Let me tell you my story.

Not the perfect version.
Not the version where everything always makes sense.

But the real one.

When I’m not on stage, people just call me Arnold.

I was born in Hamburg in 1995. Shortly afterwards, my family moved to the countryside in the north of Germany. Even as a child, I often had this hard-to-describe feeling that I somehow didn’t really fit into the world.

Not at school.
Not at home.
And somehow not into this life either, the one everyone around me took for granted.

My grades were bad, even though I knew there was actually a lot in me. I just couldn’t see the point behind so much of it.

Why did life seem to consist of slogging away every day, being stressed, and having just enough at the end of the month to keep going?

So from early on, I retreated into other worlds.

One of them was video games. I loved Spyro – that little purple dragon on the PlayStation. For a few hours, I could be somewhere else.

But there was another world.

Music.

Music was always playing in my father’s car. Russian songs, hits from the 80s and 90s, pop music, but also soulful sounds like Enya. I don’t remember the one moment when music came into my life.

It was simply always there.

As a small child, I often had to go to hospital because I was almost blind in my right eye. The doctors and nurses there jokingly called me “Beethoven”, because I was always singing some melody or other to myself.

Of course, back then I didn’t know yet what music would one day mean for my life.

But maybe it had always been inside me.

When I was about twelve, I downloaded some DJ software. I started mixing music online for other people, posted videos in the early years of YouTube, and shared my passion with people I had never met in person.

Soon I was DJing on small German online radio stations.

Two years later, someone from that scene recommended a music production program to me.

That was the beginning of something new.

I made my first attempts of my own, produced sounds and melodies, and later started projects with other artists. At fifteen, I stood in a club for the first time and was allowed to DJ on a trial basis – until the management noticed how young I actually was.

So I had to wait.

From the age of eighteen, I regularly played at birthday parties, and later in a few smaller clubs in northern Germany as well. It was the heyday of EDM, Avicii and Tomorrowland.

From the outside, it may have looked as if I had found my way.

Inside, things looked completely different.

Even then, a big dream lived inside me.

I wanted to reach people with my music. Not just entertain them. I wanted to touch something in them.

At the same time, I carried ever stronger doubts and inner blocks within me.

I felt I had to “become something”.

Go to university.
Take a sensible path.
Fit into a life that already seemed to be laid out in front of me.

But deep inside I could feel: this is not me.

This conflict tore me apart more and more.

I dropped out of my Abitur (the German university-entrance exam), later made two more attempts to catch up on it through distance learning, and gave those up as well.

Over time, my lack of direction turned into despair.

I became depressed and started taking drugs more and more often, to escape a reality in which I could no longer find myself.

On one side there was this huge vision: making music, being free, inspiring millions of people.

On the other side stood fear, self-doubt, expectations and the feeling of being completely wrong.

I put on a huge amount of weight and at some point weighed more than 160 kilograms. Various addictions ruled my life.

I was far away from myself.

In between, there was a phase when I found my feet again. I moved in with my grandparents, because there was a lot of conflict at home. I started running, quit smoking and drugs, ate more healthily and worked on my music again.

For a moment, it felt as if I was finding my way back into life.

But beneath the surface, the old conflicts were still there.

At some point I moved back in with my parents. Old patterns returned. The drugs came back too.

And finally came the darkest moment of my life.

In January 2016, I was in an extreme state of mental crisis.

I had barely slept for days and had taken a great many drugs. During an acute psychosis, something happened that would change my life and the lives of my whole family forever:

I took my mother’s life.

Even today, these words are hard to write.

I loved my mother.

And I could never have imagined that one day I would be capable of something that causes so much suffering.

I wasn’t even 21 years old.

The life I had lived until then was over in an instant.

My dreams, my ideas of my future, everything I had held on to – it felt as if it had shattered within a single moment.

I was placed in a forensic psychiatric hospital.

When my condition stabilised and, piece by piece, I became aware of what had happened, a reality began that was almost impossible to bear.

What had I done?

How could this happen?

And how could life possibly go on after that?

One afternoon, my father came to visit me.

He brought me a book that had belonged to my mother:

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

While she was still alive, my mother had tried to get me to read this book. Perhaps back then she had long since sensed how much I was struggling inside.

Now this book lay in front of me.

In a forensic psychiatric hospital.

After the worst event of my life.

For the first time, I engaged deeply with the idea that our thoughts can have an influence on how we perceive and shape our lives.

Something about it struck a spark in me.

Not a huge one.

Just a small light.

But sometimes a small light is enough in a very dark room.

The first months in the hospital were incredibly hard. Simply accepting the reality of my life was an enormous challenge.

But slowly I began to build something up again.

I was given special permission to have an old Casio CTK-750 keyboard. I couldn’t really play it properly yet.

But I had music again.

And that meant everything to me.

I spent more than three years on the secure ward. No smartphone. No computer. Only very few ways of being in contact with the outside world.

So I started to read.

Books became my salvation.

Personal development.
Self-help.
Spirituality.
Biographies of extraordinary people.

Sometimes I read a whole book in a single day.

Page by page, my inner world began to change.

