May, 18th 2017 — A depressed mind
This article is part of the series “What is like to attempt suicide and fail”. Start there, if you have not read it yet.
I’m living my most terrible week. The first since I left the psychiatric clinic where I was hospitalized for about a month after April 7th, 2017, when I tried to kill myself and I failed.
My expectation was different. My mood was improving in the clinic and there, with the isolation, I ended up making a series of plans for the world out here. For reality. When I finally arrived, the world showed me his horrible face.
My current state is the worst possible for any activity except writing. There is something therapeutic in this exercise that makes me lightly anesthetized for the brief period in which I transform storms into words. Let this moment be useful, therefore, to document what goes on in the head of a depressed man.
The first realization is that mundane affairs become despicable. All of them. No exception. From doing the dishes to landing on the moon. With that being said, I can not regain the will to work, to do what I always liked. I do not even have the memory of liking doing something at any point. Of memories, only annoyances and their sorrows. Getting out of bed is torture. Legs won’t move. The body does not respond.
Will is something that does not exist for someone in my state. Anguish prevails and brings about important retinues, like the memory of detail from the symphony of suffering. People, actions, reactions, disappointments, lost opportunities, spoken words, silences. A multitude of facts and acts stabbing the chest in an endless movement.
The gravity of the mistakes, my own and from others, absurdly amplified within the mind, at this point a compression capsule of pain. “Everything shall pass,” one might say. At the stage where I am, the only certainty is eternity of the bad.
Life itself becomes absurdly despicable and unnecessary. Flashes of reason arise for brief conflicts with this deplorable state of existence. They try to convince me that this is a phase, with an expiration date. And it is in this war that the fine line between the intense desire to leave the game of survival and a discreet whisper of discernment that, so inaudible, I can hardly understand.
Even eating, one of the most basic and valued activities of our biology, has become, for the mind, as unnecessary as anything else. I have eaten a meal a day if you can call that the intake of a few grams of protein. I lost a lot of weight, probably the only piece of good news, although it was the result of a clear emotional dysfunction.
Yesterday was my worst day. I burst into tears during a photo shoot in São Paulo on my first attempt to return to work with Pandalux. I had to leave the production in the middle and I ended up going home and then to the bed where I never wanted to leave again. Luckily, my partner Agê Barros, the most competent and humane professional I know, nailed the job on his own.
Things have improved a bit today. I was able to work for half a day at Lime. I did not do much, but I did something. And I feel less the thump of the days gone by. I hope it’s a constant change. The so-called “phase” passing to give place to the new self that I so hoped to find out here.
Soon I have my first appointment with the new psychologist. All the luck in the world … for her.
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