Berlin, S1 to Oranienburg. I’m looking at the German family, an older couple and their daughter in her 30s sitting opposite me.

They are talking about their daughter’s studies, psychology of marketing, and their friend’s vacation on the Baltic Sea.

It is all looking the same.

Except, I look at them and ask myself: will you vote for the AfD, the party that wants me, as a foreigner, out of the country?

Or are you one of the good ones?

I then open my Telegram. Full of chats with my dearest friends, written in German, supporting me through my recent breakup and offering help.

I remember that I only have a German passport. That I’ve been here for 16 years. And that I’ve experienced all kinds of meanness and discrimination, from the openly hostile to the less obvious ones, like when I’m called a “good integrated foreigner”, unlike the others.

And I chose to stay in Berlin because of all the wonderful people, opportunities and weirdness this place has to offer.

So I sit there, eavesdropping, thinking: how the hell did 43,8 % of voters in Sachsen Anhalt decide that the AfD is the party for them?

I then go to my bakery and joke around with the baker lady. She likes me and knows I’m here to pick up the bread with Too Good To Go.

I talk on the phone with the Finanzamt guy, whose name is Latin, but he speaks native German. And he helps me fix my mistakes, and he is kind.

And I wonder: do they want me out? They just can’t say so because discrimination, if reported, would cost them their job?

And then I go back to reality.

Which is the streets of Prenzlberg full of English speaking people from all over the world.

My German friends who are appalled by the elections in Sachsen Anhalt.

My own life, the one of a foreigner here, that I’ve decided to build here.

And I will not let any dickhead whose heart is filled with something different than love make me think less of my home and feel paranoid.

Not today, Satan. Not today.

Since July I am officially off the unemployment benefits, paying my own health insurance (yikes) and making my own revenue (double yikes). 

The last two months I’ve been networking in real life and building my Laid Off & Fabulous community like crazy, this is why this newsletter is about the visibility skill. 

The one I spent the last year smashing my head against. The cringe, the self-doubt, the oversharing, the trauma-dumping on LinkedIn – all my challenges that I consider overcome.

After I’ve been laid off, I didn’t know what to communicate to the world.

“I was great at my job but kinda also didn’t enjoyed it and it showed so I got canned?” didn’t seem like the right content strategy. I was unemployed, I wanted to build my own revenue, and I had no idea how. The only thing I knew – no more jobs. So I tried everything, from hunting for the right co-founder and build a startup to trying to force connections that cannot be forced.

The truth is… Connection and progress happen over time, and it happens organically, somewhere in the middle between your ultra-polished version (nobody is actually like that) and your “I’m a traumatised child and no one likes me” version. It took me a while to land in that middle..

And i’m far from having it figured out or having consistent income. But I see it more clearly now: Building s product or a service is not so hard. Building an audience is harder. 

It asks for the exact stuff we avoid – being vulnerable, sharing, and hearing feedback. And my community, the people I’ve reached and learned with and from, are the reason I might actually pull off this whole “founder” thing.

When I talk about the visibility skill, in my world it means two things:

Talk to people you know – a much bigger project than messaging the five work friends from your last job.

Talk to people you don’t know – which goes way beyond a cringey “I’m open to work” announcement every three years.

So, I’ll do some more of that visibility before my break. 

But yeah, I know, when I say we should do it authentically, the cringe the the fear of not being liked is so strong that we’d rather send CVs into the void… Well, here’s my response: 

I am always very loud about the importance of mental health. About how, when you are burned out, it is the real deal and should be taken seriously. I always support people when they share about this.

And now, when I am self-employed, I noticed a terrible thing.

When I see someone showing signs of burnout, I don’t just think about how they are doing. I start assessing whether they are still someone I can work with. Whether they have the capacity to follow through. Whether I can rely on them. Whether this partnership makes sense for me.

And, subconsciously, I thought: “They don’t have what it takes. This partnership is dead.”

And I was disgusted with myself.

Because in theory, I am all goody-goody about mental health. But in reality, when it’s about my time and money invested in a partnership where I am not financially backed? No thank you.

And I sat with it.

Because there is a legitimate question underneath this: I am self-employed. I have to protect my time, my money and my energy. I cannot build a business around partnerships where the other person simply cannot deliver.

But at what point does a healthy business boundary turn into the exact kind of judgement I would normally call out?

And I realised that I was holding up a mirror.

I pushed through burnout and a serious depression in my twenties and took tons of sick leave while employed. Never for a burnout or mental health reason, always some lame excuse.

Retrospectively, I should have sought help. But it wasn’t part of my culture and I didn’t have any self-compassion towards myself.

Things started shifting when I quit drinking and started building a more or less loving relationship with myself. Which is still very much a work in progress, don’t get me started.

And now, when I see myself being a hypocrite around this, I realise how brutal I am to myself. I hold myself to such high standards that my nervous system switches into survival mode more often than I’d wish.

