Бесплатный фрагмент - Depression at a psychologist from Russia: history and treatment

Depression at a psychologist from Russia:

history and treatment.

Life, Illness, Science, and Job search

Vitaly Dudin

Preface

A book about how a practicing clinical psychologist, a candidate of psychological sciences, fell into clinical depression, then learned that he had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and then underwent long and difficult treatment, and found ways to live like this.

Who is the book written for? I think the book is primarily addressed to people who are searching, active, striving to improve the quality of their lives, but who now and then “stumble” over mental difficulties. For example, if you are not yet morally ready to seek help from a specialist, perhaps I will help remove irrational anxiety and some prejudices regarding the culture of seeking help from psychiatrists and psychologists.

And if you are already undergoing psychotherapy or taking medications prescribed by a psychiatrist, but do not feel any improvement, then perhaps some of my thoughts based on personal experience on how to deal with this will be useful to you. The book may also be of professional interest to psychology students, psychiatrists and other representatives of helping professions, since the book describes in some detail the anamnesis of a person with depressive disorder, so there is an opportunity to better understand the way of thinking of such a person.

However, this book is to a greater extent autobiographical, and is woven from themes about addictions and coping with them, from themes about the romantic side of my life, from themes about the desire to find and understand myself as a person in a broad sense, about professional self-realization, it is also woven from themes about love for science and doing it. Therefore, in a sense, the book is a novel, since it describes the process of life of a contemporary.

Why or why was the book written? The driving force that led me to write the book is my mortality. I started writing at 35, when I was single, had no children, was not in a relationship, a year ago I stopped giving psychological consultations, and with varying success I am being treated for a mental illness. But I am alive. And the living have a need to say something, to tell, to ask, to share thoughts about the life they have lived. And I seem to be good at it. But there are no other people in my apartment, and I don’t have friends “24/7”, I can’t teach a child about life, and chat about how the day went, I can’t discuss with my life partner how life is in general, etc. And the reality is that a family may not happen in my life.

Therefore, I feel responsible for the life of the human being that I am, and in particular for his humanistic desire to tell someone about something important, from his point of view. Otherwise, it would be very annoying to leave, and take everything with me, without sharing my small realizations with other human beings. In addition, the very fact of working with the book gives me the opportunity to feel not so bad as, for example, it could be. And, of course, in this way I realize one of the meanings of my life, which I invented for myself.

The book uses foul language. Although I myself do not quite like this fact, but if I excluded it, the thread of the story about some stages of my life would be lost, the description would become incomplete and artificial because I have not found suitable substitutes for such vocabulary in the Russian language. But there is not much of it, and it can definitely be counted on the fingers of both hands.

Chapter 1. Life and illness history. Preparing a life plan

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.

My social circle and interests

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.

Personal interests of the young me

My interests also touched on several different spheres. One of my main interests was music, especially playing the guitar. In elementary school, my grandparents gave my brother and me an unexpected gift, giving us an acoustic guitar. And my father’s friend sang and played such a beautiful, but tearful song on the guitar. And my godmother’s son also already played the instrument, and succeeded in this, he definitely had talent. In general, soon we bought an electric guitar, and this was a completely different level for me. And I could sit with the instrument for a very long time, and strum something, learn songs, chords, solos. I did not try to sing, I did not want to, in my head these two skills — playing the instrument and singing — are very different skills, and it is not necessary that if you play the guitar, then you need to sing. That’s why I freed myself for the future from the role of a street teenager-heartthrob who conquers girls with tearful three-chord guitar chants about some army or prison (it is very fashionable at Russian). I wanted to master the instrument for real, so I had serious requirements for the complexity of the performance. Although, of course, playing the guitar gave its pleasant results for communicating with girls.

Speaking about the guitar, it is necessary to clarify what I was listening to then. In my distant childhood, I listened to what everyone was listening to — most often it was foreign popular music, like Ace of Base. And a little later, probably after the release of the film “Brother” (this is a super famous action drama in the post-Soviet space, everyone probably loved it), I began to listen to Russian rock and foreign metal. Then my peers were all divided into two large groups: informals (those who listen to rock music) and rappers.

There may have been more youth groups, but in percentage terms compared to the first two, they were insignificant. I don’t remember there being a group of “classical music kazas”, for example. But I don’t remember pop music, it was generally outside this division, but the informals still treated it with disdain or irritation. I was a real informal. I wore a bandana with the inscription “Nirvana”, “Metallica” T-shirts, a backpack “The King and the Jester” (it is a punk band). Without my parents’ knowledge, I wore a clip in my ear, because they did not allow me to pierce my ear.

Informals and rappers were very unfriendly to each other because of different tastes and the desire to worship different “idols”. For example, I didn’t like rappers, I considered rap a stupid tasteless trend, I was irritated by the wide “pipe jeans” that they wore, I reacted with disgust to the “peace” sign, because at any convenient opportunity rappers drew it. And we — rockers/informals had the “Anarchy” sign, and sometimes the “Satanic pentagram”. And if our teenage behavior was at least marginally reflected in the “Anarchy” sign, then I, in any case, “loved” the pentagram and drew it because it looks beautiful and is relatively easy to draw. Well, maybe the spirit of rebellion and disbelief in religion also attracted me. But otherwise, I did not eat cats, did not drink blood.

