Читать книгу Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment. Life, Illness, Science, and Job search - - Страница 8

There would be no book if everything were fine and smooth. As if parallel to or independent of the psychological climate in my family, I was feling something bad, so difficult to describe. The sadness of hopelessness.

I haven’t had too many objectively difficult events, shocks in my life, that is, something that would happen outside my head. Well, let’s say, earthquakes, loss of loved ones at an early age, various violence, persecution, suicides, drug addiction of relatives, problems with housing, finances, moving. I will describe those that were, and in my opinion, among other factors became the basis for the development of depression.

There were a few assholes. Some from they, when I was in first grade, I don’t remember how exactly, took my toy soldier (I think it was a soldier, or some other toy dear to me, I don’t remember). I think I went home and returned to that place with protection and the intention of returning what was taken, but they weren’t there, they were never found. It was a bitter loss. I grieved over the fact that the World, among other things, is arranged this way.

Other assholes stole our bike. My brother and I were riding around the area where we had a “dacha” when we were stopped by two very unpleasant drug-addicted men. One said, “Let me ride for a while and then I’ll be back soon.” The other stayed with us, sort of waiting. Some time later, under some pretext, he also disappeared. We finally understood what had just happened. We went to the police and started looking for those people ourselves. I remember that we even found the private house where they lived, and the old mother said that my son wasn’t home, but at that moment he was runing away through the vegetable gardens. Everything was mixed up in my memory, but the loss was also very bitter. I reproached myself for my naivety and gullibility. I asked life – how is this even possible? Hm? What is the purpose of what happened, huh, life? Why do I need this? How does nature justify the fact that my bike, against my will, moved to live with someone else? Why, in particular, do assholes exist? In order to cause anger and disappointment in me and others like me? But that’s somehow not humane, isn’t it? So my attitude to life in general was shaken. It wasn’t a problem to find support and peace from such a “stormy” isolated situation. But in that situation i needed some more standart support. After all the thing is that I didn’t agree with the world order then, that there is a need to include such goats and situations associated with them in people’s existence.

But, still, as a small but useful discovery, I then understood from experience that you can’t expect anything good from the police at all. As if: “Hello, police, I’m being killed!” – “So why are you calling us?! When you’re killed, then call.” What can I say about a bicycle, a couple of children and a couple of drug addicts. And of course, then I wanted to find a way to exist, to avoid such situations and not experience such feelings in the future. The search was going to be long…

I had three operations under general anesthesia. One of the moments scared me to death with its hopelessness, and the cold, I think. I don’t remember which operation, I was about 5 or 6 years old, they wheeled me on a gurney to the operating room. The terrifying thing in itself is that I went from a cozy, soft, warm home to lying on a sterile, cold table surrounded by unfamiliar faces in robes in a room which more suitable for leaving life, but not live. I look at the ceiling with huge eyes at this big round lamp, where there are many small bulbs in a circle, and they tell me to count the bulbs, and they put on this transparent mask for anesthesia. I probably counted to three, and then I started to choke. And the horror came. It lasted for a few seconds, probably, but such helplessness and hopelessness overcame me before I passed out. The feeling is roughly as if at first the air came to me through my two nostrils of normal optimal diameter for this function, then after putting on the mask I seemed to be trying to inhale air through the hole of one medical needle. It is as if after this incident I somehow began to live more quietly, since even something like this can happen. This is not even something that makes you want to cry or seek consolation, it is something that makes you just look at a point, and in your head there is a tumbleweed.

There was another near-death experience related to breathing. I caught a cold, a common thing – cough, sore throat. It happend when i was yet ten. My brother and I stayed at home, our friend came to visit. We were playing something, talking, a quiet, ordinary evening. And I started to choke. I couldn’t take a breath and that was it. Panic in my head, and my attention was running, sometimes directed at how to gulp air, sometimes directed at panic. Some air still got in, because It enought to said my brother with the phrase: “I’m going to die.” How many minutes it all lasted – I don’t know, but the amazing thing was the acceptance of the inevitable that came in the first moments with the panic. I thought something like – “well, it’s a pity, of course, that they immediately presented me with such a fait accompli, they didn’t warn me in advance, well, since there is no air for me, then take me up to heaven, ok…”. At some point, interest (if you can call it interest) in trying to take a breath disappeared and it became possible to endure these mockeries of nature over your living organism. Although it is rather nature itself that gave the living such an ability to be distracted before death. Approximately like those people who fall from above, they also “watch cartoons” on the way, since here too nature took pity, and did not leave a person in a clear mind while he flies for a few seconds to the ground, into which he will crash. And returning to the situation where I was suffocating, I will say in advance – I survived then. At the end of all the throwing and attempts to return my breath, I lay down on the floor, and slowly came to my senses. I was quietly happy with the opportunity to breathe.

Another situation with similar panic emotions was in the summer, when I went fishing with my father and his friend on the Ishim River. The river has very steep and high banks, we slowly went down the serpentine paths, and began to fish. And somehow the bank beckoned me to climb up it a little, its beginning was not so steep. And I crawled on all fours, having previously determined for myself the point where I would need to stop, because there already begins a steep climb. It would be fine if I slowly walked, but I quickly climbed there with my head down, having missed the intended point, I found myself in a terrible situation: I can no longer go down in any way, neither backwards nor forwards, only to fall, and I also can not climb up because I do not really see what is there, and have already lost the ability to assess how steep or flat the bank is in order to move along it in one way or another. In general, there was no turning back, forward was terribly scary – forward – could mean worsening the already terrible situation. I would call my father, but he was nowhere to be seen, and what can I explain him, a year will pass before I did it. Theoretically, it would be possible to “stick” to the sand and lie there until they found me, after all, I did not fall, while I was in place and did not move. But being in this suspended state, at a crossroads, turned out to be so painful for me that I did not stay in it for long, and then it was as if I “woke up” the next moment, when my arms and legs carried me, in the end to upstairs. I do not know how I climbed up, it all ended. I took a risk and won. I went back down the serpentine to fish.

And if we talk about near-death experiences at all, they changed my attitude to life in general, not for the better. Okay, there is life, and no one asked me whether I wanted to start it or not, but at some point I just started living, breathing, blinking, etc. But that’s still okay. But why do I need to experience these horror stories about death? Why are they imprinted so vividly, colorfully, in detail in my consciousness? They only make me feel bad. And the understanding that I won’t find answers to my questions made me feel worse. I can’t say something like: “I began to value life because I now know that it will end” or “I accepted my mortality.” So, the quality of my life only decreased.

