What do you do? became that year’s version of hello. People asked it everywhere, three times a day.
It was the year I stopped having an answer. And the year I began drifting— through thoughts, cities and films and books. I was working out how to navigate the playing field of my late twenties. It wasn’t a crisis exactly, more like a slow dissolving of things I used to recognize as mine. That’s when I started wandering. First mentally, then physically. I walked a lot. I read more than usual. I watched films that left me with questions. And somewhere in that haze, I picked up A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. I didn’t know then how much I’d been waiting for someone to say: it’s okay not to have it together. It’s okay to drift.
Solnit writes, “It’s not about being lost, but about trying to lose yourself. And in a place called lost, strange things are found.” In the book, Solnit recounts a moment in her own wandering when she discovers a passage about a phenomenon among the Pit River Indians, when life becomes unbearable, a man begins to wander. Aimlessly. He doesn’t stay anywhere long. He walks until he becomes a shaman. The idea that wandering could be more than avoidance. That it could be a form of transformation. That maybe what looks like disorientation is actually a different kind of orientation toward something you can’t name yet.
This idea of losing oneself in a city reminds me of two films. The first is The Wandering Soap Opera by Raúl Ruiz— a satirical, absurd, chaotic, and episodic film. And yet, there’s a deep logic to its absurdism and wandering, one that mirrors the experience of a society in transition. It expresses a collective uncertainty in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s fall, as well as Ruiz’s own disorientation upon returning to a homeland that no longer feels like home. In The Wandering Soap Opera, reality has fragmented into a series of telenovelas, and characters wander in and out of each other’s worlds, all searching for La Concepción Street—as if they’re chasing a place that might not even exist, yet longing for it anyway.
Another film came to mind—Nie wieder schlafen (Never Sleep Again) by Pia Frankenberg. It’s a road movie but not in the masculine sense of a man conquering a landscape, more like dissolving into it. The film begins as the three women, old friends, reunite for a wedding on a boat.
And there’s a beautiful solo dance scene of Gabi Herz on the boat that I’ve obsessively rewatched. Suddenly an ex shows up, stirs old emotions, and suddenly they’re overboard literally. They swim to shore. Their car’s tires have been stolen. The hotels are all full. So they just start walking. And from that point, the film becomes an unstructured glide through a newly reunited Berlin.
And Berlin becomes their shared state of mind. Its ruins, empty lots, and reconstructed corners reflect the in-between spaces of their late twenties or early thirties—that floating phase where everything is possible, and nothing is certain. They talk, they walk, they follow a complete stranger for hours just to sit down for a coffee and ask him a question that could easily be turned on themselves: What is the most beautiful thing you could imagine for yourself right now?
Watching them drift, I saw myself again. Not as a character, but as someone trying to live without answers. Someone resisting the pressure to arrive, to produce, to explain. Never Sleep Again doesn’t ask its women to transform or overcome. It lets them be in between. Which is often where we aren’t allowed to stay for long. And maybe that’s what wandering really is : not a failure to progress, but a refusal to perform certainty.
Solnit talks about how children are better at getting lost than adults. They don’t panic. They explore. The danger isn’t in losing your way, it’s in forgetting how to respond to being lost at all. Sometimes my wandering took the form of letting my mind drift across paper, through stories, characters, lives, and narrative structures. Other times, it meant letting my thoughts become physical, embodied. I meandered for hours through streets and countryside, without destination, absorbing and observing the oddities of everyday life. The wandering has taught me to recognize that arrival isn’t always physical. and Ironically, I got most of my answers while going nowhere in particular.