I always liked doing things with my hands. My grandparents had several boxes of tools and other materials at home, and, probably, a classic section for the Soviet Union, in the hall closet with all sorts of boxes, mirrors, batteries, wires, small mechanisms, and I spent a lot of time there. At the “fazenda” I had to hammer, saw, cut, build a lot — all this was done to improve the house and the adjacent territory, sheds, dog kennel, beds, shower, gazebo, front garden and so on. It was an interesting time. Wood was the main building material.

I also tried to study and repair equipment. Once there was a radio or a TV, I think I took it apart and repaired it. It happened by chance. Another of our dachas was located very close to the airport, and my grandfather worked there. So I had the opportunity to climb around in a real large airliner, that is, an exhibit plane that was parked near the airport. It had no skin, only the cabin frame remained, wires, tubes, cables were sticking out… You could climb out onto the wing. Of course, I was happy about this opportunity back then, but even now I understand that it was absolutely wonderful, I would climb up there now. I like airplanes, the flight itself, and I also had the opportunity to see and steal incomprehensible small mechanisms, units for myself, and study them.

Of course, I also really liked driving a car. I usually drove when we went to the forest to pick mushrooms or to the dacha. And if in the forest I drove along a country road, then on the way to the dacha my grandfather let me drive even on the highway. It was nice to have such trust. I also felt confident when I could drive along a road washed out by rain, and my grandfather would sit calmly, open the window, a passenger like… Yes, picking mushrooms! I especially liked picking chanterelle mushrooms — because they are beautiful, tasty and grow well, if you come across one chanterelle, then it is clear that you will pick a lot of them. After mushrooms, eating in a clearing, drinking tea — peace.

From sports: I could run short distances quickly, and jump far from a standing start and from a running start. Somehow I was lucky with this, so much so that I never met anyone who ran faster or jumped further, neither in the schools where I studied, nor later at the university. It’s nice to live with this. I have this feeling when I start running, as if I can turn on the acceleration, so that the wind starts to blow past my ears.

Also during my lifetime a personal computer appeared, which already offered games and other programs. I remember the following games that I liked: “Zeus”, “Age of Empires 2”, “Midtown Madness”, “Truckers 2”, “The Neverhood”. It was especially nice to spend time at the computer when it was freezing outside. And when the tasteful russian cartoon “Masyanya” came out, I found out what program it was created in (“Flash macromedia”), and for a long time it interested me, I kept figuring out how the miracle happens — how my thought can be transferred to the computer screen and still be mobile (dynamic). I remember practicing and drawing some kind of pill that rolled and jumped. And the game “Counter Strike” stands out for me separately — a game that I started playing in Petropavlovsk when I was still young and continued periodically already in Tyumen. Many memories were associated with it. Dust, Assault, Mansion — opening these cards seemed to transport me to those past times of my life. Besides, it would never have occurred to me to play it sober, so in an altered state of consciousness it gave me pleasant sensations and nostalgia.

Returning to my interests in music, it makes sense to tell about my piano lessons. Although learning, strictly speaking, was not related to my true interests, but was more the embodiment of my parents’ ideas about a cultured person, nevertheless, it took up quite a lot of my time. I studied for 3 years. My grandmother from the music school came to my house twice a week to give piano lessons, and almost every day I did my homework. In general, I did not want to study, but in particular, sometimes I was still fascinated by playing this instrument.

But in general, my soul and nervous system gravitated towards the electric guitar. I learned to play it myself in the era of paper collections with chords and “tabulation” from the Internet, that is, before the era of YouTube and other applications. I liked the feel of the guitar in my hands, I liked that the strings made a sound in front of me, I liked the body of the guitar, the feeling on my fingertips and, of course, the ability to extract from it a heavy, varied Grunge sound, the opposite of the “sterile, mathematically precise” sound of the piano. And also, the piano is the same in appearance and touch, black and white smooth keys and that’s it for you. All the strings and hammers are hidden inside. The musician as a user, not as the owner of the instrument, as if there was no “communication” with the instrument. Still, time went on, I studied, and learned to the logical conclusion for myself. I learned musical notation and trained my ear, which helps both to play the guitar and to build, and to live. And right before moving to Tyumen, I sold the piano.

Among my river and lake interests, I also really liked fishing with a rod. My first encounter with a rod happened when my father and I went fishing near a dam, or rather behind it. It turns out that we were catching a disturbed fish that had fallen from a high artificial waterfall a couple of hundred meters upstream, and then it was caught — too many events in a row for a fish. Yes, sitting, looking at the float of the water surface, and skillfully distinguishing the various reasons for the float’s swaying — from waves and/or wind or from a bite. And then determining the best moment to pull in, without confusing a “tricky” clever bite with a real bite. I remember how I was also surprised by events that seemed unreal, when I caught a fish on an empty hook when I was re-casting the rod, or catching a “ruff” fish by the dorsal fin — I don’t understand how that even happens, but it’s so amazing.

There were also interests related to invention. When I was young, I wanted to make a car, mostly out of wood. I remember how strategies were spinning in my head about how it would be set in motion, how the heating system would be made, and even what kind of glove compartment it would have. At that age, I thought that I would implement a good engineering solution — I would create a heater in the car. Everything seems simple, but I thought I had to come up with such an idea. Something like this: I put a fan, and in front of it a thick, warm (maybe woolen) fabric: the fan blows cold air through the fabric, the air warms up in it and comes out warm. And already at a later age, I realized that clothes do not generate, but retain body heat. In particular, perhaps due to such childish peculiarities of thinking, I abandoned the idea of building a car at the stage of its knocked together frame on the roof of a house on the “fazenda”.