Oh, school It left a mark on my life that can’t be erased. There was a time in childhood when adults ask something like: so are you going to school soon? To school next year? Do you want to go to school? I didn’t want to go to school, and I answered that I wouldn’t go there. At that time, I was faced that phenomenon when clouds gradually gather over my life, and I can’t do anything about it. I understood, but didn’t want to accept the fact that I would go there, and I had a glimmer of hope that something might happen miracle, but I still knew that that hope will die soon.

I lost that war for freedom and independence. Got dressed and went to school. The first shift – that’s getting up in the morning, cold, dark, my soul is so heavy. What weighed on me was that I had to go there, where i do not want. I don’t want to, but I have to. I had to be in a place where I don’t want to be. I have to. And I don’t want to. But I have to. I have to do something there, and I don’t like it there. New people, new premises that don’t evoke any sympathy, and these teachers too. I now have to spend a lot of time in a place where I didn’t want to. I have to be there every second, minute, hour. I’ve arrived, now I have to stew there in this “have to” for as long as I haven’t even lived yet. A very long time and I really have to. But not for me. I don’t have to, I don’t want to. I’m not cozily, I’m hard. I clearly felt depressed, yes, unfortunately, I was depressed then. And this story will not a day or a week long, and its end is not visible at all for me – a first-grader. And so it happened that nature frightens me with death, and society shoved me into the framework of school – and this “war” was obviously lost, because the forces are too unequal.

Another story that happened later, in the 3rd or 4th grade, is associatively connected with the story about school. I was studying in the second shift (when i go to school around lunchtime), spending the morning at home with my mother. And it happened that I began to cry. I was simply torn apart by the feeling of the unbearableness of my existence, the unbearableness of everything around me, the incomprehension of what was happening to me at all. I cried without stopping, as if in waves – more, then less, then more again… There was no relief from such a weeping. And I do not remember how the sobbing stopped, and how long it continued. This was the first manifestation of emotions in my life that I could not explain by psychological reasons. That is, if in general terms, no one offended me, i did not expected special at school, nothing happened to relatives or friends, I was not physically hurt, etc.

This event came, shook me, remained unexplained, and was put on the shelf in my memory with a note something like: “maybe someday I will understand what it was.” And during my life I often “passed” by these memories, but no explanation was found. And when at 33 I turned to a psychiatrist, after some time I realized that the reasons for my crying were not psychological, that’s why I could not find them, the reasons were physiological, that is, related to the work of my brain. This, as I understand it, was such a “little greeting” from my future autism spectrum disorder and depressive disorder, or, in other words, their “debut”.

Somewhere around elementary school, I had my first unrequited love. She was my classmate, cute, small, physically thin, with a thin voice, and lived in a village not far from the city. I was crazy about her. But she wasn’t crazy about me. It was the first time my sympathy for a girl and her sympathy for me didn’t arise together. Before that, I had been pleasantly lucky that if I liked her, she liked me. But here, it was completely different. I had to make do with the thought that someday, for some reason, she would have romantic feelings for me

Saturday was always a particular challenge for me. We still studied on Saturdays back then. This girl didn’t come to school every Saturday, but according to some unknown schedule. Well, yes, she lived far away, the bus schedule is unreliable, and her parents probably sometimes arranged a full day off for her. So one Saturday could bring me joyful experiences, when she would come into the classroom in the middle of the second lesson, sit down, and I would know that today she was here, and I would feel good, and we would be able to exchange at least a few words, I would be able to look at such beauty. But mostly Saturdays brought me bitter reality, when she didn’t come in the middle of the second or the middle of the third lesson. And I waited so much, looked at the front door of the classroom, listened to the sounds in the hallway, suddenly she was coming, literally hypnotized reality and myself… She didn’t come… which meant that I would have to live out today in gray tones, without love, and the weekend for me was almost in vain. My God, I was still little and already then such experiences. Horror. But i still didn’t ingratiate yourself with her. I don’t remember how it all ended then, but many, many years later I found out that she also moved to Tyumen. But my train of romantic feelings left long ago, there were so many different stations were, stops, and now she is not beautiful to me at all.

I have always had a complicated relationship with sleep. I know that children often take a few hours of sleep during the day. And i just couldn’t sleep during the day. Perhaps, in this regard, it is a good thing that I was not in kindergarten, since there I would probably have had to force myself to sleep during the day under the “oppression” of a dissatisfied teacher who wanted to do something of her own during “quiet hour” and not be busy putting unsettled children to bed. But my relationship with daytime sleep can’t be called a problem – I don’t sleep, well I don’t sleep. But once I did lie down for a while during the day, after my father and I came home from fishing, and fell asleep. When I woke up, it was as if I had woken up from a long-term coma: I couldn’t understand who I was, what was around me, what time it was, what day it was. That is, I was so confused, all the “standard settings of consciousness” were lost, it was like after anesthesia, and it took me time to collect myself again and understand what happened. But the hardest thing for me was going to bed at night. I did not want to sleep, my brain did not turn into sleep mode, regardless of whether I was tired or not. And this was my big conflict with the Universe. After all, there are enough problems as it is, well, can I at least have the opportunity to switch off at night, reboot there, is it really necessary to nightmare me 24/7, I am not a store.

Many children are afraid of dentists. But I am not many children.

I am one of those who was afraid of dentists. It was on my own feet that I had to go to the hated and terrifying hospital, let the latent sadistic women drill my teeth, pick hard with their metal hook in my sore teeth, and wind my dental nerves on those needles of theirs. I did not know what could be more terrible in life than going to the dentist – it was Hell on Earth. It suppressed me for many years, from the first visit until I was 30, approximately. That is so long. It is important to say that I definitely did not see a way out of this situation. I accepted the conviction for myself: “this will be my whole life, as long as I have teeth.” My picture of the world consisted of this. How can I fully enjoy something today if I know that in a while I will again find myself in that damn chair?..

For some reasons, dentists came to our school to examine and treat our teeth. They were located in a small room near the dining room and the stairs leading to the library and assembly hall. It was a strange location within the school walls for me, different feelings were mixed in one cauldron: warmth and interest in relation to the library and assembly hall, appetite in relation to the dining room, and horror in relation to the “branch” of Hell. The walls of a real dentistry are frightening, but here they seemed to have appeared from the last century, and the instruments and approach to treatment were appropriate. I would not be surprised if they had an old drill with a handle like a mechanical meat grinder.

