The Internal Compass
She’s all over the place. Berlin TV sets, clubs, airports to warm beaches where she’d rather swim with dolphins than watch them on TV. You’d think someone living like that would get swallowed by the city’s noise and hedonism. There are plenty of people who moved to Berlin young and ambitious, and now they basically live in the basement of Berghain, completely sucked in. But Palina’s different—she’s stayed intact somehow.
She said something about having an internal compass, something that tells her how much of what is good for her. Growing up in Berlin helps with that; you don’t fall apart from too much stimulation when it’s just the landscape you’ve always known. But it’s more than that. She genuinely loves what she does—DJing, the TV work, the constant movement. When her fingers start twitching from not spinning records in a while, that’s what gets her out of the house, not the city pulling at her.
The thing that struck me was how she talks about adventure. Getting lost in a jungle not knowing if there’s a cab after nine at night. Accidentally ordering something so hot it’s barely edible. Swimming and suddenly there’s a dolphin next to you. That’s better than the TV version. She’s chasing that feeling, that moment where the world isn’t mediated through a screen.
Berlin matters to her in a specific way. Not as a tourist version of itself, but as home. The city she grew up in, where she walks the block with friends, plays arcade games, eats well. She’s not running from it or toward it—she just lives there the way you live anywhere, and happens to work there too.
What got me was her answer when I asked if she’d ever worried about losing herself in the city. Not really. She’s got this rootedness that comes from actually being from Berlin, from understanding it as a place with a particular energy, not as a playground. But also: love is her motor. That’s what she said. Love for what she does, for the people she knows, for the sheer strangeness of the world. As long as that’s running, she’s not afraid.
She’s a child of immigrants, grew up in Berlin during its messiest, most complicated decades. When I asked about cultural diversity and all the fear-mongering stuff—the marches, the anger—she didn’t perform a position. She just said she knows how good people can be to each other when there’s respect, and how destructive fear is when people don’t bother to know the facts. The people marching in those protests scare her. That’s real. But she’s not letting that fear run the show.
Small details stick with you. Her hair, which she says is so damaged the split ends have split ends, somehow always looks perfect because she can just twist it into something in two seconds and it looks different every time. Vodka, not beer, is her thing. She’s the person who will try anything—snake soup, a two-meter iguana, whatever’s in front of her. She laughs about herself getting sucked into the internet and not leaving the house for seasons, but then she snaps out of it because there’s too much world to see.
At the end, when asked what to watch next, she said ’Modern Family.’ Manny is the best. That’s the kind of recommendation I trust—not what sounds smart, just what genuinely landed for her.