I didn’t like reading books. But I had a few favorites, for example, a thick encyclopedia from the USSR — learning the meaning of unfamiliar words is fascinating. And of the books that were able to transfer me to a pleasant state, there was a series about antiquity with cool illustrations, which, by the way, were also compiled in the logic of an encyclopedia. I think they were called something like this: “How would you live in ancient Rome”, “How would you live in ancient Egypt”, “How would you live among the Vikings”.

At that same distant age, I had a kind of desire to tell stories, including in writing. So, once at school we were given an assignment to write something on a free topic, and I described how my parents and I picked up a dog on the street, then this dog lived with us, and I developed a whole reasoning about dogs and people, about actions, in general, it turned out interesting, the teacher even wrote next to the grade that I was a good boy. And my grandfather back in those years found a person somewhere who retyped this story, and released it on a printer. It was nice and there was a feeling that there was something of mine hidden here, something to which I was not indifferent.

Of the cartoons, fairy tales and TV series, I definitely liked: “Tom and Jerry”, “Prostokvashino”, “Once Upon a Time There Was a Dog” (cartoons from the USSR) and fairy tales during the New Year holidays. But I didn’t like “Well, Just You Wait!” (also a cartoon from the USSR, similar in concept to Tom and Jerry) — it felt like he was drawn as a heavy drinker, smoker, and uninteresting as a person citizen of the Soviet Union in an uncomfortable cold kitchen with blue tiles on the walls. There was also a cartoon about monkeys, about pirates, and I also didn’t like the “spirit” of these cartoons. I really liked “Alf”, “The Mask”. I was afraid, but watched Freddy Krueger. I loved watching “Field of Miracles” (it is analog american TV show Wheel of Fortune) with my grandparents, I was sad at the end of the program when the host said the final words, because I wanted to prolong this feeling of home comfort. Later, when I was 12—13 years old, I liked watching MTV and channels where they showed various extreme sports and beautiful videos accompanied by rock music.

It is very difficult to remember the details now, but I was interested in what is called the soul or psyche. The behavior of some people raised questions, I wanted to understand why they acted this way and not differently, why some were strange. And in my head there were so many different states that I sought to understand, to explore them. I felt it as a pleasant desire to learn, to explore, to “declassify” what is connected with the soul, the structure of man and society. Unfortunately, I cannot remember what words I would have used to describe my interest then. But, probably, most of all I was attracted by pathological manifestations of the psyche. Several cases come to mind, which, of course, do not exhaust the entire interest in the soul.

I remember how near the “Universam” store, where we often liked to walk with friends, I saw a naked, and most likely homeless woman, she was walking somewhere slowly, was dirty and, probably, in a state of alcoholic intoxication. I am a smart boy, at school they teach me to write, read, count. But no one taught me that a society of people can give out such amazing things. Explanations like: “well, she is probably sick”, or “she is probably drunk” — are no good, it is clear as day. I wonder how this happened? So many people, such a well-organized society, everyone looks like each other, they go on green, stand on red, go to the toilet properly, and then suddenly. The “molecule” (that woman) of society up and fell out of the combed line — naked, she says, I want to walk, it’s summer after all. For me, this is an interesting “glitch” in the system of society, and in the head of one person, which I wanted to explore.

Another case is a woman who age was beetween women and grandma. She was a janitor in my yard, and was, I think, deaf and dumb, and most likely with significant mental disabilities. I was very little then, so my memories are fragmentary. But the main ones are that my then acquaintances and I bullied her and ran away. She ran after us and made inarticulate sounds. And I remember how sorry I felt for her, and then I also wanted to understand how this happened to her, what she was thinking, worrying about. But my behavioral repertoire was then only enough to play secondary roles in the process of bullying her.

Another interest from the psychological field is dreams and the state before falling asleep. What kind of phenomenon is this: I fall asleep, switch off, and some movie or cartoon starts showing up for me, and in such a strange “language”, filmed by strange, inconsistent, illogical and overly mysterious “directors”. Where do they come from and why do I need them? For example, to walk I need my legs, I know that. And why do I need dreams? It would be fine if they were harmless entertainment, but there are also nightmares. And what are they for? Don’t I have enough problems in reality? And why do I have some kind of fears before going to bed, sometimes I need to wrap my legs under the blanket as much as possible so that no one, no monster, can get in there in the dark, sometimes I’m afraid to fall asleep near the window. Even at that distant age, I seemed to be afraid, but at the same time I understood that this was some kind of nonsense that had stuck to me, these incomprehensible fears, this was something unnatural.

Another micro situation happened when I just started going to acrobatics. And there is a big unfamiliar room, a lot of people. And then during one of the first classes the main trainer is replaced by another. We are standing in a line, and he commands something unintelligible to me, even now I can’t recall it with complete certainty, but I had to spread my toes apart by the length of my foot. And I don’t understand what he wants, there is noise in my head, and I hesitated and spread my toes wide. He comes up and starts yelling, like: “Are your feet size 41?” (and it size is very big), and continues something else. And at that time I had to grow and grow to 41. And then, probably, I got scared, embarrassed too, but I definitely remember that I also felt anger then, I thought “why are you yelling, idiot!”. I also became interested in why this horse suddenly decided to yell at me. … what in his head allowed and/or forced himself to behave like that. What kind of social situation happened that made me feel so bad?

