#4: Natalia Panzer

"I kind of perversely loved being in that heart-wrenched state."

Natalia is a Kraków-based artist who, among other things, helps run the Lynn collective, has a monthly NTS show, and edits miniskirt, a fashion fanzine (Spring issue out soon).

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At a glance…

Location: Kraków

Big 3: Cancer/Aquarius/Capricorn

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What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

When I’m kind of flowing through myself rather than getting in my own way, this is when I feel the healthiest. Discipline, generosity, honesty, spontaneity, magic all play a part.

How would you describe your current lifestyle? 

I work a 9-5 from home, take online Polish language classes and have various other projects I’m working on alone and with friends. All to say, the large majority of my time is spent sedentary at the computer.

I live at one of the busiest intersections in central Kraków and hear cars and trams rumbling by all day long. The whole front side of my apartment is made up of windows and I recently arranged my desk so that it faces out to the street. I stare out the window in reverie and just zone out quite often. It’s beautiful to see people running for the tram. I very rarely ride the tram. I have a bike but I tend to go everywhere on foot. I’m part of a supper club that meets a few times per month. We take turns cooking and hosting in our various apartments. I love cooking with others and having guests. I rarely eat out and don’t enjoy ordering food to the home. If I order food with other people it’s ok though.

At this point in my life, where I’m living in a new country (or relatively new, I moved here from New York 3 years ago), it’s important to me that I nurture the past lives I’ve lived, respect the present and always be looking/dreaming ahead.

How do you start and end your days? 

I usually wake up at 7:30/8am, drink matcha and lemon water, put on an outfit. I always dress up and my coworkers think I’m a bit of a nut for it. Sunscreen, tinted sunscreen, concealer, lipstick. I want to implement some new habits now that the weather is getting better, like taking a walk in the morning. Or doing grocery shopping early on weekday mornings would be nice. On the weekend I typically read and then try to get out of the house as soon as possible.

I always work out and shower at night. I need to have a clean kitchen with no dishes in the sink in order to feel at rest. I drink lemon balm tea before bed. I try to go to sleep no later than 11pm and usually get sleepy by 10/10:30pm. Watching a film at night is a rare but wonderful gift.

Was there a specific moment in life that made you change your approach to health? If so, what happened—and what changed?

Yes, quite recently. Since moving to Poland and going through the normal ups and downs of acclimation, my health had been chugging along at a fine pace. But then at the end of 2023 I had what I’ve been calling My Hyper-Inflamed December. I was away from home for around 3 weeks, traveling around Europe and then spending the end of the year with family overseas. It was fun! But it was maybe a bit too much. Lots of activity, not enough sleep, drinking, parties, etc. On the day after Xmas my body began to react quite intensely (painful breakouts, anxiety) and when I got back to Kraków I was a bit of a mess. Another factor playing into this is that I had been living with my girlfriend for the past 1.5 years and she sadly left the country in December, right before my trip.

As I write, I’m still in quite a hyper-reactive state and various triggers that didn’t used to affect me have been causing trouble, mostly expressed in acne. It’s incredibly frustrating but the flipside is that I feel much more in tune with what helps and what hurts my body. I’ve always been sensitive. I was a sickly child (asthma, chronic ear infections, eczema) and was in very serious intensive care right when I was born and again when I was 2. My body has always been doing strange things; I used to have two sets of teeth when I was a child, for example. A full second set started to grow up in parallel and when I was 9 or 10 and I had to get it surgically removed.

This December flare-up has helped me understand my present limits and how important it is for me to have balance and structure. I’ve been circling back to doing really simple and effective things, like getting 10k steps per day. Stress management is still a missing piece of the puzzle, but there’s progress! I think spring will help. I have jokingly said that I’ve started my summer glow up this month to be completed by my birthday in July, but it’s also kind of true. I have a tab open to go and see someone at the Chinese medicine clinic. I also think I should buy an air purifier/humidifier.

What's your relationship like to death?

Death has always been something relatively present but largely distant in my personal life. It’s never really stopped me in my tracks. I have a feeling that learning how to confront and cope with death will be a defining factor of “adulthood.”

It’s hard for me to untangle thoughts of death from the reality of suffering, brutality, rage. I am terrified of suffering and deeply affected by the idea of martyrdom, especially secular martyrdom. Lament, elegy, hymn and dirge are some of my favourite words and I hold them to be incredibly powerful forms.

Do you have any recurring dreams?

I have one dream where I am in high school and it’s the first day of the year and I can’t find any of my classes. I don’t know how to read the paper class schedule in my hands and am just running around the school hallways lost and confused. Sometimes I make it to math class but it’s the last day of the semester and I don’t understand how I’m going to pass the class.

