The Crane Wife
CJ Hauser
"The Crane Wife" is an essay wherein the author switches back and forth between an expedition in the Texan gulf coast to study cranes, 10 days after calling off their wedding, and explanations diving into why they called off the wedding and what went wrong with their relationship to begin with.
The first time I read this essay was in March of 2023. At that time, I had been with my then-boyfriend for approximately half a year, and everything was still going well. My only previous relationship thus far had been extremely one-sided. From the ages of 16 to 19, I had been with a boy my age who highly introverted and generally kept to himself. There wasn't much affection in the relationship. His explanation, usually, was that he was too busy and that he plainly didn't have time. At one point, I decided to not text or call him anymore, and it took hime 3 whole weeks to notice. Even then, I stayed for 2 more months, because - just like CJ in their essay - I felt like I had no right to have needs.
Thus, when I first read the essay, I felt like the experience that CJ was describing was one I had already gone through once. In March 2023, things were going great with my then-boyfriend. He was a very affectionate person, and he frequently made time for me. He had introduced my to his friends and family, and I remember telling my friends that finally things were falling into place, that I was genuinely happy, that there was nothing else I could possibly wish for.
It is now January 2026. I broke up with this man in September. Just like in my previous relationship, I had been begging him for more than a year to give me what is essentially the bare minimum. In May 2024, I had noticed that he had been treating me differently for a few months, making less and less time for me, and acting kind of stand-off-ish. Thus, I asked him (or, more accurately, started a fight on this) - where is this relationship going? Do you still want this? And, more generally, do you wish to have a future with me?
He couldn't give me an answer to my questions. Before then, it hadn't crossed my mind that one could enter a relationship, at an adult age, without looking to build a future together. He told me that he needed time to think about this, and that he'd answer when he was ready to.
And so I waited.
At that time I was still working on my Bachelor's thesis. In August I still hadn't gotten my answer, and thus I started looking for opportunities to either start working or keep studying - outside of our state. When I mentioned this to him, he genuinely lost his shit. He cried, sobbed, saying "This can't be it, this cannot be the end of our relationship". Yet, at the same time, he could not bring himself to just say the word "I want a future with you". He decided to call a friend the next day, and the result was that, when we met up a few days later, he told me that he did love me, but that as long as he was still studying, it was difficult for him to imagine what his post-studies future would look like, and thus couldn't answer my questions. If that sounds like a load of bullshit, that's because it is.
I decided to move to Cologne, into my own apartment, and look for work there. Between September 2024 and January 2025, he had switched back-and-forth on his decision to move in with me approximately a gazillion times. Even when I told him that I did not want him to move in with me anymore, he was still contemplating this option and giving himself unnecessary anxiety over it.
During 2025, the topic of a future together still came up a lot. I was crying myself to sleep over this multiple times a week, and yet tried to pretend like everything was fine, like I just had to wait a single more year until he had finished his studies. Yet, at the same time, he kept blowing his studies, and needing to take more and more time. However, all of this omits the single most important issue in all of this:
I allowed him to treat me this way.
I felt embarrassed to demand more than these crumbs. I felt like it was not my right to ask for his attention, his love, and his commitment. I moved to a new city and chose a career without seriously considering my other options because I got caught in thinking, this is the best I'll ever have. I allowed myself to emotionally depend on an avoidant man-child. I am embarrassed of myself.
I was going through my bookmarks after having set up my new PC. Feeling a bit desperate, searched the hashtag 'love', and stumbled upon The Crane Wife. I didn't remember its content or meaning, but my gut told me that it had, at one point, been a very interesting and eye-opening read. And so I gave it another try.
It's weird and ironic how, when I first read it in March 2023, I kinda felt like I was better and smarter than the author. I was 21 years old then, I had gone through one very shitty relationship, and was convinced that I definitely would not repreat my own mistakes. However, maybe that's where my initial interpretation of the issue fell flat: I assumed that it was a warning. That the author was publically performing this self-flagellation to show every woman: "Don't repeat my mistakes!" I did not fully grasp why the parts about studying cranes were included. My assumption was simply that it was a way to show "Don't worry, you still have a life, even after you've blown your life up!" Now, at 24, I don't think that was the author's intention at all. It is a highly personal story, and while you can draw some teachings from it, that is likely not its aim. It is the author's very intimate way of making sense of the called-off wedding and how it got to that point. There is a very brief expedition into how gender plays into this, but I do not see it as the essay's central piece.
