About The Artist

Journey with me through a condensed timeline of how life brought me to creating art and Human in Design.

In 1983, I decided to make it known to the East Berliner world that I am naturally impatient and don’t enjoy boredom. So, in true M.-L. fashion, I left my mom’s studio apartment, a.k.a her belly, 2 months prematurely. Not much has changed ever since in the patience department, but I’ve learned to delay gratification.

Ever since I could sit upright, my dad escaped reality with me through make-believe play. Together, we saw things no one else saw, and we never let anyone rain on our fairy parade.

In 1989, my parents told me to pack my tiny Care Bear suitcase for a vacation to Hungary. They didn’t tell me that we would never return from our trip, but they had to prevent me from snitching on the plan to flee East Germany at the border. In short, this was an escape from East Germany to the “golden” West.

This runaway status made me a refugee and a complete outsider that people treated like an exotic exhibit for being from the East at age 6. Well, they treated me like a weirdo for that and my tendency to make up wild stories, as well as not wanting anything to do with other children. Instead of playing with kids, I’d prefer to sit with the adults, listen to them talking for hours, and entertain them with weird little things such as coughing cutely on command or telling them made up stories and jokes.

1992, my mom smelled the big wide world. She left my father for a man who promised heaven on earth to her, but instead, he turned the planet into hell. He physically and mentally abused my mother to the point where she lost all hope and resorted to alcohol to escape reality. He would not touch her only when I placed myself between him and her because he knew my father would send him to jail if he ever laid a hand on me. I never really lost that bodyguard mentality regarding my mom, even though she and I were not on the best terms for a long stretch of years.

2001 sh+t hit the fan for me. With all that I had gone through at this point, I developed severe mental health issues. At my worst, agoraphobia prevented me from leaving my mom’s one-bedroom apartment for a full year. I spent 12 months laying in bed, only leaving the sheets to go to the bathroom or snag something to eat out of the kitchen.

At some point in the 12th month of mindlessly staring at the TV in my room, I realized on the Big Brother show timer that I hadn’t had a shower in a month. Realizing that I was only 19 years old, there were only two options: throw in the towel to check out or get up and fight. I decided that this could not possibly be it at 19, and I decided to fight. The same day, I opened the door to the apartment and set one foot in front of it. That was all I could bear, but it was also all it took—the first step.

A few months later, my father helped me to get into an apprenticeship to become a medical technician in radiology. The apprenticeship was hell for me as I was still dealing with severe agoraphobia, but my dad went through it all with me. After the mandatory three years, I came out of the experience with a degree and new self-confidence that I could likely tackle anything in life I set my mind to. My dad says I became too overconfident. Who am I to argue?!

While I worked in this profession in several departments-nuclear medicine, radiation therapy, medical imaging- I knew before the apprenticeship that this would not be the profession I’d grow old in in the long run. I was pretty much fed up with the job after three years, so when I met an old acquaintance who had worked for my father, a radiologist, in the past, I switched over to clinical research and project management for a few years.

In 2006, I decided to try my hand at online dating. I found a guy who was full enough of himself to be interesting to me. Being a person who lost the hearts in her eyes faster than anyone could say the L word, I promised myself never to get married. Somehow, however, I ganged up with him in 2010 because I was unwilling to let him ghost me, and he, an American, was not interested in staying in Germany. So, for 17 years, we’ve been trucking through this thing called life together and will do so until one of us rides off into the eternal sunset. I don’t start stuff, not to finish.

That’s right. You may call me Don Smelly Stranger.

Being new to the USA and in an area where working in Clinical Research was impossible, I had to rethink my career. So when someone approached me to start in the network marketing candle business, I said ‘ABSOLUTELY NOT,’ ‘I will not, under no circumstances, become a Tupperware hustler for candles.’ Six years later, I left my candle pimp business with a sh+t load of knowledge and a multi-million revenue in sales under my belt. I learned a lot about people and myself during those years.

By the way, that industry is indeed full of a+holes that misrepresent what it takes to be successful in this stuff. But that’s a different story and not necessarily the industry's fault. Nonetheless, I left because I had enough of peopleing with a+holeos.

In 2015, one year before I quit pimping candles, I decided I had to up my game again. I started my BS in Psychology at an American University, and 4 years later, with a GPA of 4.0, I realized that I did not have the patience to become a shrink unless I worked with the bottom of the bottom of hope. Since my husband did not want me to work at a prison, I left the world of psychology and joined the world of Interior Design.

With a love for themed rooms, I started specializing in creating rooms that would allow clients to realize their, often, childhood dreams in their four walls.

While creating rooms to escape reality in was a lot of fun, the truth is that you are still working on someone else’s vision, and I realized that I might have no issue with agoraphobia or social anxiety anymore, but I still do not enjoy working for others. In a sense, I am a pro-loner, and I love being in my own head to bring to life what’s going on in my noggin.

When 2021 hit with some unexpected challenges that catapulted me into a bout of anxiety again, I, once more, had to pull myself out of the hole. That is when I rediscovered my love for collaging and made being an artist my full-time profession.

Collaging is my escape from my mental circus and my journey out of reality in good old daddy fashion. I lovingly blame my dad for wanting to create my own worlds. Having gone through some things in life, I am also not afraid of letting all of what society calls strangeness out. I was different since I was born and through what I lived, and the world has treated me that way. While this outsider status bothered me when I was younger, I now let my freak flag fly, and Human in Design is here to support you to show off your Stranger Self as well.