Another story is connected with the fact that in the courtyard of an ordinary five-story building where my grandparents lived, in a small low front garden opposite the entrance, some parents periodically poured water from a bucket on their daughter, my age. When they came out, she was already naked, they doused her with water, then dried her. I saw her both in winter and in summer. Okay, the reason for such behavior would seem to be obvious — it is the body’s hardening. But two questions. One is not very interesting, but still: is this the only way to harden the body: do you have to be naked and in the courtyard, that is, in front of people? The second question is more interesting. When I saw this girl, I could not take my eyes off her, she was beautiful, her manner of standing and moving, her reaction to being doused… I was indescribably drawn to her. These were also my new, unclear, but pleasant and interesting experiences. Just like with the above, I wanted to understand what it was.

I also remember a couple of stories described in books that I thought about. The stories were moral-oriented for children. The plot of the first one took place at school. One boy discovered during recess that he had no food to eat, although he usually had some. There was no mention of a cafeteria. And so his classmates behaved approximately as follows: one said something like: “well, you probably dropped your food somewhere on the way to school”, another said: “well, you need to be more careful and attentive so that this does not happen to you”. And the third said nothing, he just broke off half of his sandwich and shared it with him. Moral: the third boy is a good boy, be like him. But somehow it did not add up in my head. Now we can say that the moralistic authors somehow did not leave room for other options. For example, what if I do not share, then I am bad? Can we discuss the motives (reasons) for my actions? Or only “black” and “white”? And it’s strange, how does the Earth carry the first two boys at all if they act like that. Okay, the Earth, let it be indiscriminate, how does our society carry them then? In general, this morality left me with an unpleasant feeling. It would be easy to join the third virtue, to associate with it, but this is too superficial an approach. So here is some material for reflection for me.

And in another described situation there was also enough material. Here it is: the events most likely took place in a village. A large family is sitting and eating. They all look healthy, young, well-mannered, their cheeks are rosy, they chew with their mouths closed. Somewhere in the distance sits a very old grandfather, he is not at the table, but somewhere they placed him so that other healthy and young people do not hear, do not see how he smacks, how food flows from his “leaky” mouth, do not see his wrinkled face, etc. And then either a new character appears or someone from those previously present has a guilty conscience, and he begins to scold the family for treating the grandfather as if he were not a person. He began to shame everyone, list the grandfather’s merits before those gathered. It seems that he even returned the grandfather to the table. And I automatically connected to this topic, what kind of injustice is this, why is a lonely old sick grandfather sitting there, and you healthy young guys are like pigs with him…

But even here the situation cannot be so morally one-sided. If the authors of the fable are such humanists, then what should I do — the child I was then, when I see a very old wrinkled body, food running down his cheeks, that smell… That is, is it morally right to make the child pay for this whole discrepancy? Like, “Okay, I feel sorry for the grandfather, he fought, and we are in his house, let’s seat him at the table with the child, let the child suffer, everyone will more or less win, except for the child, he won’t be able to demand rights yet, he’s small.” But the fact that the child will be torn apart by terrible feelings at that moment — that’s okay. And not because the child is spoiled, selfish or just a jerk, but because nature itself has arranged it so that in the eyes of a child watching, the sight of extreme old age or even the visual embodiment of death does not evoke sympathy and deep respect in him. Of course, these book situations are like an attempt to instill kindness, purity, light. But considering that they no longer stand up to criticism from a person who has not even reached the age of ten, it means that adults themselves are somehow naive, one-sided and not so smart to normally illustrate their teachings to a child. So this also became interesting for research.

Another thing that was in the air, in society and aroused interest was religious — faith in God, arguments in favor of his existence, interpretation of phenomena and actions of people based on faith in his existence, etc. It is far from being said that my family was religious, except that my mother sometimes went to church and knows a few prayers. It is so difficult to remember now, but somewhere in the very beginning I liked the idea of the existence of a higher being, but when several times in difficult situations for me there was no reaction to my requests for help, of course I doubted, and then the spell fell off me altogether. Moreover, I found so many logically unfounded, blatantly contradictory assumptions in this idea of the divine that the question of whether to believe it or not quickly disappeared.

But two other very important questions arose. The first is how can I live if no one from above will help me? Wait, be patient, pray, try to understand the plan, repent, rephrase my request a hundred times — this is not for me right away, thank you. This means that an alternative concept of the picture of the World that I should have. But I don’t have it yet. This makes it difficult. I need to come up with something. The second question is — if I have rejected the idea of the religious, since it has not passed the test of ordinary human logic, then why is the “religious market” so vast in society, and why does this phenomenon have so many fans? … questions that were also hanging in my mind and wanted to be solved.

Along with these questions were the questions of my mortality and the mortality of my loved ones that had recently fallen on my head. Here, perhaps, it is not even necessary to show interest in psychology in order to hang for some time from such news, or rather not news, but awareness. But nevertheless, I hung in my own way, and in addition to experiencing anxiety, this also caused me to have “sprouts” of research interest in the phenomenon of mortality and how to cope with it when the outcome is clear.

The issue of mortality was accompanied by my encounters with the death of other people. Thus, at different times I happened to see three dead men outside the coffin and outside the quiet funeral ceremony — one in the entrance, the second under the pipes in the bushes, the third under one of the back steps of my school. Another little boy who was fatally hit by a trolleybus, although at the moment of the accident my mother turned me in the other direction, but I remember the cry of the boy’s mother. And by that age I had already been taught that in society, a person’s life means a lot! A person himself is a great creation of nature! And if so, then they should die, it would seem, somehow majestically or something. But no. In the bushes under the pipes lies quietly in ordinary worn clothes, he lies, and everyone else lives. In the entrance as well, and under the porch, and at the intersection with the trolleybus.