They came in the third school term – the longest, frosty, darkest term (dark because it was winter outside). It would seem that there were enough negative events for such a term, but no. And then every year at one point during the lesson they come to our class and say, like, three people to the dentist. So what? Should I think about the lesson, like, while these trios are leaving and coming? I was shaking, panicking, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, there were simply no thoughts in my head that could support me. I wanted everything to fail, and I would go there too. Year after year, year after year. The third term. And one day I decided for myself that I would not go there, and I would not sit in their chair, and I would not open my mouth. But I had to go, I just had to and that’s it. Somehow I managed to time the teacher and the end time of the lesson and the traffic of these three so that I left the lesson and was not counted. Although it was so scary that someone would look at some list and see that there was nothing next to my last name, and how they would start to haunt me. But that didn’t happen. Incredible luck. But the luck is temporary, because eventually I had to treat everything. But before the treatment I was able to neglect some teeth, so that not holes of caries but “craters” formed in them, so they could not be saved, and by the age of 25 I already had three chewing teeth missing. I had reasons to neglect my teeth, although these reasons were not entirely rational, but, nevertheless, this is how I ensured my emotional safety. I would can list many and long cases in the dentist’s office from which I suffered, but I mention one and the last one that I remember.

I was already living in Tyumen at the time. And I didn’t know from experience that you can avoid many problems if you go to a private dental clinic (although this is not a fact, but the chances of preserving your mental health increase many times over). I didn’t know it, so I went to a state clinic, which was located on the outskirts of the city, on an ugly street called “Narodnaya”, where on one side there are gray, scary panel apartment buildings, on the other side there are garages, on the ground there is dirty snow, black slush, and a cold wind from all sides, next to a gas station and it’s like the end of the city. The walls inside the clinic match the exterior of the street. And, of course, a fat old doctor dissatisfied with life, who, I’m sure, likes to give a painkiller injection in the wrong place, as long as it gets in the mouth and that’s fine, and it’s not her taste to bother with numbing the exact tooth she’s going to treat. There was an injection, after all. You can’t present anything, like. What claims… She starts – it hurts – I endure. She continues – it hurts even more – I endure, writhing there of course, fidgeting in the chair. She finishes – it hurts a lot – blood splashes from her mouth onto her white robe – I actually slid somewhere to the floor as if. I slid as if I was running away from her. And now before my eyes there are red droplets on white and a sediment of thoughts that it seems like it shouldn’t be like this. Well, no, anything can happen, but something like this just shouldn’t be. Even in the Russian Federation on “Narodnaya” street.

I have seen this kind of behavior of doctors, when they use well-known facts as a cover, like their medical interventions can often be painful for patients, give free rein to their “sadistic demons” and taste the sweetness of power and the opportunity to mock another person more than once. Since I worked with people most of my life, and worked in the state office, then they all wanted to be sure that everything was fine with my health. So it was necessary to undergo a medical examination. One of the medical analysis suggested that something like a mini-brush should be inserted into my genitals, right into the hole where I pee, and rubbed there to collect biomaterial. Twice, it seems, with a frequency of several years, I went there, where the same woman as in the story about the dentist was sitting and poking this thing into me, and I had such a sharp, intense, acute pain that my eyes almost went dark. My lightning-fast reaction or desire, which I suppressed because I was in society, without even pulling up my pants, was to slap her hard across the mug and scream fuck! fuck! bitch! moron! And fuck! But I endured. And I didn’t know that a wonderful discovery was waiting for me ahead.

That discovery was a female doctor who performed the same procedure at the next medical examination, and did it in such a way that I did not feel a drop of pain. She was simply a morally healthy person, at least for performing her medical functions. I went into her office, again prepared for the worst, she came up, did the procedure, kindly said that everything was done, and I could go, and switched her attention back to her phone, continuing to type. I was glad about this event.

Returning to dentists, in the end I came to the point that I experienced violence against myself with them, such moral violence, one of the types of violence provided to the people by the state. Unfortunately, the “soil” for this violence was my lack of knowledge that a visit to the dentist does not necessarily have to be terribly painful. As I later found out during the investigation of the causes of my phobia, my mother herself was panicky afraid of dentists. And for her, all these trips to the doctors were a real torture. And of course, she herself did not know that you can visit the dentist and not fall into a state of panic at all, so she kind of distanced herself from this area of my life.

I also often heard from people around me that dental treatment is not painful at all. Hearing such opinions at first, I looked for the problem in myself, thought that I was somehow too weak to endure pain like a man, it was very offensive because of this. And here I am in a situation where they tell me that dentists are not painful, but I feel this pain. Add to this the fact that they always gave me anesthesia, and waited a few minutes for it to work, and often added more, but it was still terribly painful for me. Well, here, of course, I reasoned something like, well, everyone’s body is different, maybe anesthesia does not work well for me – that is, again, I put everything on myself. That’s it, there is no way out of this situation. That’s it, there are no options left. The world, the environment will not help me here in any way. Go and live with this, go and endure, take your panic and close the door from the other side, since you are so complicated. “That” is not “this” to him, and “this” is not “that” to him… Wonderful, right?

And of course, I didn’t talk to anyone about the psychological component, namely about the “satanic” motivation of dentists, because these thoughts are too “for an amateur”, too “not related to reality”. Therefore, I had to go to the dentist, so I went. And I was a lucky catch for the sadists in white coats, because I met important criteria: in my eyes at the threshold of the office it was clear that I was depressed, and I was not going to leave, because I knew that it was better to suffer now than later, because then nothing would change, and in my lifetime there would be no future with new technologies for painless dental treatment. Because we are still too close to the Dark Ages. In my eyes you could see the horror that attracts sadists, much like blood attracts vampires, I will not tell anyone about what happened to me, I do not bite, do not scream or roar, in general, I do not attract unnecessary attention from the corridors of the clinic. This is a hypothesis about my relationship with dentists, quite coherent, but I will not test it for pragmatic reasons: my “dentist case” is closed. I am not afraid of them at all now. Maybe I want to share, but it would take too long to tell how I dealt with it. The only thing that relates to this paragraph is the sediment in my soul that remained after prolonged moral violence. That is all about dentists. The paragraph below is on a different topic.

I had one of the groups I hung out with. There were five of us. And the event happened back in the days when there were no mobile phones, and we would agree in advance what time and where to meet. We would also call each other on our home phones and invite each other to go for a walk. And if there was some kind of glitch, then you just go and go to the places where we usually hung out and find friends. Yes, there were no mobile phones, but we were already drinking with this group… This is by the way about our age.

