About The Berlin Life 

I moved to Berlin in June 2011, having never set foot in the city, without speaking the language, completely alone, and without a job waiting for me on the other end. What I had instead was a one-way ticket and a lot that I was ready to leave behind back home in Canada. I won’t get into all of it here, because I came to Berlin at a low point, running from more than I’ll put on this page. If you want the unfiltered version, I’ve written about it elsewhere. What matters for this page is simpler than the whole story anyway, as I didn’t come here for a fun adventure, I came to rebuild a life, and I bet on a city I’d never seen to help me do it.

It half-worked. I lasted about a year and a half before I left again, moving back to Toronto at the end of 2012 and telling myself that had been that. Except it hadn’t been, because Berlin gets under your skin in the way that it does, and from an ocean away I found myself missing it far more than I expected to. So in November 2014 I came back, this time for good, and I’ve been here ever since. What that means is that I’ve done the hardest part of moving to Germany not once but twice, and that the second time I chose it on purpose, with my eyes fully open to everything it would ask of me.

The years since have taught me how this country actually works, mostly the hard way. I’ve held five different visas, worked as both a freelancer and a permanent employee, and been laid off on multiple occasions. Sage locals will tell you being laid off is its own rite of passage, since you’re not really a Berliner until you’ve been made redundant at least once. I found new jobs during the pandemic and again during the 2023 tech downturn, at exactly the moments when everyone agreed that nobody was hiring, and I’ve spent more hours than I’d like in all of the different ‘amts, working through the famous German bureaucracy, and learning the rules that nobody bothers to mention until after you’ve already broken it. None of it was glamorous, but all of it turned out to be useful.

Somewhere along the way, the notes I was keeping to survive my own moves started quietly helping other people with theirs. I’ve always been a writer, long before Berlin was ever part of the picture, with my photos appearing in a gestalten book and my words appearing in publications like Condé Nast Traveler and Atlas Obscura. So when I began figuring things out here, I did what I’ve always done and wrote it all down, the guides and the hard-won hacks and the things I wished someone had told me before I arrived. At the same time, my day jobs were teaching me the other half of what I’d need, because I spent years as a hiring manager reviewing hundreds of applications from the side of the table that most job seekers never get to see, and I became a coach helping people find work that actually fits them. It took me a while to realise that this particular combination, the writer and the coach and the person who had been hired and let go and hired again, was exactly the toolkit that someone navigating work and life in Germany could use. The blog posts became a community, the community became events, and in 2021 all of it finally came together as The Berlin Life.

What I set out to build was the thing I wish I’d had when I landed here on my own. When I arrived, most of the advice I could find was thin, out of date, or written more to make the author look good than to actually help the person reading it, and I wanted something different. I wanted to create a resource that was honest about how genuinely hard life in Germany can be, welcoming to everyone who’s trying to make it work regardless of where they’re coming from, and focused on the reader rather than on myself. Something that tells the truth, covers the things other guides quietly skip over, and never once pretends that moving to a new country is easy. That’s what The Berlin Life has become, a community of more than 10,000 internationals across the newsletter, socials, and in-person events, with over 60 free guides, a weekly newsletter, career coaching, regular meetups, and a great deal of straight talk about what it really takes to build a life here.

So if you’re reading this because you’ve only just arrived, or because you’re job-hunting in a market that feels stacked against you, or simply because you’re trying to make a difficult country start to feel like home, then you’re in the right place. I’ve been exactly where you are, twice over, and I’d love to help.

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