Everything is so prosaic and mundane. That is, not only is the outcome clear — death, but it also comes to people practically in house slippers, without ceremony, just like such working moments of the Universe. It came, took a rabbit, a couple of pigs, an old cow, a titmouse, and a boy — something like that, and they were all on one list. And death comes regardless of the small human joys of life, so my paternal grandmother died on his birthday. Now it was necessary to develop an appropriate attitude to this too. And along the way, society itself revealed its little-understood, and at that time outrageous for me, sides. There are wailers at funerals. What is that? If they don’t want to — let them not cry, if they want to — they will cry themselves. How do people manage to stuff theatricality, pretense, commerce and these artificial tears, groans into such an intimate, personal event?

I also found interesting psychological questions that left me with unanswered questions in animal behavior and relationships between people and animals. Why, if you are friends with a dog, does it still growl if you approach its bowl when it is eating? That it is impossible to cancel your nature’s hackneyed instinct and believe that I do not claim food? A cat reacts calmly, but a dog does not.

Another situation: a puppy appeared to our fazenda, I wanted to make friends with him, but he barked at me non-stop for a very, very long time. At the end of the day, he simply could not bark abruptly like a dog, but pronounced “ava-ava” in almost Russian sounds. Apparently, it was easier that way. For the record: I did not squeeze him, did not scare him, but simply sat in the our outer entrance hall, and tried to talk to him — or rather, with the intonation of my voice, to make him understand that I was normal and did not pose a danger to him. and Earliner I found a common language with other dogs both before and after. And we became friends him they, and he lived with us for several years, both at the farmstead and at my father’s work. But the question has already arisen: what was this phenomenon that prevented normal communication almost immediately?

Another situation: we got a budgie. These are parrots the size of a sparrow that can be taught to talk. But we didn’t have enough strength to do it. When the TV was on in the room, the parrot chirped non-stop. And if you turn up the volume on the TV — the parrot chirps louder. Unfortunately, for me personally, the excitement of having an amazing new resident in the house soon gave way to irritation. And I wasn’t the only one, so we soon gave the parrot to good hands, with its cage and all its belongings. I don’t know, maybe this situation is not really about an animal, but perhaps about the relationship between people and animals. Although no, not only. I remember then being upset by the fact of “stubbornness” and the rigidity of alive, wild nature. We tried a thousand different ways to persuade it not to chirp, but it chirped. It was a pity to accept the fact that some living creatures are only nominally alive and cannot make contact with humans, are not capable of changing their behavior — as nature told them to chirp, so they do, without reviewing anything or climbing into their nature’s settings. Oh, what a pity, so I wanted such a handsome parrot to be able to understand humans at least a little.

Here’s the situation: we had a cat and a dog living on our fazenda. Their character and relationship were typical: the cat was important and sometimes hysterical, the dog was naive towards the cat, kind to her own people and mean to strangers. They probably respected the fact that they shared a house, but they definitely weren’t friends. One time the cat gave birth to kittens when it was still cold outside. The kittens were in the barn, I think. A few days passed, she was taking care of the kittens, everything was fine. And one day my grandfather and I came to the fazenda, and some kind of hell happened there. As far as I remember, we then realized that either the dogs or the cats had attacked our cat. What a horror. And when I came there, I remember feeling like I had come to a crime scene. There was tension in the air, and the cat and dog looked worried and shabby. The cat seems to have dragged two kittens into our dog’s kennel for protection. And one or two kittens died. And those that she dragged in, we initially took for dead, because they were like ice cubes, but then it turned out that they were alive and we were warmed up for a long time they. The point here, which was important and interesting for me, was that our cat and dog acted so wisely and thoughtfully in a catastrophic situation. It is valuable in itself that I became a direct witness of how animals demonstrated the ability to help each other. And, of course, now such they’s behavior, which goes beyond the framework of “animal instinctive behavior”, is always in my field of interest.

And in general, without separating the psycho of man and animals, I was surprised and wanted to learn more about the structure of common life phenomena. For example, how I can see the world around me, how this information is processed in my head, how my thoughts, images in my consciousness, feelings and emotions appear and what they are woven from.

Also, in addition to my research interest in the psyche, I had closely related emotions of compassion for people or animals who are outside the “framework of their normal state” or outside the “framework of what is accepted as normal in society.” I remember concentrating on this in particular and on the issue of human or animal suffering in general. I wanted to help with something, sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t, because I didn’t know how or didn’t want to spoil someone’s already not-so-great situation. For example, I could have helped that naked woman walking through the city with something, but I didn’t know what my help might look like.

When I thought of writing about personal interests that involve being alone with myself, I thought I would remember much more than I did. This, in my opinion, reflects the fact that I have long been a “learned extrovert”, that is, I focused on spending more time with other people, and accordingly, satisfying my interests in this way. This state of affairs also indicates that by nature I am more of an “introvert”, that is, focused on actions with the object (not the subject) of my interest and “interaction” with myself. And the need to retrain my nature most likely became one of the factors in the development of depression, which will be discussed later.

The listed interests concern the age of up to 15 years and moving to Russia, Tyumen.

Family as a source of ideas and an example of life path. Free invention and prosperity as my life choice

Above I described my actions that could be observed from the outside, they were also manifestations of my view of myself and life. And it was based on conclusions made based on the results of my observations of the family. It is unlikely that these conclusions were clear to me at that age, I rather felt them intuitively. Therefore, now I am trying to add clarity, turn them into words and express them.

