About me

I’m Sonja. I come from a river – I grew up in Germany, lived for a long time in Munich, along the Isar. At some point, I chose to follow my heart. A feeling I decided to trust. So I left. To the sea. To Marseille. And with that to another life  –  what that would fully mean, I wasn’t quite sure. But I was open to everything that comes with it. 

New Waters is my attempt to put that journey into words: the outer one and the inner one. I write about this new life in a city that is loud and rough and chaotic – and fiercely beautiful. About the sea – I live right next to it now, and almost every time I see it, I still can’t quite believe it. About learning a new culture, learning French – sentence by sentence, clumsy mistake by mistake – and how it slowly opens up an entirely different way of seeing the world. How a language thinks. How it feels. What it reveals about the people who live inside it.

I write about being foreign and about belonging. About moments when I wonder who I actually am when the language, the context, the light all change. About Germany, which somehow looks clearer from here – almost new – as if distance were a kind of lens. About identity – my own, other people’s, and everything in between that doesn’t have a neat name.

I write because it brings me joy. Because I want to share what moves me. And maybe someone out there reads this and discovers something – or feels inspired to follow their own feeling. To take the step where not even a big toe remains in the comfort zone. Because the life on the other side? So vivid, alive, colorful – and deeply true.

So, this is my journey from Germany to France. And maybe the journey even a little bit more towards myself.

Happy you’re here.