Hello friends,
Here’s my first dispatch from the road - or rather, the bike path, as there are so many of them in Germany that I’ve barely seen a car for days.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” said Stefan, one of my Heidelberg hosts, over dinner the other night.
I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but I wasn’t surprised to hear this phrase. It’s something people often say to me, including people I’ve only just met, or who only know me from my books and Instagram posts. And this is clearly one of my blind spots, because usually when I hear it, I’m surprised.
Am I really that hard on myself? I’m much more worried that I’m full of myself. (Part of my job, after all, is to document my life on social media, so it’s very easy to end up accusing myself of being narcissistic, egotistical, self-obsessed, and all the other criticisms levelled at influencers.) But as I rode along the river Neckar this morning, heading out of glorious Heidelberg towards the still-distant Czech border, I started to accept that all these people might have a point.
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