Here they are: “can freely invent and have financial wealth — in this way you can consider that life is a success.” Then it is necessary to explain what I mean by free invention, and what financial wealth means to me.

As a child, I had an example of how to live on your mind own and earn good money. Although it is impossible to single out one family member from whom I gathered material for formulating my conclusions, but maybe the main role was played by my father and his activities. And the role and contribution of other family members may not have been so noticeable to the eyes of a child, but they were just as significant.

At that time I saw that my father’s work was a business related to cereal production. We had several workshops scattered around the city, where huge piles of different cereals were stored: buckwheat, pearl barley, semolina, etc. My father’s company processed them, packaged and sold them. They also produced and sold pasta. Some of the products were sold at retail in a couple of rented points of sale in the city markets, the other part was bought in large quantities by other companies. Good people worked in the workshops and the office, I think I knew them all. The production had different equipment — big, loud, iron, beautiful. Some equipment was made by ourselves, for example, loaders, crushers, etc. The territory was guarded by dogs, one dog — “Pirate” was taller than me, and I was afraid, but still made friends with him, the other — “Mike” — a stocky brown mongrel friend who had seen life. Everyone got along with them and fed them well.

And work “came” home in the form of bundles of big denomination “Tenge” (currency of Kazakhstan) bills tied with a rubber band. I remember how I sometimes counted them, interesting emotions… Then the bills were converted into the blessings of life. So, during my childhood, we successively changed apartments: one-room, two-room, three-room. They were all in the city center. We had two summer cottages. There was a beautiful private house in the foothills of the city. Its plot was on a rather steep slope, from which they eventually made three even tiers with steps. There, a large excavator dug a dungeon, on which they built a barn.

We drove cool foreign cars. My friend once noticed that my father changed cars like gloves. In addition to the family car, there were always work cars. Small and large. There was even three identical but different colored Volkswagen Transporter minibuses. My father had his own driver — a good man. And once we went to the store, and my father bought himself a mobile phone, although I think I didn’t even know about such things before. A similar situation was with the computer, when it appeared in our house, I didn’t know that anyone else I knew had one. In addition, it appeared in our house in a complete set: a printer, a scanner, a modem. Accordingly, the clothes and food were good.

My family led a socially open and proactive lifestyle, and understood how to maintain a sense of interest. My father was often the initiator of entertainment and ideas for them. So, it was common to go on joint trips with family friends and parents’ colleagues in a large company in the summer to the water, and in the winter to the hills and forests. In Kazakhstan, we loved to go on vacation to the lakes among the mountains “Borovoe” and “Chelkar”. We often visited Russia on vacation (Omsk, Kurgan, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk). It seems that no one went to distant foreign countries, like Turkey or even further, in our circle didn’t even know how to think about it. All of the above was for their own cash, not on credit, not on mortgage or debt, and I only learned the word “mortgage” after moving to Russia.

So, I didn’t know what it was like when my parents worked from morning till night. I didn’t know how to expect them to come home from work at a certain time in the evening. I didn’t know that any of them had bosses. I didn’t know that any of them took public transport. I didn’t hear that any of them needed to take time off from work, for example, for family reasons or illness. I didn’t hear that they were underpaid. I didn’t wait for my parents’ vacation to do something, but when they needed a rest, they simply took it from themselves from theyself.

That’s how I understand it for myself free invention — you know how to make money and you make it the way you like, and you don’t depend on an employer, whether it’s the state or a private individual. You breathe freely, you feel that the fruits of your labor are important and in demand in society. I sometimes I could watch my father at home making various sketches, drawings, diagrams, translating his thoughts onto paper. It was so arbitrary and so inventive and creative. It was similar when my father came up with how many grams to pack cereals in for retail sale. The arguments were something like: “Well, what about a kilogram, it’s somehow well… — a kilogram, let it be 800 grams.” The arguments were certainly weighty, but the most surprising thing for me was that they then packed the cereal in 800-gram increments, and serious figures were written on the pack: “800 g.” One might think that the decision to pack exactly 800 g was based on serious considerations in the company or compliance with some standards, but no, off the top of one’s head. So it was as if I learned something about this world from experience, learned the inside of the goods on the shelves. They are not all serious, much of this is just the spontaneous creativity of the producers, that’s all.

In much the same way, my father came up with a logo that would be on the retail packaging. The phenomenon itself, when you come up with an interesting logo. In doing so, you show and tell the world something, knowing that the logo will be looked at, remembered, and used to distinguish our products from others. And it’s really cool that no one is standing over you, no one will say that the logo needs to be redone because one of your bosses or customers doesn’t like it. A logo as self-positioning. Nowadays, one can assume that a person’s presence of a company logo has ceased to carry such a significant meaning, because even a teenager or any self-employed person can make one in Photoshop. But back then, having a logo was the lot of companies. The company needed to get on its feet, and only then a logo, like a well-deserved cherry on the cake — the opportunity to freely invent.

It turns out that my parents were not poor workers, but occupied a good position in society, had a status. Once my father celebrated an anniversary in a cafe, and I remember that there was a very long table, in fact, it was more like a wedding in terms of the number of people. And it was nice to see that many people knew my parents, they had a good relationship.

To sum it up, I can say that my family understood how to earn good money using their abilities, did it freely, and in addition to that were conscientious employers and producers of goods.