So one day, I think it was a summer day, I was expecting a call from my friends, but I didn’t get one. I called them myself, their parents said they were out for a walk. Strange, but okay. No, that’s already strange, without “okay”. I get ready, go out, and go to all the places where we could be found. I went everywhere, there was no one anywhere. I was so upset then that I wanted to spend the day in one way, but it all went down the drain. And this upset was so hard to stop, also because I didn’t understand where everyone had gone. I came home, and I don’t remember whether it was in the evening or the morning of the next day that I got through to one of my friends, and he said something like this: “don’t you understand, we abandoned you over.” “abandoned” means they unilaterally made and implemented a decision to stop communicating with me.

I have never heard the word “abandoned” in this sense before or after. I don’t remember how I reacted then, of course I wasn’t happy, but it didn’t become a big shock that knocked me down either. Although for the next few days I had a hard time rebuilding my life for being alone. It was especially hard not to know what influenced their decision, why they stopped communicating with me, and of course, I wanted to communicate. On summer days and evenings, sometimes such sadness would creep up on me about the missed walks, about the fact that right now I could go for a walk, but I don’t. I remember that I didn’t like spending time alone at all, as if I was carrying this burden, serving out a moral sentence. This stage of my life was somehow endlessly gray. But I also had no intention of asking to join a company.

What’s the matter? Why didn’t I approach my friends so suddenly? Especially since nothing had happened in the last day or two, no arguments, no complaints, etc. Everything was going well, the friendship was floating. And the matter was in one fat red skunk, as I understood later. There was one guy who occupied a leading position in the friends company, but probably with my arrival he began to lose it. Another thing that often worked against him was that his parents forced him to stay at home with his very small brother. It’s a shame when friends build booths and try alcohol and gasoline in them, and you sit at home with a very small brother. And, in general, it was noticed that he was a real liar. A professional one. And this talent of his as a bullshit-monger helped him turn his suggestible friends against me, thereby bringing everyone back under his control.

What did I learn from this? That communication with people is generally an unstable phenomenon. Even friends are not constant. But without drama. I also learned that I am able to interrupt communication with people whom I consider close today. This is a difficult, but pleasant understanding. It supports my independence. I realized that I have a problem with not liking being alone with myself. I did not know then how it should feel to be alone with myself for a long time. But I made a note that I need to return to this in order to figure out what’s what. And much later, when I was about thirty, I had to return to this issue when it arose very painfully. But then in childhood, time went on and on, and passed, autumn and school came, and I became closer to other guys, and it was better. I knew them all before, but now I began to communicate differently. The company we created turned out to be psychologically healthy. And to this day we maintain relations, although we live in different countries.

Oh, high school algebra and high school geometry, I hate you with all my heart. Just think, I was never an excellent student, not counting elementary school, but three Fs in a term is still quite something. If I recall correctly, in 7th grade I got a “2” in algebra in a term, and in 8th grade I got a “2” in algebra and a “2” in geometry in different terms (a “2” is the worst grade you can get, you can’t imagine anything worse). The most painful thing was that for me, all of algebra and geometry were nothing more than numbers placed in different places on a line, Latin letters, and geometric shapes drawn with a ruler. I completely didn’t understand the essence of the subjects. More precisely, when I studied with tutors, I understood what was there and how to do it technically – I did it without any problems. But as soon as I finished it, it immediately disappeared from my mind – “passed and forgot.” Because I simply couldn’t remember those three-story equations for long because the curriculum required it. As a schoolchild, I didn’t need them. And even the person writing this now still doesn’t need them, and almost half my life has passed. I hope it’s half my life. Because I didn’t understand them and didn’t want to, algebra and geometry lessons probably became the breeding ground for my anxiety. I had to somehow cope with my level of knowledge in these subjects. Okay, homework is always copied either from classmates or from a homework collection. Okay, a test or a quarterly assignment is either copied in advance from friends in parallel classes or, during the assignment itself, from classmates. I’m just being so simple now, although to achieve these goals, naturally, you had to become a master at getting out of hopeless situations and a master at cheating under the teacher’s nose. I’m not called to the board that often, and my classmates still help me by whispering, and the teacher doesn’t expect much from me.

But we are moving towards a bright, reasonable future, and the end of the 9th and the end of the 11th grade will put everything in its place. At the beginning, I was preparing for the Unified National Testing (in Kazakhstan), and in the end I took the Unified State Exam (USE). In essence, both are the same thing: stupid tests instead of checking knowledge. But at these wonderful exams there will be no opportunity to cheat from anyone, to peek anywhere, or to exchange cheat sheets in the toilet – Nothing. You’ve had enough, you who don’t know mathematics! We’ll expose you! And get out of high society! Sweep the floors, or whatever else you’re good for… And how can you stay calm here? To whom and how can I prove what? Who can I approach and say that I’m not an ass if I don’t like and don’t understand mathematics? There’s no one. As a result, several years of life awaiting the highest pedagogical court. The math teachers pour out their sadistic venom at every convenient and inconvenient opportunity, lamenting about those who do not understand math, that they need to go to a vocational school for everything (this is kind of an insult, because, as a rule, stupid kids go to study in such schools).

Yes, I hated math teachers. It was hatred. A very intense and long-lasting feeling. And my body allocated mental resources for this. Very expensive and traumatic for a schoolchild. It is very annoying to hear unpleasant words and not be able to find support for your position from the outside. Not in the sense of friends or parents, they were on my side. But in the sense that taking an exam on tests was invented by people without brains, approved at some high level, passed down to the math teachers of all schools in the country, and these teachers broadcast this, feeling such influential people from politics behind them.

They were the ones who were carrying the “truth”, since they approved it at the federal level, and put a blue seal on it. And what about me? And I’m sitting and reducing my anxiety in class by beautifully copying numbers from the board into a notebook. For me, the notebook was like a canvas, like a sheet of paper on which i “draw with numbers.” I’ll sum up the paragraph – here, for the first time, I probably encountered a manifestation of mass idiocy in a serious and global way – society is forcing me to learn something that I can’t stand and don’t want, society is threatening to give me a tough final exam, and the same society has come up with the most idiotic form of conducting this exam. Society continues – if I don’t know mathematics, then I’m not much of a person. But I’m smart, I have my own point of view, and I declare that it is this stratum of society that is characterized by a decrease in intellectual abilities, and not me. But our social roles and powers are different: I am alone, and I am a schoolboy, but there are many of them, and they are teachers, head teachers, school principals, and higher and higher and dumber… I couldn’t just brush it off, like forget, ignore, say to myself something like: screw them… No, here I was faced with the fact that this is such a global problem of humanity, of society.