5/5, The Crane Wife is very beautifully written, and defintely worth a read. It is interesting how my perception of the essay has changed over the years. I hope CJ Hauser is doing fine.
02.01.2026, Cologne
Im Westen Nichts Neues
Erich Maria Remarque
"Im Westen Nichts Neues" ist in der heutigen Zeit mit neuen Kriegen und der jüngst eingeführten Wehrpflicht ein Must-Read. Der Protagonist des Buchs ist ein junger, wirklich sehr junger deutscher Mann, der im Anschluss an die Schulbildung mit seinen Klassenkameraden ins Militär eingezogen wird. Die Grausamkeit des Krieges allgemein wird in all ihren Facetten verdeutlicht, insbesondere die Tatsache, dass es junge Menschen sind, die in den Krieg eingezogen werden.
Wer bereits eine Weile gelebt hat, der hat auch Wurzeln geschlagen, und der geht sehr viel weniger Risiken ein. Wer einen Beruf, einen Lebenspartner, eine Familie hat, der hat etwas, zu dem er auch zurückkehren möchte. Hinzu kommt, dass Ältere einen differenzierteren Blick auf die Welt haben, und entsprechend weniger bereit sind, für die Interessen einiger Wenigen zu töten. Die Grausamkeit entfaltet sich jedoch vor allem dann, wenn die Soldaten schließlich aus dem Krieg zurückkehren. Immer wieder betont das Buch, dass der Protagonist Paul und seine Kameraden in ihrem gesamten Erwachsenen-Leben nur Krieg erfahren haben. Sie haben nichts, zu dem sie zurückkehren können. Als Generation sind sie kollektiv für ihr gesamtes Leben dazu verdammt, die Traumata des Kriegs mit sich zu tragen und immer wieder zu durchleben.
Ein Drittel aller getöten deutschen Soldaten sind in den letzten 6 Monaten des Kriegs gestorben. Im Buch wird dies auch veranschaulicht: die Charaktere, mit denen man sich im Laufe des Buches angefreundet hat, sterben am Ende Einer nach dem Anderen wie Fliegen. Bis zum Schluss hatte ich einen gewissen Optimismus in mir, dass es doch noch gut ausgehen würde - entsprechend hart war die Enttäuschung. Als ich die letzte Seite zuende gelesen hatte, in der ein Kommandant den titelgebenden Bericht gibt: "Im Westen nichts Neues.", habe ich mich unaussprechlich leer gefühlt. Da es sich um ein Anti-Kriegs-Buch handelt, welches warnen soll vor den Gräueln des Krieges, ist das wahrscheinlich jedoch auch genau die Reaktion, die das Buch hinterlassen will.
5/5, es hat nachhaltig meine Weltsicht verändert. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich es jemals erneut lesen werde, da es wirklich deprimierend ist.
01.01.2026, Cologne
I Saw The TV Glow (2024)
directed by Jane Schoenbrun
I watched this movie back in January of this year, but never got around to reviewing it. For a while, I needed to simply sit with it and let myself marinate in its blue and pink hues.
The indie movie theatre I used to visit with my ex-boyfriend (and which happens to be his favorite) was showing a screening almost 2 years after the film's initial release. I had ended 2025 with the terrifying realization that I was lonely. This feeling wasn't new to me - I was a severly depressed teenager, one of the awkward kids, with a bad home life. But, at 24, this felt ridiculous. I'm an adult, I should have this shit figured out by now. I realized that I had been relying on my ex-boyfriend and his friend group for socialities. After the break-up, all of this fell away, and while I met in 1-on-1 scenarios with friends, I was severely lacking in what one might call a friend group. Thus, my new years resolution became exactly that: every month of 2026, I wanted to organize some sort of group activity, and softly force my friends who didn't yet know each other to spend time together (using the power of FOMO). And, for January, I decided to introduce my friends to the nobiko (a hidden gem in Cologne's culinary scene, a lefty vegan udon restaurant on the Schäl Sick), and go see "I Saw The TV Glow" afterwards.
