Riggers · Kreuzberg, Berlin
Nobody here asks who taught me and it took a year to relax
Pinned as nobody_cares_who_taught
- Wants
- a partner who judges me on how I behave rather than on my references
- Rope so far
- Sixteen years, twelve of them somewhere considerably more hierarchical.
- Around
- Kreuzberg, Berlin
Where I did this before, the first question about anybody was who they had learned from, and the answer decided how you were treated for years afterwards. I arrived here and asked it once, out of habit, and got a genuinely puzzled look. It took me about a year to stop expecting the question and about two to stop missing it.
I miss it because a hierarchy is comfortable when you are near the top of one. What replaced it is better and harder: people here decide about you on the basis of how you behave in front of them, over months, and no reputation from anywhere else counts for anything.
Thirty nine, Kreuzberg, sixteen years in and four here. What that means for anybody reading this is that I have no credentials to offer you and no names to drop, and I have come round to thinking that is the correct arrangement.
What I want is a partnership rather than practice. One person, a couple of evenings a week, built slowly enough that you can watch me be consistent for a while before deciding anything.
Not looking for anybody who wants to know my lineage. Not looking for somebody who needs to be reassured by a third party. And not looking for a partner who wants me to be senior to them in any sense, which is a dynamic I left behind on purpose.