How can I live in a world where a large mass of God knows what kind of people can depress the life of another person with their quantity? I’m not the only one who doesn’t like math. And math is not the point here, I just showed an example with it. I’m not the only normal person who has an unpopular opinion who suffers from the fact that my opinion and tastes don’t fit into this Procrustean bed of yours. This paragraph will probably flow smoothly into another topic. After all, okay, the exam, to hell with it, I’ll pass it, I’ll survive it, but it’s not just the exam that awaits me ahead. As soon as I finish school and the gates are closed behind me, there are already “collectors from the motherland” waiting for me, or, to use everyday language, representatives of the military registration and enlistment office.

From that moment on, grades in math cease to mean anything, and the attention and conversation turns to my morality, whether it is high i have or low. If it is high, they say, then I run to meet them, jump into military suit, make my bed according to the ruler, march in formation, shave my head, love routine and follow orders from representatives of the homeland, leave home for two years, and sing sad army songs in three chords with a guitar (At least that’s what they do in Russia). Well, I kind of pay my moral debt to the homeland. Although, those debts that I took from the boys, I paid them, but those were money. And putting the words “debt” and “homeland” next to each other is such nonsense that I don’t even want to seriously analyze it. And since I don’t run to them and don’t consider myself a debtor, then my morality, in their estimation, is automatically low, and in general, as a person, I admit that I am low-quality. But I don’t give a damn about their assessment of my human qualities. Something else worries me. After all, since I don’t run to them, they run after me, such a low-quality person, but they still run, they want to knock out debts. I can temporarily hide in a “little house” – go to university to study for 5 years. But they will be waiting for me there at the gates. In general, this is not a way out. And hiding, making excuses about illnesses there, tuck my tail between my legs – this is not my taste. Ah, my homeland, my homeland. Ah, the Kazakh steppes and Russian birches. It turns out that my homeland is stalking me. Stalking me. Wow, abuse on a national scale! I don’t want to, but they make me. And in this case, who should I turn to? Who should I tell that I fundamentally disagree with the fact that someone once determined that they have the right to use two years of my life against my will? I was not at that meeting, and if I had been, I would not have voted “for”.

And I still have a conflict in my soul, a feeling of misunderstanding with society, at least with a significant part of it. But still, light was shed on this difficulty of mine, and it became a little, but still easier for me, when I learned about the scientific works of one good man – Erich Fromm. Before he and his colleagues put forward a fresh assumption about the nature of psychopathology, scientists thought and reasoned something like this:

– Are you mentally ill?

– Yes.

– Well, it’s in you fault, let’s examine you, then treat you.

And Erich Fromm and his colleagues formulated their view approximately as follows: it is not the person who is sick, it is society. And then they opened the gates to the field of studying society itself and the manifestations of its diseases. Therefore, I responsibly declare that when I do not like mathematics and do not intend to repay the “debt” to the motherland, then everything is fine with me, but society has gone crazy in this matter. And let there be many “of them”, and few of me. I believe my eyes, ears, brain and heart. Of course, this discovery did not completely solve my life problems. Because it is one thing to know about the limitations of society, another thing to live your life in this society without having the opportunity to influence it. And this conflict, and living my life certainly did not add strength and joy to me, since almost every day I have to deal with the “painful crumbs or grains of sand of society”, because it is clear that the “metastases” have reached not only mathematics and the army, but have dispersed and absorbed into simple, everyday and other aspects of scosiety’s life.

There was something else that had a background effect on my mental state for a very long time – music. I listened to Russian rock. And foreign metal. But metal is okay, but there is something to tell about Russian rock. It is, as I finally understood, many years later, music that strongly suppresses the joy of life. For me, the meaning of Russian rock is the glorification of suffering, adding sweet, enticing shades and colors to the process of suffering. It’s a pity, perhaps, but then I combined flies with cutlets, and took Russian rock as the standard of my favorite music.

Returning to the “flies” and “cutlets”, the “cutlets” were the sounds of musical instruments – guitar, bass, drums, etc. I really liked listening to their parts, separating one while listening and listening, enjoying, imagining how I would play it. Even my body seemed to react to the sound inside. And I liked playing my favorite melodies on the guitar. But my “cutlets” were mixed with “flies” – these are these depressive rockers: more often men, less often women, often using drugs, alcohol, in the lyrics of their songs dissecting sadness, melancholy, meaninglessness, anger, despair, betrayal to atoms, presenting it in a symphony of pleasant sounds.

Of course, in some teenage years they played a positive role, allowing me to react (or live through, or survive, or outlive) my teenage emotions associated with being lost in the World, with not understanding Where is everything going? What is happening around? Who am I?… But some time later this music interfered me, but I did not know clear at once that it affected me so much. It was built into my life like, say, my hand or ear. That is, I did not even think that it (rock music) could be separated from me, that I could leave it and go away myself. I did not understand that there was still music in the world where I could enjoy the beautiful sound of instruments – that is, “cutlets” in their pure form, without depressive “flies.” It is not surprising, because the market of accessible music was Russian pop, rap, chanson, jazz. In pop music, the music is elementary and soullessly electronic, in rap there is no music at all, except maybe bass, chanson – no discussion, and jazz even a child can play by simply plucking the strings or poking the keys out of tune.

That’s why I listened to Russian rock, “sat on it” like a drug addict, got depressed, and thought that everything that was sung there was folk wisdom, and everyone who sang there was a sage who had lived a life, and they were sharing it with me, a young man. And I had no reason to look for alternative views on life. “Love is beautiful, but cruel, society is stronger than me, but it is not for me, few understand me, I suffer, but I still hold on” – that’s the whole philosophy of Russian rock.

In the end, I got rid of this music, but it had worn me out and led me astray. In a sense, it was either a friend or a drug for me, which I often turned to. I turned to it when I was sad, when I was really bad, I turned to it when I was happy (oh, it’s so strange…), and this drug-friend always gave me nothing but depression with a good accompaniment. Nothing but. And I am one of those who almost always had headphones in their ears. So it turned out to be such a simple insidiousness of habit: I feel bad, but I know little else except to turn to where this “bad” will be multiplied even more in my soul.

Earlier I talked about learning to play the piano, in this paragraph I will note that it was very painful for me. I did not want to learn to play this instrument, I did not like it. I did not have any pianist idols to listen to on my player, for example. My body did not respond to this instrument. But then I could not defend my right to quit studying. My parents calmly, but very convincingly left me at the piano. It was a difficult time. Studying assumed that I did my homework almost every day, and studied with a teacher twice a week. And I started studying late, at about 11, I think. It was just that age when I incredibly wanted to spend all my free time outside with friends. And it’s not that I sat at the instrument for hours every day, no, but even those minutes that I did my homework were difficult for me, dragging on, suppressing my mood. And I could freak out if something didn’t work out.

