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On Mondays I go to Lidl on my street.
I know I should not go on Mondays. I know because they still haven’t restocked the goods that fled the shelves over the weekend. The carrots look like worn soldiers after a battlefield; the spinach is a rumour; the spring onions resemble survivors telling stories no one will believe. But shops do not open on Sunday, and on Saturday I am always exhausted from dancing all night on Friday. I should go on Tuesday when I have noticed many trucks come, when the apples are plump again and all the aisles become abundant again. But I like cooking on Mondays. I like the ritual of food prepping for the week, beginning with steam from the pot where I make broth. And because ritual is stubborn, I am always missing something—fresh vegetables especially. So I end up going again on Tuesday and telling myself that I should not shop on Mondays.
I think I know why I am afraid to adjust this routine by even one day. When you struggle with ADHD—the vintage stuff, not the shiny TEMU-ADHD that everyone seems to have nowadays—and you have against every instinct in every fibre of your being, managed to build a routine that works, you treat it like a relic. You are petrified that one thing out of sync will cause it all to unravel. You fear that if you skip Monday you will procrastinate on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the kitchen will look at you with the hard face of a landlord. You will spend all week staring at the pots like they owe you money, wishing you had the will to just get up, go to the store, buy food.
During the worst times, paralysis has been a flat mate. I have sometimes lost weight not from discipline but from decision fatigue; not from fasting but from the thousand small acts I could not begin. There are days when the list is simple—garlic, onions, tomatoes—and still it feels like being asked to push a bus uphill.
And yes, I could go to a different store. I am not loyal to any business. There are at least a dozen different stores within a one-kilometre radius. But that, too, comes dangerously close to ruining the routine. So I hold this one thing I can do in the palm of my hand and squeeze tight—tight enough to keep out the sunlight, the drafts, the temptations of novelty. You might call it rigidity. I call it survival—harm reduction for the brain. There are grand solutions and there are small ones; on Monday mornings mine is a plastic basket that will not let me drift into the sky.
There are advantages. The people who work in the grocery store know me now. I know this because their eyes are softer when they see me. Two years in, they still do not say hello or even nod. But this is Berlin, and to judge the warmth of Berliners by the standards of any other city would be to judge a fish by its ability to climb trees. Rudeness is a love language here; economy of warmth is a municipal policy. I know I have become a Berliner because it no longer bothers me. Instead I use a new scale. I treat the softening of the eyes like warmth.
To understand this you must know where I started: invisibility. From sometimes not even being heard when asking for help finding groceries. In the Gospel According to Berlin, you do not interrupt or speak to anyone working in a grocery store except at the till—confession is only heard at the register. So when those stocking the shelves let their eyes rest on my face and allow them to soften, it can feel like a hug. I accept it like an official stamp on a quiet application for belonging.
It was in my Lidl, on a Monday morning, that I first experienced that eye-only smile —as though the eyelids were small lips acting on their own, knowing that the heavy Berlin face need not be burdened with a full smile for a stranger. The woman’s eyes did their little smile and it felt so warm. I, in return, gave a full-faced smile. It was my way of saying: I see how far you have come toward me; I see the warmth ladder you must climb to meet me at my level.
This, perhaps, is the second reason I will not simply go to a different store in my neighbourhood. I have accrued years of micro-progress—stamps in a human passport I am not about to forfeit. Leaving now would be like emigrating the year before your permanent residency arrives. (This analogy makes more sense if your passport is currently a provocation to consulates.) I am one step before a full-face smile. (It took three years for some neighbours to begin saying a brief hello when we pass on the stairs, a shy treaty signed in the stairwell.) I am not going to waste that progress at my supermarket.
I practise a choreography: onions first—always—then garlic, then ginger; then apples, cucumber, spring onions—an unbroken liturgy. The rest may improvise, but the overture never changes. Before I surrender to the till, I take one last lap of the aisles, a slow reconnaissance of everything on display, in case memory has mislaid a small necessity. At the register the old ritual returns: phone ready to pay; and before the cashier asks if I have Lidl Plus, I scan my barcode—then return the things to the basket—and say: mit Karte Bitte. On the Lidl app, which I installed particularly to be faithful to this routine, I have opted not to receive a physical receipt, so I roll the basket away once the payment is authorised and begin emptying the basket into the black bag which opens like a suitcase: large, flat items at the bottom; cylindrical items along the sides; leafy vegetables and fragile items on top.
The middle aisle—the bazaar of unlikely futures—is my Monday test. A large pillow for €9. A stack of pastel notebooks promising that new stationery will inspire me to write more outdoors. A tool set that makes me remember everything that needs fixing in my flat. “No,” I have to say to myself. ADHD is not only forgetting; it is also wanting. Wanting a thing that will solve a problem you have named poorly. Wanting a fix. But I am learning to walk past the inflatable kayak and toward the tomato paste.
I could wait until Tuesday, the trucks will come and the shelves will look like hope. This is true. But Tuesday requires flexibility, and flexibility has, in the past, opened into a week-long absence. Monday is not optimal; it is anchor. The point is not efficiency. The point is I cook. The point is I eat. The point is the sizzling of onions in butter is louder than the static of postponement.
Some may say routine is the enemy of spontaneity. I say routine is the scaffolding for it. I say my small Monday pilgrimage to Lidl is a pact with myself: I will meet the week with food in the house and the dignity of having done one necessary thing. I will accept that some days the onions are weeping more than I am and that is fine; we will share the task.
There is also the matter of being known—not by name, not by biography, but by pattern. The staff may not greet me, but their eyes recognise the recurring Monday man who buys too many apples. In a city where it is easy to drift, where you can pass a thousand people and remain a rumour, a softened eye feels like a receipt that says: you were here; it mattered to someone for a second.
So on Mondays I go to Lidl on my street. I greet the week with onions. I practise being a person. And if—so help me god—on some future Monday the full-face smile arrives, I will respond with a full “Hallo!” complete with a small wave, a nod, the kind of extravagance that, in Berlin, borders on opera. Perhaps I will even add the dangerous flourish: “Na?” Perhaps she will blink in shock and the eyes will smile again. Perhaps that, too, will become routine.
