Читать книгу Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment. Life, Illness, Science, and Job search - - Страница 5

There are people who can be friends with one person and always be together, best friends. I have never had this. It’s not that I didn’t want or couldn’t be friends like that, it just happened that way. Probably, there was no need to stick so tightly to one person. I floated from one group to another, some groups already existed, and I joined them, in other cases I was one of those who stood “at the origins”. But, probably, the main ones were two groups, which was in the middle classes, and another – an extended one, which I left when I went to Tyumen. With some guys, our circle of interests included:

– • building various booths (huts),

– • wandering around a small forest untouched by civilization in the center of the city near the old church,

– • playing tag, hide-and-seek,

– • racing around garages, playing ball (including the ball that we, by prior agreement, stole from under the noses of the city football team. Because it was high-quality),

– • fishing (including on a “TV” net (this is a small square net that looks like a TV), which we also, by prior agreement, stole from people we didn’t know),

– • swimming in the river and lake. My interests were in my boundless love for diving. More precisely, diving and trying to touch the bottom with my feet, touch it, and do the same thing several times, each time moving further and further from the shore, into the depths. I also liked swimming underwater, opening my eyes underwater, trying to swim beyond the buoys, swimming on my back. But, unfortunately, I never managed to lie on the water.

– • playing cards in the entrance,

– • going to the football stadium,

– • going to the city park, riding on rides,

– • frying potatoes in the ground,

– • doing the “sun” on a swing – it looked like this: standing with your feet unfastened to anything, make a full turn around the axis of the swing. And when you managed to do one, then you already tried to do as many as possible,

– carrying out technical operations (all according to the same pre-arranged agreement) to pick and eat onions, garlic and berries from the garden of the school for deaf children. The latter was necessary to somehow mask the smell of tobacco and alcohol. We drank cheap wine (brands “Агдам”, “Талас”, “777”), vodka or beer. Cigarettes could be bought individually at kiosks regardless of age. Someone smoked with a stick so that their hands would not smell of tobacco. Someone, especially bold and savvy, smoked with their left hand, claiming that mother would sniff their right hand and calm down. I still don’t know if this is true or not. They threw nasvay behind the lip (it is supposedly chicken droppings, oak bark and lime. The effect is the same as cigarettes). It was sold on street “stalls” from grandmothers selling sunflower seeds, chewing gum, puffed rice. At one time, we tried “breathing gasoline” – this means pouring a little of it into a plastic bottle and intensively inhaling its vapors. The first desired stage of the “high” is when you start hearing the sound “bzzzz…” in your head. It vaguely resembles how silence sounds if you dive underwater and listen to what is happening. Only more intensely from gasoline. At the next stage, hallucinations came, some were big, and some were smaller – visual and/or auditory. It was a novelty, interesting. But soon the “withdrawal” came, I don’t remember exactly, but it seems that my bones ached a lot, well, somehow my whole body was amazed at my action and ached. Therefore, I quickly cooled off to gasoline. It is some kind of “bull high”.

– It was also natural that while living in Kazakhstan, we smoked marijuana. This is a classic – at first it wasn’t funny, then you got a taste, it became funny and you liked it. I can’t say much about my relationship with marijuana, but what’s important is that it will develop in the future.

Well, a strong early teenage experience of getting to know different substances that alter consciousness. But it really was interesting, helped to transfer “outside”, and even served as a means of developing social connections. It’s also good that I was quite picky and “heavy” substances never attracted me in any way. Heavy substances are those that are injected into a vein. Perhaps also because there were people-examples who used it, and even then, watching them, I understood that they were in a terrible dead end, “living corpses”.

With other guys, when I was already a little older, our interests included walks with girls, courtship, love, kisses and other erotic things. There was a girl at school, with a beautiful name and beautiful appearance, half Armenian, half Belarusian origin. At that time, we were dating seriously – we spent a lot of time together in the same company, and even made attempts to kiss like adults. Meetings with her and thoughts about her evoked in my soul exclusively positive feelings of interest, warmth, happiness, and my outlook on life was very bright.

And then her parents took her to Russia. And at that age, at least for me, such events seemed to paralyze. After all, I couldn’t run through the airport like in the movies, run up the steps and tell her something like: “Come on, stay, why do you need this Russia, we’ll live together at my place, we’ll go to school together for fun, I also have a cool dog – a beautifully groomed poodle, marry me, and let’s go eat, my mom just made meat à la French.” No. I was simply broken, confused and in a pitch-black mood. How was I supposed to live? It was unclear, and I don’t remember how I got through it.

Life brought us various adventures, which were also accompanied by alcohol, smoking and nasvay. We especially valued drinking. So, when we went to a tourist camp with school, we knew in advance that the teachers were preparing to search us so that we would not take anything sinful with us. The tourist camp was 15 kilometers from the school. And a few days before the event, we went there on bicycles to hide the booze in the bushes.

At that time, it turned out to be one of the most difficult tests in my life, because riding a bicycle for thirty kilometers without preparation, and also riding uphill on the way back was terrible. But the reward was that the teachers searched us and lagged behind. And that vacation at the tourist center was wonderful, including thanks to our ingenuity, persistence and a hiding surprice place in the bushes. Oh, I can sing about bushes, bushes and trees. And when I got a little older, I also often went to that forest in the center of the city, which was not touched by civilization, maybe because it was once a cemetery. We loved to make fires there, especially in late autumn or early spring, when you could look at the fire, warm yourself, throw sticks into it and talk about something with the girls.

In addition to studying altered states of consciousness, we were also interested in mobile phones. We seemed to know everything about them. Then, there was a period when mobile phone technologies were changing at a high speed – from “bricks” without a SIM card to color screens, polyphony, Bluetooth.

It so happened that at first this group of friends were from school, mostly from the same class. And we were active, creative guys. If there were extracurricular activities – that was our call, if there was a newspaper to draw for a holiday – that was our call too, and we often gathered at my house. By that time I was already playing the guitar well and used it too. We even wanted to put together a rock band. We agreed on something with the school, where to rehearse, what instruments we could borrow from them for our purposes. All interests were life-affirming. None of us were nerds, did not strive to “bring A’s to our parents” and be the favorites of boring teachers. Then we were also lucky that we had a very good young class teacher, we affectionately called her Oksana, without a patronymic, but not when addressing her, of course. And it so happened that I had something to compare with, since by the end of school, I had definitely had five class teachers.

The peculiarity of that period was that our initially small company grew, absorbing different people from different places, and it was at least cool and felt powerful. We all had one place to gather – the base – a football “box” near the school, which was not used for its intended purpose, but was used to form and strengthen teenage friendships and romantic relationships.