The piano teacher was a strange woman, especially when it came to time. She came to my house at 2 p.m., I think. But in fact, she probably came at 2 p.m. several times, all the other times she was late, and she was late for a long time. Half an hour, forty minutes, sometimes an hour. And so every time 2 p.m. came, I began to expect something wonderful from the World. I wanted so much for something to happen, and for these shackles to fall off me. For there to be no more classes. I wanted so much for some phenomenon to take my side, because my parents and the teacher wanted me to study, and I was alone in my unwillingness. And the teacher also burdened me with her lateness. And with every minute that passed after 2 p.m. my hope for a miraculous outcome grew, as if I was falling into a daydream while awake, but at the same time the “voice of reality” was saying “damn, she’ll be here any minute now.” It also added, “while you’re naively hoping for something… she’s already left her house a few minutes ago, walked down the street, and is now somewhere nearby… the outcome was determined in advance, you’re dreaming in vain, you’re only making things worse.” And, probably, in 98% of cases the “voice of reality” was right. Usually maybe 2:19 or maybe, 2:34 p.m. the doorbell was rang, and all the castles in the air built in my mind instantly collapsed, dissolved, replaced by a bad mood and a trip to the door to open it. However, there was still 2%, and sometimes she managed to forget that we had a lesson. Forget, yes. Although this was not a salvation either, since it was the cancellation of only one lesson, and not the entire training.

The roots of depression here are that a significant part of my life was not regulated by me, was not in my power, was not used by me. Inside, I resisted, rebelled, but deep down in my soul, I seemed to consider this one of the characteristics of life, that this is how it should be – that there are some sufferings that I will not be able to get rid of, because this is how life is arranged and that’s it, period. This is very bitter. And if you step back from this situation and look from afar, it becomes clear that I was simply a “good boy” who could not defend his rights to his desires and his unwillingness, for the time of his life. As it turned out, I defended them too “quietly” and modestly. In the end, I did defend them. But it took quite a long time by my standards. And here, using the piano as an example, I understand that there are still many life situations where it will be difficult for me to defend my rights, and where, just like the first time, I will encounter that bitter belief that this is how life is and nothing can be done about it, and only then, after some time, straighten up and stand up for myself. And the story with the piano has a life-affirming ending: before moving to Tyumen, I sold the piano myself for good money, so the instrument and lessons remained in Petropavlovsk, and I left. Well done! And from my performed repertoire, I liked and remembered Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” the most.

The move to Tyumen started interestingly and as if it were just a fantasy. At first, I just knew that we were moving soon. I told my friends. And in general, it was such a pleasant time, I even felt a little cool that we were going to go to a fairly large Russian city. Especially since I had already been to Tyumen a couple of times, and I thought that it was just awesome here – tall buildings, interchange bridges, big roads and distances, and traffic jams like on TV in Moscow or the USA. There was none of this in my city. Time passed, I finished the last quarter of my school, we sold the apartment, sold the industrial buildings, and the move turned into reality. By that time, I no longer wanted such a reality.

We were leaving my grandparents’ apartment. Early in the morning in November my friends came to see me off, we stood in the entryway, said our final words, hugged and I began to feel sad. I got into the car and turned on the player. Two songs accompanied me the whole way: Pavel Kashin “Black Box”, Mumiy Troll “Go, I Will” (Павел Кашин “Чёрный ящик”, Мумий Тролль “Иди, я буду”). They colored my bitter despondency. There was a hitch at customs, my parents did not declare the money they were carrying with them, and this, how can I say, is not very welcome. The customs officers kept confusing us about this for a long time, they wanted us to come to an agreement with them and give them a bribe. While all this was happening, as when I was waiting for my music teacher, I was daydreaming in the car at customs something like this: “Oh, to hell this Tyumen, how i wish something happened so that we would turn around and go back, we would arrive and everything would be fine, like it was before, hear me, World, please do it.” But my parents shared some money with the customs officers, they were happy and let us go further. And two songs started playing on the player even more tragically. When we entered the city, it was dark. We dragged a few things up to the third floor, I went into the apartment. The move was complete. It was already late, I didn’t want to sleep. But I didn’t want to see myself in those circumstances – in that apartment, in that city, in that cold November i did not too. So it was better to fall asleep. It was sad to go to bed, because I wanted to smoke, take some nasvay, get drunk, laugh with friends like a teenager, but instead there was a sterile and boring family environment, and longing for a home that was already truly and forever lost. I don’t remember how I fell asleep, but I would never want to fall asleep under such circumstances again.

Gradually, the new place of residence revealed itself to me from an unsightly side. We settled on the outskirts of the city at that time, I went to a school where there were plenty of idiots. The neighborhood, yes, like the city as a whole, was configured as if against green vegetation. It was all made of concrete and asphalt. This both upset and irritated me at the same time, how could one live like that at all. By the way, to this day in the yard where my parents now live, and in the house, which is already about thirty years old, there is one birch that accidentally grew and a small tree that seems to have started to die since my arrival, but can’t do it – everything else is in the style of the city: asphalt, brick, garages and a barrier so necessary for human happiness. For several years, I didn’t understand why I stopped feeling autumn the way I used to… Then I understood, and it turned out that there were no yellow-red leaves under my feet that I could rustle and kick. Only bare asphalt, please. Well, not completely bare, of course, but since there are only a few trees in the entire city, there is, accordingly, little foliage.

I don’t like the climate in Tyumen. If it rains, the rain is sure to be cold. If it’s a summer evening, you definitely need a sweater. If it’s hot outside, you can melt. But you can feel with your skin that the air is not warm, and the heat is exclusively due to the sun’s rays. And in Petropavlovsk, the air was pleasantly warmed up. Winter was sometimes wild in Petropavlovsk, but in Tyumen there are some days with a wind that blows through all your bones, no matter what you wear. And all this weather put a lot of pressure on my mental state – I couldn’t do anything about it, and my mood directly depended on the weather, there were rare exceptions. And in general, it was difficult to know that I had moved from a northern city even further north, and I don’t see any noticeable advantages at all that would compensate for this loss.