So this “They don’t have what it takes because they are already burned out” is just a painful mirror.

Of me pushing myself. Of me thinking that I should deliver 50% more to even dare. Of me having learned, somewhere along the way, that struggling is evidence that you are not doing enough.

And now, being self-employed, that belief shows up in a different and very painful light.

Am I judging others because they are not operating at the completely unreasonable level of capacity I have come to expect from myself? 

So why am I sharing this?

Sometimes the uncomfortable thing we see in other people is holding up a mirror to something we have normalised in ourselves.

Because sometimes we say things to look good, but the old system is screaming louder. 

And I’m happy to say that…. I am lucky to be building on a sober and happy basis. Now it is time to stop pushing and start being more attentive and loving towards my own body.

And dang, I still have some work to do.

That question stuck with me. I wish I took it more seriously when I was being laid off. I still don’t have an answer for myself, and I hope that it is what I’m doing, but deep down I know that… well, that I don’t know what I don’t know.

And it got me thinking about the F word – the old and good failure. While failure (fyi, layoff is considered as failure in most cases) is not being celebrated, I figured that exactly those times create a chance to rethink, change and go in depth, My failed startup (and 6 months well wasted) – best teacher I’ve had about entrepreneurship, myself and what’s important. And also, how not to lose your mind while building your own revenue.

Dropping the limitations of failure makes this question a great exercise to explore what it is we find exciting to do with ourselves.

I found when I drop the possibility to fail, I thrive again.

In a way, It also forces us to notice how often, even when we have the agency to change our lives for the better, we still choose the familiar patterns that leave us out of control and unhappy. 

 Self-employed people agreeing to work with clients from hell. Falling back into employee habits by giving clients too much control over income and security (like yours truly). Laid off people wanting more agency yet searching for another job. Or people running their own business becoming overworked employees of the thing they created and hardly enjoying the perks (partly yours truly, again).

Because old patterns worked, we know them. New ones might be way better, but they might be more of a failure than the ones before so that’s why bad habits die hard.

When I look at my own days, the same tension shows up in a more personal way. My head started reaching for business value – of each interaction, each investment, every piece of content, every intro, every hour of paid work. My more creative, non-business-oriented self has a different intuition: pure fun, connection, reading, sharing, creating, exploring, and simply being me without calculating what those fifteen minutes cost.

I’m learning that the constant value filter is useful… and also it suffocates my creativity. I am not what I deliver. We as people are flawed, sometimes highly organised yet chaotic and creative beings who also deserve to call some of our time well wasted.

The sweet spot – still rolling in creative flow while delivering enough business value is where most of us are hoping to find happiness, trying to answer that original question about what’s worth doing if we knew we wouldn’t fail. For now I’ve chosen to deprioritise the pure business optimisation side, because what I’m doing is working. Why break it.

The caution and the “let’s give it one more quarter”  and too many hiring rounds because no one wants to take responsibility for the wrong hire. It all clicks the second the money is yours.

Maybe there is a camp that turn employees demanding value from employees into employees that think about the value they bring and leave when they become resentful? 

Asking for a friend.

Funny thing, I consider this layoff the second most important event in my life, right after leaving Novosibirsk for Berlin in 2009.

This experience helped me build my first strong offering of my own, helping internationals negotiate higher severance and not get screwed over by the immigration and unemployment systems in Germany.

Now my community, Laid off & fabulous, is growing and changing, and so am I.

I’ve been running a business full time for half a year now, and I can feel myself moving away from the “companies bad” narrative. My focus has shifted from “the employee is always right” to something closer to “if you don’t embrace ownership over your own professional life expect no job to do that for you”. I think most of us forgot that we are the execs over our own act and let companies define it too much.

At the same time, I also see the other reality, where companies proactively create laid off talent out of awesome people. Wrong time, wrong teams. Life happens.

When I’m freelancing in UX Research half of my time to keep the cash flow and my sanity intact, I can 100% say the layoff changed me. No more gossip. No more negativity. More agency. Less time wasted. Maybe it’s easier because I’m always an external, but the shift is damn refreshing.

Seeing different realities crush some people and make other people shine is fascinating.

So yeah, a year later, I’m still processing what happened, but I wouldn’t undo it.

How magically “integration” is understood as “assimilation” in Germany beats me every time.

Having lived and built my life in Berlin as a Russian immigrant, I catch that stench crawling into conversations. It’s the superiority.

A colleague casually asking if I could recommend friends… because she needed a cleaner
When locals assume the German way is the only correct way
When immigrants with the same or better education ending up on lower salaries is treated as the default
When holding C2 German and still being ruled out for leadership roles
Treating giving up other passports to get the German one as a blessing – what could be better than a German passport, esp when you are coming from a country Germany is now actively cancelling?
My favorite – when a shop owner offers me a cleaning job (I was already in a senior EdTech role, so no thanks)

Super yikes, but when it was happening to me… I did not even push back. It’s ok, I guessed – I am a guest here, I gotta change. But it never happened, I just struggled more.