A variation of this dream occurred recently where I was competing in a kind of class tournament (based I think on the Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter?). The challenge was to snorkel through a shallow pond and find “something to wear.” There was a bunch of jewelry in the pond. I collected it all and was trying to get back to the teachers, who were up on a balcony, to show them what I’d found and earn my points but I couldn't find my way back to them. I was lost running through school again, wet and bejeweled.

Do you believe in the concept of self-healing, or that one can heal oneself?

When it comes to healing certain wounds, I do! I would say that the last time I really radically and successfully self-healed was in 2018. At the time I was working a horrible office job in midtown Manhattan and was dealing with the most consuming heartbreak I’ve ever experienced. I was so unhappy. I had stress-induced warts that wouldn’t go away all over my feet and hands. My hair was falling out. Quitting this job was so scary for some reason, probably influenced by my Capricorn rising. In retrospect, I think what was scarier was deciding to change my life and let sadness go. I kind of perversely loved being in that heart-wrenched state. But I did it, took myself to Europe for 6 weeks to stay with my brother and sister who lived together in London at the time, traveled to Bologna, Berlin and Lisbon, experienced a very pure romance, and came back to New York with no money but a new job already lined up.

There’s this text I love from the pianist Elodie Lauten, liner notes to her album “Piano Works” (which I found out via the album “Piano Works Revisited” on Unseen Worlds) where she writes with such conviction, “My life was in order.” This is how I felt. This energy carried through until 2020 when everything fell apart (job, housing, relationship) and I decided to move to Poland, itself a prolonged process of self-healing.

When I first moved to Kraków, not knowing anyone and with no plan, a text that was so crucial for me was Agnes Martin’s “On the Perfection Underlying Life.” I remember reading this for the first time; I cried and cried. I still return to this text often, especially the section about helplessness.

Where do you look to for information or guidance on matters of health/wellness? Do you work with anyone on a regular basis?

I am really interested in Chinese medicine. Face mapping is my go-to resource for figuring out what’s happening with my body, and I’d like to soon get on a Chinese medicinal regimen for hormonal balance.

My mother usually has all the right advice. She used to be a professional athlete and now works as an addiction therapist but I don’t always listen to her because she is my mother.

Last year I remember finding Nina Cristante’s (now inactive?) website and read all the interviews, watched her videos, listened to a guest podcast she gave and found all deeply moving and true. I still think about the concepts and methods she discussed. I once wrote to her to try and become a Zao Dha Diet/Fitness Provero “member” but unfortunately that did not come to pass.

“My mother usually has all the right advice […] but I don’t always listen to her because she is my mother.”

Fuck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.

Fuck: protein breakfast + no coffee on an empty stomach. Marry: Fermented foods. Kill: supplements.

You have (the local equivalent of) $300 to spend at your favorite health foods store. Where do you go, and what do you buy?

The health shop landscape is a bit different here than in the US so it’s worth getting into a bit. There are health food stores but they usually only stock pantry goods and have a really limited vegetable/chilled section. My favourite one is called Natura and I go there for specific yet reasonably basic things I can’t find in the regular supermarket: quinoa, hemp seeds, tamari, tempeh, nutritional yeast, those green compostable bags for food scraps, brown or black rice noodles, good vegan yogurt, incense, ginger, pecans, buckwheat flour, sea salt toothpaste (love to my dear friend Alix Vollum for getting me on this), natto.

Most of the time I buy my vegetables at the outdoor food markets. I guess these could be called farmers markets but they’re not really, because while some sellers are also producers there are also many middleman suppliers that sell there. All really high quality produce though. The vegetable stands are part of a whole outdoor market ecosystem with fish and meat shops, Mediterranean speciality stores, home goods places, sometimes wine shops, bakeries, flower shops. There are usually people selling homemade breads and soft white cheeses. Especially on Saturdays, the main shopping day, there will be little old ladies selling cut flowers from their gardens.There are I think 5 of these markets scattered around Krakow. One, Targ Pietruszkowy, is the closest to a farmers market because all sellers are also producers and they have a lot of organic and niche produce.

The one by me, Hala Targowa, has a mixture of suppliers, small-scale growers and old women selling homegrown or homemade stuff. The market in my old neighbourhood Salwator, Plac na Stawach, is probably my favourite in town because the variety of sellers is even more eclectic and delightful.

I’m writing all of this out because I'm so worried about the future of these places. I feel that the distinct heart of these markets, preserved from previous generations, will probably dissipate soon. Who will take over from the babcias selling raw milk in reused water bottles and homemade cottage cheese in thin plastic bags? It makes me sad to think about.

So yes, I usually buy groceries there. What is available fluctuates with the seasons. I can’t wait for the wild herbs and foraged berries that will be available in the Summer.

What do you think is the most pressing health issue of our time?

Probably the combo of greenwashing, pollution and climate change.

What advice would you give to the person reading this?

Try something new!