I had a hard time breaking up with my social circle. I had no interest in making new acquaintances, friends – it just happened gradually, somehow, by itself. But there was one event that greatly complicated my adaptation to the new place of residence – it was my falling in love. Already living in Tyumen, during school holidays I went to Petropavlovsk, and my company was replenished – a new friend girl,. I remember how we met, and something started inside me that could not be stopped. We spent time together in the company of friends, got to know each other better, but did not romanticize our relationship in any way. I returned home, another quarter at school began, sometimes I had pleasant memories of communicating with her, but I somehow strictly decided for myself that that nothing will work out between me and her. Simply because we live in different cities, we are far from each other, and I do not need to fall in love, and then suffer from it. Summer was approaching, and the holidays, which I fully intended to spend in my homeland. And a few days before my trip, this girl writes me a message, with which our romantic relationship begins. My previously made strict decision flew into the trash from joy.

This relationship gave me a wonderful period of my life. It had a “main figure and background”. The “main figure” is the brightest, deepest, most beautiful feelings towards a girl that I have ever experienced. And the “background” is the feeling of desired complete satisfaction with the fabric of everyday life, the desire to continue to feel the environment and move, gratitude to the ability to live and Being. Then I know for sure that I was completely satisfied with my life, and did not want to change anything. If I wanted changes, then only simple and pleasant ones, but not those that need to be made because it is no longer possible to do otherwise. I had fallen in love before, even with two girls at the same time, but that temporary infatuation. But that i am believed that i am feeling had for her could not be exhausted, stopped, and therefore I looked to the future with the understanding that my path would no longer be so much mine as ours together. I remember then I was very inspired by the idea that we were now like a single whole. And I could experience this feeling from experience. I was lucky to have met such a person, with whom I did not seem to get acquainted as with someone else, and i feeling that we were with her parts of something one and early. That is why all the processes of our human interaction were instantly set up by themselves. There was no need to rub in, be shy, pretend, convey to each other each our “philosophy of attitude to life”, because they were very similar. These were relationships that included my ideal vision of friendship, romance and simply some kind of magical, and such a harmonious attraction of two living beings.

I remember that at one moment I experienced two essentially different views on life, on existence. Since I was coming to Kazakhstan already as a Russian, I had to go to a government office to register and extend my permit to stay in the country for more than three days. And my girlfriend and I went there together to deal with this red tape. We were standing in line together, but at one point I somehow moved away a few meters. I was busy with something and somehow in the process of all this my gaze shifted to the side where She was standing. And just moments before She appeared in the center, in the focus of my field of vision, I managed to see and feel a gray, meaningless “nothing”. The boredom, abandonment and uselessness of what was happening: the worn-out pocket of a cheap jacket of an uncle, a hastily knocked together tasteless table where a crowd fills out papers with pens on a string (so that they don’t get stolen) according to samples that are always in short supply, the bellies of men and women, such by a bad life, the ridiculous headdress of an elderly woman, and all of this somehow fell on me, and was black and white, lifeless, dead, as if apart from this room, apart from these meaningless activities there was nothing else, everything was reduced to this nothing. The next moment She comes into my field of vision and attention. Her image is so colorful, full of life, breath, interest. Her short stature, the unique way of standing, the knitted hat, clothes, beautiful face. I somehow quietly, quietly, to myself was glad that my eyes see her, that she is, that she exists in that place, in that World where I found myself, that we met, that we are together, we are united, and I am incredibly lucky in this, I cannot want and do not expect any more gifts from fate, everything has come true for me, further – everything is applied, I will do this myself, without expecting miracles from fate.

This view of my life, of my beloved, was constant then. The “peak” of our relationship was the summer that I spent in Petropavlovsk. I really needed that summer, because last fall I was hit by a move, autumn, winter and spring in a still strange city, and it was so good to return to the warm homeland, to forget about the difficulties of my reality and to surrender to love. I enjoyed the time that we spent together – we walked all day long, stayed with friends in rented apartments to have fun, drink, smoke, get high, swimming to river went by trolleybuses and buses to public beaches and secluded places on small country ponds, hugged, kissed, stood for a long time in her entrance before I ran out in order to have time to rush home to my grandparents at the appointed time. After returning home and until bedtime, we hung on the phone. A beige home telephone from my childhood, her voice on the phone, me inside an old cozy checkered armchair from the USSR – these were the endings of my summer days.

I was happy all the time we were together, even if I went to Tyumen. At a distance, we wrote each other an unrealistic number of SMS and called each other, then still on the home phone via “long-distance”.

However, such a life did not last long. One beautiful cool autumn day, before the snow, I managed to come to Petropavlovsk not during the holidays, but somehow in the middle. I made a surprise. It is happend for my friends. And so we are standing with them in that very football box near the school, which was not used for its intended purpose, chatting and laughing, and a little further away, from where everyone usually came to the box, I see a divinely beautiful red hat and my favorite silhouette. Oh, these moments of parting and meeting with her, they were always so emotionally intense and significant. Of course, our eyes meet something like a romantic passage from a book or a film begins, when we rush towards each other, touch, etc.

Probably, for an outside observer it would look like: lovebirds meet in a standard way after a long separation. But as a participant in this beautiful moment, I saw and felt some foreign variable that definitely should not have been there. The meeting of our gazes and desire for each other were not so smooth and completely given over to the control of love. Something confused me, but I could not even think what exactly, although this unknown variable had already irrevocably changed my life.

A few hours later I found out that a boy named Sasha from our school had settled in the heart of my beloved. And the hat, the sight of which that morning made me almost faint from the experience of happiness, was not intended for me, but rather for the boy named Sasha. Because I, like an undesirable-sudden husband, who came back from a business trip on Monday, although they were expecting me by Friday. I somehow found out this story, found out that they didn’t seem to have a full-fledged romance yet, and I also don’t remember how we made peace that same day, decided to continue our relationship. She even reinforced the agreement by deleting either a photo or correspondence with him from her phone, and I decided to somehow process and explain to myself such an act of my kazakh love and continue living.

During that day I thought that my mind was clear, I didn’t feel anything supernatural, except that it was painful and offensive in my soul. It was such a working state as if I had been at the market all day, walking for a long time, choosing, buying and carrying many things home. And I don’t know how, but I managed to fall asleep that day.

The night opened the royal road to my unconscious and showed me what I had actually experienced during the day. In terms of the level of hopelessness, this state was similar to that when films show a period slightly after the Middle Ages and where a hopelessly ill dying person lies in a white bed, on an uncomfortable huge pillow and in a fever, he is shakering with pain, there is nothing to help him with, and a concentrate of worldly suffering has fallen on him before he exhales his last. I do not remember the content of the dreams that night, but I woke up many times, physically I was sick of the mental state, there was a desire to do something, to move my muscles in order to “shake off” the pain that is in me, but it was night outside, silence, almost complete darkness and there was no point in moving, whether you move or not. Before my eyes was the bottom of the wardrobe, the second pillow, the ceiling, and so on in a circle all night long, and when drowsiness set in, then a terrible dream would immediately begin about her action that was killing me, and I would immediately try to jump out of the dream, and having jumped, I would end up in the same room and in reality I would experience all the same states as in the dream, but from a different perspective, from a “different director.”