It was my first time trying something like this and I was supremely nervous. What if we sit in awkward silence the whole time? What if they all hate each other? And worst of all, what if they dislike the movie? In the end it turned out, my worries were over nothing. I had severly underestimated the social skills of my little clique, and even if the movie was not everyone's cup of tea, no one found it terrible.
Since this is my personal website where I do whatever I want, I will actually start with the negatives. To be fair, only one comes to mind - the pacing. I love looking for symbolism clues, and picking apart every oh so tiny detail, and even I had difficulties keeping my attention up in the first 2/3 of the movie.
The last third of the movie, however, cracked me open like I was some kind of sad little sea animal, sucked out out of my shell and then spat my insides back out. I don't think I will ever get the screaming scene at the birthday party out of my head. I have asthma, and I am all too familiar with the physical state Isabel was in. The crouched position, the coughs, the weakened voice, the general fatigue - I could go on like this forever. It is an awful feeling, as if you've already died and are just dragging your old corpse around. The direction of the scene, right before Isabel's panic attack, is also astonishingly close to how it feels in real life. One moment, everything is (sorta) fine, then you suddenly start noticing every little stimulus, amplified to the extreme. It feels as though you are hearing everything at once, like you cannot distinguish the different sounds from each other. They blend into a cacophony of pain, and suddenly, voices sound more like the noise sounds more like a construction site than human beings. I don't think I've ever felt so uncomfortable in my life (apart from when seeing body horror, but I dislike that). The birthday party scene will likely remain as one of my favorite scenes for the rest of my life.
To fully unpack the film I will likely have to rewatch it at a later point in my life. The overall message was very clear to me. There is still time. It is never too late to transition, and to live as yourself. You have to face what you have been hiding from, or it will eat you from the inside out. Obviously, the movie meant it in a trans way, and I do not want to derail from this messaging in any way. It is first and foremost trans art, made by trans people for trans people. Looking back now, after watching the movie I did start to grapple more with my own gender identity, and, by extension, I started telling a few people who I feel safe with about how I feel more like a non-binary person than a woman.
But also, you can view this messaging in an even bigger light - you have to be real with yourself, to admit the truth to yourself, and to fully accept yourself as you are, or the cognitive dissonance will kill you. For the first 20 years of my life, I was completely disassociated from my own actions. Whenever Maddy and Isabel would talk about how it felt like time is flying by, it would remind me of this feeling. My goal was simply to survive until I was old enough and, crucially, financially stable enough to move out. Only then, when I got my own apartement, I fully started to think and choose for myself, and I got out of the slumber of my teens. Compared to my peers, I have years of catching up to do with regards to experimenting with my life and my identity. There is still time for that, and there will always still be time for that (unless I am lying on my death bed). However, I must not lose track of this fact. If I stop paying attention, stop choosing myself, I will end up in this zombie-esque state again, and it will slowly kill me.
The reason I brought up my friends and my loneliness is that it is so tied up in the person I have wanted to become ever since I was a little kid. I was jealous of the boys in my class because I had noticed very early on that somehow, their words carried more might than mine did. The boys seemed like they naturally had more charisma, and like people simply listened to them, simply because they were boys. I was not wrong in my observation - I am proud of myself for catching these sexist factors at such a young age. However, as a kid (especially one growing up in a conservative authoritarian household), I was very limited in my further interpretation of what could be change about this reality I had been born into and what couldn't. I was convinced I simply had to deal with these feelings of inadequacy, that I would simply never be the kind of person that people simply listen to.
I do not need to become a man to become charismatic. There will always be some dipshits who do not take my serious for this reason, but there will me even more dipshits willing to defend me. If transition works for you, reader - Cheers to you! As for me, I have personally realized that I can and will become the charismatic class clown which everyone listens to, simply because he is, well, the class clown. There are a select few who know about my "technically non-binary" identity, but do not further press me on it.
I am becoming more and more of myself, and I like who I am becoming.