This superiority does not help Germany right now. Because being superior means you’re likely to complain and assess risks (Germany’s specialty) but not proactively DO things to change what’s not working.

I really don’t think Germany needs its foreigners to assimilate.

After 16 years in Germany I am telling people to back off when they give me tips on how to do it “the right German way”. Some of this advice comes with care, but 90%? It’s a Tipp I didn’t ask for.

I KNOW what the German way would look like. I CHOOSE to take another route.

Btw I always say that I’m a Berliner by now. And some locals… say that too. Not many, but it happens.

I have no other home. My densest, best cluster of friends and people who inspire me live here. I see the mess and hypocrisy Berlin can be – and I accept it. Just like you accept a home.

Btw I’ve just spent 15 minutes on the phone with a bureaucrat from the Finanzamt – the kindest, most helpful guy – who helped me navigate my self-employed tax mess, and he did the thing ChatGPT said is impossible – he fixed my mistake free of charge.

I guess there’s hope for us after all :)

Let’s talk money.

It’s day 341 of me receiving unemployment benefits. In Germany, that’s 60% of your average previous salary – around €2,100 in my case. On top of that, since I took the leap, the state is paying me €300 extra, a subsidy that is supposedly helping me transition into full-time self-employment when revenue is typically low and unpredictable. Ca. €2,400 a month, cool.

I now pay my own health insurance. The lowest rate for I could negotiate is €480 monthly – for the first four months they charged me €780 monthly.

Rent €900, I pay for all my tools €200, other insurances €100, I try and pay people to help me navigate this… I live in Berlin, not the cheapest place, and I spend €1,000 on average for food and stuff.

Very little money left to invest in the actual biz.

So, ouch.

Don’t get me started on the mental space I am investing to figure all of this money / taxes / legal stuff out.

Over the weekend I wanted to apply for the extension of the €300 subsidy (plz, cover at least a big part of the health insurance!) and the lady on the phone said that my sustainability is highly questionable (with my absolutely great growth numbers but weird cashflow). I rolled my eyes so hard it hurt.

Now, could I still make it? I am not only here to moan.

1. Yes, I can make it! My severance from being laid off gives me extra cash to prolong my runway. So if you are being laid off – negotiate better, get more cash. Seriously, 10K netto is 3 months of runway. I wish I had gone an extra step to secure more. If you need help negotiating – I can help.

2. I can make it because I have a solid career behind me and network, so I land research gigs. I love research. I wish I’d started building up my visibility and taking better care of my professional network earlier, while I was still employed.

3. I can still make it because, despite the time I “lost” solving wrong problems and whining, I stopped planning and hiding, went forward and started sharing what I have to share. 

The numbers and signs are great, the cashflow will get normalised, I am certain of that. Even if the unemployment center lady was not convinced.

I regret nothing, I don’t owe investment money or any explanations to anybody, so I am delulu enough to keep on doing the thing. It’s turning out beautifully… If you need some of that magic dust (not the Berlin kind) – I am happy to talk to you.

P.S. The lady from the unemployment agency actually gave me another chance, saying I should please send her some more invoices when I have them, so all is good. They really never truly consulted me, but they are ok.

Let’s talk moneeey.

I’ll tell you because I have tons of this insider information: 

If you are signing a Mutual Termination Agreement, a good severance package starts with… 

Faktor 1,5 and higher, As “signing bonus” 3+ months of extra pay, keeping your notice period. 

You keep all the perks while still employed, plus some mental support sessions and outplacement service.  

Assuming your brutto salary is 10 000 euros and your tenure is 3 years, your severance as a lump sum will be 10000 x 1,5 x 3 = 45.241 €. (Brutto) 

Plus six months of pay. If you negotiate an early garden leave, you got yourself a sweet deal and if you are blocked from your unemployment benefits for 3 months and have to carry your insurance cost in that time – you are well covered. 

This doesn’t happen that often but sometimes it does. And if you wanted to leave – that’s a fantastic exit. 

Okay, now bad severance. 

If you are signing a Mutual Termination Agreement and there is no severance or Faktor 0,5, perks cut straight away, no garden leave, you are being paid until your notice period. 

That is what happens most of the time. That’s not a great deal. 

Assuming your brutto salary is 10 000 euros and your tenure is 3 years, your severance as a lump sum will be 10000 x 0,5 x 3 = 15.080 € (brutto).  

PLUS you will most likely get blocked from the unemployment benefits for 3 months so honestly, a termination notice (NOT an agreement) with a lawyer involved will get you somewhat of a decent severance package. 

With ane exception that your employer truly is broke and can prove it, which is tough without a very good Works Council. 

It is all super nuanced ofc but I hope you get the idea… 

What’s your experience?