Читать книгу Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment. Life, Illness, Science, and Job search - - Страница 4

Conditions and process of forming plans for the future (where and how the outlook on life was formed)

About the place and time of my birth, family composition

I was born at the end of 1989, in the Republic of Kazakhstan, in the city of Petropavlovsk. The city is located in the north of the country, within the forest-steppe and steppe zones. The nearest large city in the country is Kokshetau. It is near it that the mountains and beautiful lakes Borovoe (in Kazakh – Бурабай) and Chelkar (in Kazakh – Шалқар) are located. In Russia, they are called “the blue lakes of northern Kazakhstan”. It was about 200 km to get to them. The same way to the capital of Kazakhstan – Astana (during my time the capital moved from Almaty to Astana) is 440 km. The nearest large Russian cities are Omsk, a city of over a million (about 250 km) and Kurgan (approximately the same distance). And Tyumen, where I would move when I was almost 15, is located 450 km to the northwest.

Petropavlovsk is located on a large hill, that is, no matter where you enter it from, you need to go uphill. Or go down, if you leave the city. In winter it is cold and it gets dark earlier, in spring there were streams running and there was a wonderful smell, in summer it is hot and light for a long time, in autumn it was rainy and there were many yellow leaves. Each season took its place, but winter was, apparently, the main one, and took a month from autumn and spring. Winter is about -10 – — 20 degrees Celsius, if there is frost, then -35 degrees, probably happened. Summer is hot, most often +20 – +30 and more. I do not have objective data, but from my memories, if it rained, it was warm. That is, it was impossible to freeze under it, and there was often a mushroom rain.

The Ishim River runs through the city, which has both flat and high banks, and also looks greenish from afar. There is a free city beach and a dam on the Ishim – it is, roughly, like an artificial waterfall. I believe that the city loved nature, in particular trees – they are everywhere and the city turned out to be green and cozy. The city park, especially in childhood, seemed like another world. There, coziness was multiplied by a very large number. Trees, attractions, monuments, sculptures, a pond with important white birds, fenced with a cozy high mesh fence behind which you could easily go, cafes and all this is intertwined with paths.

I liked the holiday of Nauryz, it is a celebration of the beginning of spring. It took place at the end of March, when there is still snow outside, but spring is already in full swing, the sun begins to warm, and the length of daylight hours has noticeably increased. Then one of the central streets was closed for cars. It was so wide that it is completely incomprehensible how it happened that such a wide street appeared in such a small city. And yurts were set up on the street (this is a national mobile round house of the Kazakhs), they were so scattered that you could walk from one to another. Something was fried, steamed, cooked, sold everywhere. People walked back and forth. And there was such an atmosphere as at a fair from a picture in some old book. I liked all this very much. There was no place for advertising, politics, propaganda, or any other nonsense. Everyone was simply welcoming spring.

This street was also used for the New Year’s Eve, and a central Christmas tree appeared on it (even though there were no peripheral Christmas trees in the city, there was only one, and all the city dwellers went to it), slides, and beautiful snow figures. I remember these figures for their simplicity and warmth. They were made by artisans, lovers of this craft. They did not always succeed smoothly, both in terms of the modeling itself and in terms of painting, but these figures were a living physical embodiment of a New Year’s fairy tale. And there were few buildings made of ice cubes in this snow town, they were rather used as an additional material. I will return to the topic of the central Christmas tree and the building material for building the town later, when I tell you about how New Year is celebrated in Tyumen. In the meantime, I will finish this description with a note for psychiatrists, in case one of you gets your hands on the book.

When I was sledding down an ice slide, that big main slide where all the kids are heading and where a line forms, I stood up after sliding down it and wanted to run away so that I wouldn’t get knocked down, but I didn’t have time. And another boy knocked me down, and it so happened that I hit the back of my head on the ice from my height. It hurt. It’s like something very hard hitting something very hard, but at that time one of them was my head. It even hurt to write. Maybe that fall partly influenced why I started writing this book at all, that is, the development of my depression or autistic traits. End of note. Below I return to describing the city.

The city then had a population of about two hundred thousand. Most of them were Kazakhs and Russians. The Russian population was quite large compared to other cities in the country. Sometimes tensions in the national question were noticeable, but they were rather “general” or “abstract”, and in particular people of different nationalities were friends with each other, families were friends, etc. A city with a small neurosis. But the neurosis was our own, native.

It seems that nothing was built or anything major was opened in the city during my time. It seemed that I had been in every yard in the city, knew every path and their features. And nothing changed there, and if it did, it was minimal, and I always found out about it. Also, it seems that no one gave birth in the city. Of course, I saw pregnant women, mothers with strollers, kindergartens, but there was so little of all this that it was as if it did not exist. In this sense, the city was static. Also, we did not have any of the terrible “1990s” (the difficult time after the collapse of the Soviet Union). Years are like years, life is like life. Both from my point of view, as a child at the time, and from the memories of adults at that time.

Petropavlovsk is the regional center of the North Kazakhstan region. And the region’s economy is predominantly agricultural. That is, there are many fields where something grows, then it is collected, processed and sold. Another part of the economy is because the region is a transit region – the region physically borders on the territory of Russia. The first part of the economy could be easily noticed by turning on the TV, where they almost always say that the sowing campaign begins, the sowing campaign ends, the results of the sowing campaign, and all this is under a video of a row of fields, ears of wheat and combine operators. The second part of the economy is partially reflected in the fact that there are currency exchange points in the city almost at every step. Later, having moved to Tyumen, I was surprised that there were no such points in the city, and in order to exchange currency you had to go to the bank. So official and difficult.

Pentium 1 computers appeared around the beginning of my school years, and mobile phones somewhere in middle school. Computers amazed me with their uniqueness, and gave me the magical ability to move a mouse with a wheel inside and see an arrow move on the screen. Phones also amazed me with something, but I can’t remember what exactly. After all, the wireless communication technology itself already existed. I remember that back then we wrote SMS in Latin, and there were special symbols for those letters of the Russian language that did not have an analogue in the Latin alphabet. For example, the Russian letter “Ч” was written as the number 4. Photos of my childhood are black and white until I was about four years old, of course there are no videos of me as a little boy, there was nothing to shoot with. But when I got a Polaroid camera, I already have such photos. Also, for example, in my childhood, people washed their cars not at car washes, because there weren’t any, but at their dachas, rivers, lakes, using a bucket, or sometimes a hose.

My family consisted of my mother, father, brother, a brother who was five years older than me, and me. My grandparents also played a significant role in my upbringing. I developed normally for my age, I was not observed by “special” doctors, I did not have “complex” diseases. I underwent three operations under general anesthesia. I did not go to kindergarten, since it was possible to leave me with my grandparents. I went to school at the age of 6. And for me, this was a difficult period, since I did not get to “be a child in society”. That is, I did not sit next to someone on the potty, did not pick my nose, did not cry, and did not fall asleep after lunch with a group of children. I immediately had to become a typical well-behaved first-grader. I went to the fourth grade, that is, I did not skip from the third to the fifth. This was the custom in our school. Although in many others they skipped. Changed two schools in Kazakhstan, and one in Russia.

We moved three times to larger apartments. And my grandparents lived in the historical center, with a view of the regional drama theater from their windows. And the floor of their apartment was the ceiling for the regional children’s library. There was a third location, not counting the dachas, which we called “fazenda” with a little irony – it was a private house in the foothills of the city. Despite the location, it was almost a full-fledged village. And in winter, it especially turned into a fairy-tale village with frosty air, darkness, snowy landscapes, barking dogs, silence and the smell of lit stoves.