choice was putting me in the middle of a very dangerous cold war game that he was an intimate part of. I was naïve and completely unaware of what I had gotten myself into.
After many phone calls to the secretary to Gert Reinholm, (the director of the Berlin Ballet), we learned that getting apartments in Berlin was going to be difficult and that I would be arriving during Octoberfest which began in Berlin in September.
But the secretary said that she would meet me at the airport and that she would take me to the Tourist Bureau in the city and they would help me find a space to rent.
What I did not realize was that during that time the Pensions were full and the hotels were also full.
It is probably good that I did not know what I was in for or I might not have gone at all.
Ignorance is bliss when one is young and innocent.
I was the baby leaving the nest and my mother was cracking under me leaving. I knew that I was her emotional support person. I knew that my mother was fragile in so many psychological ways. I knew my leaving was going to be difficult for her.
I did not care. I needed to be free! I needed to be out from under the constant emotional obligation that I felt to her mental, emotional, and psychological well-being. I understood that I got to have a life also. And going far away to Berlin finally offered a solution to my core problem that I did not realize at first.
My mother’s emotional and mental problems made me believe (at that age) that my only value was in what I could give to others!
This was a terrible burden to carry and a belief that would take me many years of inner work, meditation, yoga, and retreats to break free of.
But leaving Dallas and claiming my own life was the first big step away from this pattern of co-dependency and towards discovering who I could become if I was separate from her.
It all came to a head when I was getting ready to fly to Berlin. I was already quite nervous. I was actually terrified, but I knew that showing that emotion would only fuel my father saying, to not go, and my mother collapsing further into needing me.
I remember my father handing me my roundtrip plane ticket and saying, “Here is your roundtrip plane ticket, so when you come to your senses you will have a way to get back home. Just know that then you will be going to college. No one dances for their whole life. You have to think about your future. There is no future with this choice, but it is yours to make. I am also giving you a thousand dollars to get started but know that if you stay in Berlin, that is going to be the last money you will ever see from me! Are we clear?”
I nodded, and I knew that he meant that. I would never ask for money from him for the next decade. After all, I am a Leo, and I had my pride.
There would be many moments that I would have only sixteen cents in my bank account, but I had all the bills paid and I would be eating cheese and crackers for dinner and oatmeal for breakfast for months. But I told myself that I would be independent.
My mother takes me to the airport (my father refused to go). The entire time she is crying hysterically. We get to the airport, and we have arranged that the flight from New York (JFK) to London and then London to Berlin were the same flight number. I assumed that this meant that I did not have to change planes. We thought that would be simpler.
My mother is sobbing uncontrollably, and I am beyond embarrassed. She even convinced the woman at the gate to let her on the plane to say goodbye to me.
(Remember, this was 1978 and the rules were not as strict as they are now).
I get on the plane. I am seated. My mother is sobbing over me, people are trying to get on the plane and my mother is in the way. It was mortifying to a barely 18 year old girl.
I can still see the moment when the stewardess tells my mother that they are going to close the doors to the plane, and she now has to leave. Sobbing she grabs me like she is never going to let go and is escorted off the plane.
I will never forget the relief when they closed that door to the plane, and we began backing up from the gate.
In my head I am thinking, “Free at last! Free at last!! Thank God! I am finally free at last!!”
I sat there during the taxi and take off realizing that I am going to a place where no one knows me. That means that I can be anyone I want. I don’t have to be what my mother or father wanted! I could be anyone! In fact, I could finally discover and be myself!
That thought was so freeing. I was going to a place where there were no expectations on me. Other than being a ballet dancer.
I was going to find out who I really was.

Sometimes we discover who we are by being challenged. Sometimes we discover who we are by finally feeling as if we belong. Sometimes we discover who we are through the characters that we are asked to portray on a stage. Sometimes we discover who we are by situations that force us to stand up for others even when they do not want or expect us to stand up for them. Sometimes we discover who we are by being in places that are so vastly different that we have to let go of a lot of false beliefs in the face of shocking truths that are revealed and that our upbringing protected us from.

I was going to a place that two world wars had devastated and destroyed. I was going to a place at the center of the Cold War conflicts between Russia and the United States. I was going to a place that was to attract many from the Eastern Block to attempt to move into the West. Berlin was the first free place even as it was surrounded by a wall, with guns, guards, barbed wire, and booby traps.
I really had no clue what I was about to experience. And that was probably a very good thing. If I had known what lay ahead, I am sure I would not have gone.
And yet, this was my path. This was my destiny. Something was calling me. I did not know what it was, but I could not ignore all the synchronicity and magic that had brought me to that point.
I am grateful that the universe had a plan and that it did not let me in on all the information that I was about to experience.
There are many things that must be taught in specific ways to shape and mold us into what is necessary for our growth.
The next year would be one of the hardest I had ever experienced. A year in which everything was new and completely different. A year where I would have to face how very naïve, I was and how much I really needed to grow up. A year where the blinders of my childhood would be ripped off and I would have to find pathways through a very dark and dreary maze of existence.
This would be a year were my childhood dream would now became a real job. Idealism was replaced by real life pressures and stresses. Performing on a constant basis would be a test to my internal metal and persistence. And finding how to take my Texas girl and figure out how to fit her into a very serious, seniority system German Opera House was going to test me, break me again and again, but it would show me how strong I really was in the face of enormous challenges.
In learning a lot about the world, I would (in turn) learn a lot about myself.
In ballet up to that point, I felt I had more successes than failures. My ballet teachers in Dallas would cater to the experiences and talents of their dancers to showcase them. In Berlin, there would be no such leeway. I was to fit into their choreographic choices and styles. Dancing was not about organic free flowing movement. It was about finding out how to make my body do what they wanted it to do and to look in a particular stylized way.
In Berlin, dance did not conform to me. I would have to conform to it. That was going to be a huge awakening. One that would give me more than it took. But the fight with my own ego would be a hard wall to be thrown up against over and over again.
Until I finally let go and discovered that adapting is the beginning point of real mastery.
~Suzanne Wagner~