And my grandparents were also open, cheerful and sociable. Especially if I went somewhere with my grandpa, I was surprised how he met so many of his acquaintances along the way, and managed to stand and chat with everyone. And when I walked in their yard, my friend and I often ran to eat at my place, where my grandma treated us. And they also knew how to earn money in a rather inventive way — making and selling moonshine. When I stayed with them, there were, so to speak, “X” hours, when the door to the kitchen was closed so that if someone came, they would not see what they were doing here.

These fears are probably like relics of the “rainbow” “free” Stalinist times, when the walls had ears, and anyone who made a report was quickly isolated from society for a long time or forever. And the kitchen was so intricate then: tubes, hoses tied to a cupboard, flasks, gauze, and in the bathroom there were flasks and an interesting instrument for measuring the strength of a drink, similar in size to a thermometer for cows. Then, especially when I stayed overnight with my grandfather at the “hacienda”, I saw how buyers came for moonshine. It’s interesting, so alive — you produce a product, and it is bought up, and everyone is happy about it. Here I leave out the ethical side of the fact that the product was alcohol, and not, say, a cure for cancer, which would relieve people of suffering.

It is probably worth mentioning general data on the psychological climate in the family, or rather, what was not there, and accordingly, this what was not there did not influence me and my choice of life path. I was not beaten at home, I was not really forbidden anything, I was not punished by being a homebody, my computer or phone were not taken away. No one placed unreasonable expectations on me, like I have such high hopes for you, you are our support and blah-blah. They did not compare me with other children, they did not set me up as an example. I did not have “hard to reach” parents, I could talk to them informally and at any time, I felt that I was loved. Both my mother and father were married once, there were no divorces, betrayals, the family did not hang by a thread. I did not have stepbrother or srepsister. I was not forced to “drag” excellent grades from school, they did not force me to cram — I studied as I wanted, as long as they moved me from class to class in an ascending order. Something like this.

And since I started my life in such conditions, a desire to continue in the same spirit was formed in my consciousness — to invent freely, to be my own master, to have financial sufficiency. Intuitively, I understood that my desire fully corresponded to my capabilities, that is, to good inclinations for intellectual and creative activity. Also, that inside me there was something that was not entirely clear to me, but definitely important, unique, alive, interesting, and I really liked it.

I wanted to live this way for a simple reason — because I liked it. Although I didn’t see myself in the activity of processing and selling cereals or producing moonshine, I wanted to adopt the rest. And I envisioned a different leading activity for myself.

I did not imagine myself as a full-time employee — a sad working person. In my view, which was mostly confirmed much later, sad working people are those who barely “make ends meet, live a life in which there is no meaning other than to earn for basic needs.” They have no time left in life for life itself. Everything is “devoured” to death by boring duties. I do not remember that I would consider these people cheerful. I could observe the parents of my classmates, buddies or friends. Manu of this was sad workers. And they lived as if in a cage, they are not free. The only entertainment, as I imagined, for them was spending time in the company of alcohol and “greasy”, pathetic jokes below the belt or about those who live better than them socially.

I had a hints of rebellion when I thought about working for hire. What!? What do you mean!? How can anyone tell me what to do? How can I be dependent on my boss? What kind of nonsense is this: a 9—6 workday? I want to live, not be tied to some schedule. What do you mean!? Do I have to ask for time off or warn someone that I need to leave early today? What kind of nonsense is this: working 5 or 6 days a week. How is it that all daylight hours are taken up by work (especially dark came winter too early), and I have a miserable little bit of time left in the evening to live on, and that time is taken up again by preparing for tomorrow’s work!? How can you live like a human being on this salary? How can you spend your whole life waking up in pitch darkness and crawling out from under the covers into a cold room with irritating lighting that hits your eyes to go where your legs don’t lead you!? And why should I suddenly go and specifically fall asleep in order to get enough sleep before work when I don’t want to sleep at all!

I was terrified when I thought that something like this could happen to me. It’s a hopeless situation. And to this are added, to put it mildly, modest living conditions — often a miserably small apartment or an apartment in a depressive area, which you never want to go into. Monotonous cheap food is added there, not to enjoy it, but to fill the stomach and not die. Then — cheap clothes, made without a drop of sympathy for the human being, but only for commercial purposes — to dress the poor. There is no life for workers, they were born, tried to run, jump, ran in the rain, saw snow, played with a dog and a cat, rode a bike, swam in the river, ate ice cream, fell in love, stopped loving, then had sex, and dead. That’s all the “highest” impressions. Further, in the narrow sense, from Monday to Friday, they will wait for the weekend, and in the broad sense, they will wait for this life to end!? It has always hurt me that the society of the World has shoved the working person into such a cage, reduced his entire human being to the elementary.

I also observed another category of people — “men in jackets” with clean hands, who most often served the “king”. And if I sympathized with the workers, then I did not consider the latter to be people at all. I remember how I came across them several times on TV in some talk shows, where they bark at each other, and in moments of calm they chatter about the structure of the country, society, uttering incredible nonsense. Two smart guys once decided to explain some phenomenon in society in the following way: one fat guy in a jacket can barely stand on his hands, as on his feet, only on his hands, he is held and while he is in this pose, redder than a lobster, a glass of water is brought to his mouth for him to drink. The moral of the story — it is difficult to drink upside down, so some similar situation is happening in society. And there were not enough words in their lexicon to express it in words. Kings of metaphors and figurative meaning. Holy shit, they’re grown-up people, okay, singers or something, they’re supposed to be circus performers by nature of their work, but those try to seem smart, and they also have the levers of control over society in their hands. And of course, I didn’t want to become one of those either. Because besides being stupid, they’re also probably no freer than workers. After all, workers are at least allowed to tell someone they don’t like to go to hell, it’s kind of excusable for them, but these people have to filter what they say and dress it up in supposedly smart statements, wear a mask and not reveal their essence.