And the more my thoughts changed, the more strongly something returned that I thought I had lost:

my vision.

I dreamed of one day having a laptop in front of me again.

Producing music again.

Creating something again.

Living again.

Over time, I changed my life from the ground up.

I ate more healthily.
I lost a lot of weight.
I stopped smoking.
I started running regularly.

And when I was finally moved to a less secure ward, I was able to make music again.

For the first time in a long while, I had the feeling of moving towards something again.

After five years and eight months, I was finally discharged from the forensic psychiatric hospital and at first moved in with my father.

I was full of hope.

But freedom alone doesn’t automatically solve everything.

Many of my old self-doubts and blocks were still there. I procrastinated, doubted myself and found it hard to really live, every day, the vision that was so clear inside me.

Even so, I kept going.

In 2023, I moved into my first flat of my own.

I started releasing my own music.

And during that time I discovered something I can hardly imagine being without today:

my voice.

I found out that I could sing.

And, far more importantly:

that I loved it.

It felt as if, after all those years, I had found another part of myself.

I started performing as a DJ again. But after a few gigs, I had to admit something to myself:

This was no longer my path.

For years, “DJ” had been part of my identity. Letting go of that identity hurt.

But sometimes growth doesn’t mean becoming even more.

Sometimes growth means letting go of something that was once a part of us.

This phase was difficult.

I distracted myself a lot with food and media. Old addictions came knocking at my door again.

At the same time, I stopped taking my medication. My condition got worse and worse, I hardly slept any more, and I developed mania.

Since I was under court-ordered supervision at the time, I was supposed to go back to the hospital.

Everything in me wanted to prevent exactly that.

So I fled to Austria together with my girlfriend at the time.

For seven months, I practically lived out of a suitcase there.

I busked on the streets.

Often I didn’t know where I would be in a few days, or how things were supposed to go on.

For a while I lived in a caravan that was rented out through Airbnb. When I couldn’t pay for it any more, I had to leave. At the last minute, with the help of a loan, I booked myself a hotel for a month.

Later, a chain of circumstances meant that I was suddenly allowed to live in a luxury hotel near Salzburg – for free, in a suite.

My life felt completely surreal.

In a strange way, I felt carried by life.

But at the same time, I lost the ground beneath my feet once again.

I slept too little, hardly ate any more, and developed a psychosis again.

This time, I contacted the police myself, before anything could happen.

And suddenly I was back where I never wanted to be again:

in a forensic psychiatric hospital.

One moment, a hotel suite.

Shortly afterwards, an isolation cell.

Life could hardly have held greater contrasts.

And yet this time, something was different.

In all those years, I had found something.

Something no one could take from me any more.

A light inside me.

Sometimes it was only a tiny spark.

But it never went out.

It reminded me that a person is more than their darkest hour.

More than their past.

More than their mistakes.

More than their fear.

And that even when almost everything on the outside seems lost, something can still exist on the inside that says:

In the hospital, I kept holding on to my vision.

On the secure ward, my options were very limited at first. So I asked myself a simple question:

What can I do now – with exactly what is available to me?

The answer was:

Writing.

I began my autobiography.

In circumstances that were anything but ideal, I wrote down my story.

Not because my past was beautiful.

But because at some point I understood that even the darkest experiences can give rise to something that might give another person light.

Slowly, I worked my way back up.

Step by step.

All the way to the open ward.

And when I finally got my laptop back from Austria, I started writing and producing songs again.

Lots of songs.

And more and more clearly, I understood what music is really about for me.

Today, my heart flows into this one thing:

Music.

Music that people don’t just hear.

But feel.

Music that reminds us that something greater than fear lives within us.

Music that invites us to open our hearts again.

Music that brings light into moments when we ourselves can no longer see any.

Music that reminds people to walk their own path.

For me, that is exactly what AZADA stands for.

Freedom.

The freedom to be yourself.

The freedom to break away from old patterns.

The freedom to find your own voice again.

The freedom to begin a new chapter in spite of your past.

I’ve started busking again.

Today, I’m building my vision piece by piece.

Not someday.

Now.

My path isn’t perfect.

I haven’t reached the end of my story.

Maybe I never will.

But I’ve learned that I don’t have to wait until everything is perfect to live my life.

And that is exactly why I’d like to give you something to take with you.

Maybe you, too, carry something inside you that has long been wanting to be lived.

An idea.

A voice.

An art.

A dream.

Something you know, deep down inside:

Then don’t wait until one day all your fears have disappeared.

Don’t wait for your circumstances to be perfect.

Don’t wait for someone to give you permission.

Start with what you have today.

Right where you are now.

I don’t know what you’ve been through.

I don’t know what battles you’re fighting.

But I believe that something lives in every person that this world needs.

Perhaps that is one of the most important insights of my life so far:

It can begin to shine right in the middle of it.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

Thank you for letting me share it with you.

And if you yourself are at a point in your life right now where you don’t know how to go on, I want to tell you one thing:

You don’t have to see the whole path yet.

Take the next real step.

Then the next.

And then one more.

Your story isn’t over yet.