Something that I was very afraid of happened to me, and I can’t change it in any way, I can’t forget it, I can’t live with it. Our relationship will never go back to what it was before. All her words, all my hopes and dreams about her attitude towards me, all the hopes that she values me, thinks about me and that I am that one person for her for the rest of her life… Everything shattered, broke apart without warning, and in its place I was overcome by emotions from hell. I don’t remember what happened in the morning, I don’t remember how we met and looked at each other, but from that moment our relationship died, although formally it continued to exist for several more months.

And then and the formal existence ended when she said that her loved one should be nearby with her, but I’m not nearby, I’m in Tyumen, i am far away. It was funny not to meet such a simple criterion, and at the same time it’s hard that all that romantic, wonderful heaven created had to end again because I’m not nearby. One could exclaim something like: what about those words? what about love? what about our innermost dreams? you and I accidentally “cheated” the system and felt the most genuine love without suffering… But the answer would be just about: “I am not there, and therefore do not meet the criteria”. As a result, the romance ends, she leaves, and gives her love to a lucky boy who lives very close to her. Therefore, I refrained from these lamentations. And I began to dislike Tyumen even more, not on purpose, of course, and it was not logical. Not only did the city take away both friends and the love of my life, but I also had to return to it and get back into the life pattern in order to live on.

I was killing my love for her for a long time, but the love did not to die. I kept wanting to meet, to say something that would change something, resurrect the relationship, but it was unrealistic. And what can I say, since I was so exchanged. Then, if I can put it this way, I used the tactic of “suppressing” my feelings for her – I tried not to think, to get distracted, to forget, to delete contacts, photos, messages, I even burned her memorabilia, gifts that I kept with such warmth. I suppressed my feelings, and they transformed there inside me and again sprouted in the form of fantasies and hopes. Even once, returning home from school, I noticed a car driving in the distance, the same as her stepfather’s, I looked closely at the license plates of the car, I never saw the exact numbers, but I saw that the license plates were Kazakh, with the letter “T” at the beginning, indicating that very region of the country. Then the car turned towards my yard. While I was watching car, my legs carried me, and that is good no one car hit me. Because I daydreamed that it was she who arrived, asked my stepfather to bring her, that she decided to take such a step… I saw the car from afar, so I had time to daydream and “escape from reality” while I was run up to my yard. Along with dreams, there was also an inner voice, which, of course, dissuaded me from the idea that such a miracle could happen. I don’t remember how it all ended, but of course, in the end it wasn’t her. And this whole situation was just a typical mental reaction of a person experiencing sorrowful feelings.

The love story began, when I was a happy teenager, but gradually turned into an unhappy young man. I was sure that I would never be able to love anyone else at all, and that’s how it happened. This whole story took about six years of my life, of which only about a year was spent on our relationship. Another year I had another relationship, which I ended, realizing that I still did not love another, and that my heart was asking to return in past relationship again. In general, the essence is clear – I was “charmed” for a long time, in the end I gave in greatly because of this, it’s a pity, of course, that all this pain happened at such a young age, although it is unlikely that there is an optimal period in life for this. And then I was disenchanted, the spell has been lifted from me. And if further in the text it makes sense to tell how this happened, then I will. But for now I told such a love story because, as I said above, it greatly complicated my moral move to another place of residence. And when I ended that relationship inside myself, “got off the dead horse,” then I was inspired to be open to a new love from Tyumen.

My move did happen, it was painful, but it happened. It was painful first of all because it wasn’t me who made the decision to leave my homeland, and it wasn’t me who chose the place I was going to. If we take it globally, then in the end I agree that the move was necessary – but that’s another topic. And in continuation of this, it’s important to say that I paid a very high price for the change in my life. So, now I lost the feeling that my city – my home. I loved my hometown, I loved living there, and it was an extension of me, my inner world, my space, and I was an extension of it. I was like a fish in its pond. My roots were there, and so, by and large, I was never drawn to “break out of a small town and into the big world.” But what happened happened. There was sadness, and probably still remains to this day, that having left my native place, my home, I never found another home. I still have no love for the city of Tyumen, no feeling that I am in my warm, native, beloved environment, no feeling that I am dissolved in the city. I am here as a separate unit, building business, almost working relations with the city. And now, twenty years later, I no longer expect and do not want these relations to become qualitatively different. It would seem that if I return to live in Petropavlovsk, then that’s it, I will, as before, find myself in my environment, but no.

I seriously thought about moving, and often visiting it, “trying on” a return… But we parted with Petropavlovsk, and it, like me, went its own way. It became different. Almost everyone who is dear to me has already left there, or died. And the appearance of the city has changed and continues to do so in a completely different direction than before. Architecture like “Birdshit Architects” came to my favorite green old park, a cozy front garden near the school, where there were many different beautiful plants, is now a lifeless asphalt on which cars are crowded together, all looking the same, and even all the dovecotes have disappeared from our yard except for one, which is living until its elderly owner dies, also surrounded by asphalt and cars. And, of course, many beautiful changes have occurred in the city. But it is already alien to me. I do not feel the warmth of my home there either. Therefore, on the day when crossed the threshold of my apartment for the last time, I became a man without a homeland, only I did not know it yet. It’s sad, but what can you do Thus:

There were no tragedies or catastrophes in my life that would undermine my mental health – which means that I had no direct indications to see a psychologist.

My social behavior was within the norm – not withdrawn, sociable, adequate – which means that there were no indications to see a psychologist.

I did not have obvious and “popular” symptoms for treating mental illnesses (schizophrenia, mental retardation, severe autism, etc.) – which means that psychiatrists were not waiting for me in their offices, and no one intended to take me there.

But I felt and understood that something was wrong with me. Somehow I was concentrating too much on my experiences and thoughts not so much because they simply aroused research interest, but because they made me anxious. But my vocabulary then had practically no words to “catch my state by the tail,” to describe it, to make it clear for observation and understanding. And if I did try, then the phenomenon that puzzled me most was something rooted in the state of sadness. But sadness is not quite the right word. Sadness can be bright, calm, and in general can potentially carry a positive function – to encourage a person to change his life situation. Longing, despondency, sorrow, grief – also do not suit my state of mind.