Well, I probably didn’t observe other categories of people. Although, no, there were others. At the market, it’s clear that I wouldn’t want to work. Even now in my mind I have images of saleswomen who smoke a lot, and on frosty days they themselves stand on the cardboard where customers try on shoes, in greatly improved felt boots, and to warm up they knock one foot against the other.

There, in childhood and a little later, I took steps towards earning money in a free, inventive way. If in very early childhood, then I handed in bottles. It was like cumulation — each bottle cost a certain price. You find, wash, count and handed, knowing how much you will get from it. Of course, I did not have to look in the trash, but I could take at home, from friends, or a neighbor who liked to drink beer from “cheburashkas” (bottles with dark glass) had a particularly large “catch”. It was especially interesting to search and think where else you can get bottles. The reward for a successful search idea was not delayed — found more, received more money. A good exchange of energies with the outside world. But you can’t make a career out of this, so I did not hand in bottles for long.

Later, during the summer holidays, I wanted to do something other than hanging out with friends, and we worked for my father several times. It was simple housekeeping in the fresh air. Even later, my ability to play the guitar brought me fruit in the form of payment for coming to a friend’s house and giving lessons. My two skills came together — the ability to explain something to someone and the ability to play in one “ability to explain and accompany the process of learning to play the guitar.” This is, in my opinion, an example of free invention — helping another person, a person I like, master my favorite instrument, and even for financial compensation.

Sources of mental pain and depressive roots

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.

My state can be called “hostile” towards a person, because it does not carry any potential positive functions. Also, this state is very intense, you can’t “pass by” it without noticing it, when it comes, all the focus of attention is concentrated on it, the rest falls out of sight. It feels like something corrosive, well, that is does not as “hit”, or “press” it exactly to corrode and poison the soul. It can be compared to eating something that can poison you, then in the stomach and throat there is a corresponding sensation of something that the body does not like, something that it does not need and from which it wants to get rid of, this is approximately the same state, but on a mental level. And I can say for sure, and it’s good that such a suitable word exists in the language — I suffer from this state. Exactly suffer. Something that is stronger than me (in this case, this state) dominates me, and I literally passively endure it. There is no salvation. Hope too. As if a large stone was crushing you, and you really want to remove it, but nothing happens beyond the great desire, except maybe moving a finger that wasn’t crushed, and that’s it.

If we talk about other characteristics of this state, I will note that it is unnoticeable to others — that is, there was no need to even somehow hide it. The most that others can notice is that I am not in the mood. Also, its course was rather paroxysmal, that is: nothing — nothing — then it will twist emotionally for a minute or several minutes — then again nothing — nothing. But “nothing” after an attack is no longer just “nothing”, but “nothing with sediment, with a trail of this state”. And this trail can last for several days. And now, remembering these states, I wanted to write that I recovered quite quickly and could easily function after the attacks. But I realize that this is not so. It was as if I was like a dog with an evil owner who beats it. He beats it, it yelps, runs away, “swallow it all”, endures all this, and a minute later comes to him again, wags its tail, cuddles, and most importantly trusts, and wants to be friends with him. So, the “dog” here is me, and the “evil master” is life in general, and in particular the work of my psyche. And this state ran like a red thread through my entire life, including the situations listed above. But in those situations, at least it was possible to track the external cause (factor) that caused such an emotional reaction, while in other cases it was impossible to do this — the state came and went like a sudden and invisible gust of wind — as it blew, so it disappeared. But, I still tried to understand where it comes from, what external factor triggers it, and the lack of an answer I attributed to my lack of attentiveness, or rather, even when my attentiveness was cranked up to the limit, I just lacked an understanding of what exactly to watch for, what to record. After all, it is difficult to find something that is not clear what.

And so, in general, I resigned myself and already accepted this state as something natural for life. But the life-affirming part of my soul hoped and understood that it should not be like this. While the “everyday me” was a “dog”, and I had no time to think, no time to stop, to stop “waggling and tucking my tail” and to confront this state, I had no strength to tell myself that it is not natural for life, it is not an obligatory attribute of life like air, blood or food. As a “dog”, I immediately tried to shake off the pain, straightened up, and again went with trust to please the “evil master”, hoping that this time something, somewhere, somehow will be kinder to me. Let something, somewhere, somehow, please, be kinder to me, because I can only endure this because I am spending the last resources of my body, and I can already see the “bottom”. Hello to God, by the way. And, unfortunately, I did not hear, did not see, did not meet “allies” in my condition. In my world there was everything except help in recognizing this condition.

So, I felt I needed help, but it wasn’t clear what kind, nor was it clear what exactly I wanted to improve (cure) in my condition. I also understood that improvement would require considerable effort and time. And this improvement couldn’t happen today, right now, or in a month. I envisioned a long-term process. I don’t want to live like this, and I can’t. I want and need to live differently. That is, this aspiration did not belong to the group of “small desires that can be fulfilled fairly quickly,” but was one of the system-forming ones of my life. And I had no doubt then that the methods I intended to use to cure myself of this condition would be psychological, not psychiatric. That is, I intended to “treat myself with new knowledge, understanding, and words,” and not with a “magic pill or injection.”

Preliminary concept of life plan

...and in all the above-described external and internal conditions of my development, I have an idea of how I want to be in the future. Here are the main initial ideas: