(Read Part III here first.)

One of the oddest phrases uttered during the audition about depression was Cristi saying she is thankful for hers. “What a weird, ridiculous thing to say”, I thought, astounded. And then she elaborated: she was thankful because she didn’t want to go back to her life BEFORE depression. And, once I looked at my life from that angle, neither did I.

Before depression I lived in Poland, with an amazingly boring, egoistic flatmate I passionately disliked (the feeling was mutual, as I eventually found out) but didn’t dare to tell him, with a somewhat shit job that made me unhappy, with not many friends, no boyfriend (I met Scipio after the illness has been going on for months already, and it was loving him that made me go and do something about it), my best friend having just moved to a different town, my grandmother having just died.

Right now I am living in Amsterdam in my own apartment without any flatmates (unless you could my rat), working at a job I still like, slowly but surely building a circle of friends, finally having broken through my fear of biking around town, fit, happy, financially slightly under the weather but solely due to my own choices (working four days a week does that to your finances) and… yes, with a grandmother being very unwell. Guess it’s a habit, this one.

A few weeks ago I have had a small bout of what I thought was depression but now that I think about it was most probably a small mental breakdown instead. I wasn’t able to talk to people. I cried the whole day. I drank a lot. (It helped. Until the morning after.) I spent a lot of time in bed unable to move. And I monitored it very closely; in fact, I started visiting my therapist again three weeks before it happened.

I am no longer addicted to pain and suffering. More, I feel absolutely no need in my life for unwanted, additional pain and suffering, other than what life throws at me regardless of whether I ask for it or don’t. There is absolutely no way I am going to waste any more time on being depressed, wallowing in self pity or telling myself therapy doesn’t work.

I am thankful for my depression because had it not been for the illness I wouldn’t have gone to therapy, which has changed my life tremendously. I have learned how to cope with things; I have learned how to use them to my advantage; I have learned to take responsibility; I have learned that other people are not responsible for the way I feel. I have learned that I still have loads to learn — it is not, by any means, easy to live without falling back into old tracks; after all, I lived wrongly for almost thirty years, it would be rather silly to expect that a year or two can repair such a damage. And I have changed my life enormously. For the better.

I always try to talk about depression publicly because I remember myself thinking it won’t help to do therapy, it won’t help to go to a doctor, etc. I want to be the example of someone who thought that, then went through therapy and pills… and they helped. If I make one depressed person go to a doctor a month earlier than they would have otherwise, I will perhaps pay a bit of debt to those people who helped me while I was unwell.

*

This journey — the journey of self-discovery and learning new things every day — is far from over. In fact, I hope it won’t be over until the day I die. And I do not regret a single bit of it. There is no point in regretting the past, which has the convenient ability to remain where it is — in the past — and not influence your present and future any more than you allow it to.

I just put on my white hotpants — don’t worry, I only wear them at home, that’s a bit too much Ray to be seen in public — and had a very pleasant thought: “Less than three years ago I said to Scipio that he can have them because there is no way on Earth I will ever fit in them again.”

In other news, I listened to a radio show about depression, starring my friend Cristi (I will put up a link if anybody asks, but it is in Polish). I thought a lot of her observations were scarily accurate and, well… largely about me, too.

And in still different news, last night I arrived home after a long weekend spent with the boyfriend. I biked against the wind the whole way — a total of 40 kilometres give or take a few, since we spent the whole day biking around, suntanning, swimming and in general having a lovely time. The bike started making strange noises at the end of the trip; it isn’t a very new bike, but I love it nevertheless. I took off my top — it was shit hot; put the bike upside down to check the brakes, then put it back up to replace a bell and do some other minor service. Sweaty, sunburnt, muscular and tattooed I caught a reflection of myself in the TV screen and suddenly had a thought: “Shit, I am so sexy, I would do myself — except I probably wouldn’t dare to chat myself up.”

All these things are connected.

*

I believe it was around June, five years ago, that I hit the rock bottom. I drank a litre of wine a day, more or less. I had attempted to kill myself. I had cut myself (finding a mail years later that starts with “Hello xxx, please don’t be scared or anything because I am alright but I cut myself last night” isn’t a pleasant experience). I only had dark thoughts, dark feelings, dark t-shirts and dark everything else. I couldn’t remember how to laugh. I was very very very unhappy and completely determined that there was nothing in the world that could help me.

I remember having a friend, Cristi, also self-diagnosed with depression, over. And our conversation where we assured each other there was no way out. That we had no chance. We felt strangely reassured in our suicidal emo-heads. We were… chosen, we felt. Ones that had no chance on the long road through hell at the end of which was death.

And then Cristi was hospitalised, I went on pills and we both started the long, long process of recovery.

*

I hated myself back then. I thought that I was an absolute nutcase, worthless and stupid and useless, drowning in self-pity. I wrote songs about darkness and blood. And I wallowed in pain with gusto.

A depressed person finds a certain solace in their pain. Certain people say depression is an addiction like alcoholism — that you are addicted to pain and suffering. This is in a way true; after all, you’d expect that a person feeling so horrible and awful would immediately seek help. I didn’t. Neither did Cristi and neither did most people I know who suffered from depression. Some went on and on for years, refusing to go to a therapist or a psychiatrist who could prescribe medication, despite the truly horrible pain we were going through; a very real, existing pain, making us barely able to function. And that does strike me as an addictive behaviour, same as that of an alcoholic who refuses to acknowledge his or hers problem and seek help.

I remember certain bits better than others (my memory has been shot to threads by the antidepressants — it still hasn’t improved all that much, I write down a lot of things). I remember once coming home from work, seeing a genuinely funny billboard, acknowledging its funniness and saying, in a monotone voice, “ha, ha, ha”. Not laughing. Saying. I wasn’t able to laugh. I remember being at work and hiding in the kitchen to cry for five minutes, then quickly wash my face with cold water and go back to my desk. I remember lying on the floor for hours, whipping myself with thoughts along the lines of: you’re useless, you stupid piece of shit, looking for attention and pretending to be ill, why don’t you fucking do something you crap excuse for a human being? — and not getting up from the floor and doing “something”, because I genuinely wasn’t able to.

It is not moving abroad, buying an apartment, releasing an album or becoming fit that is my biggest achievement. It is the fact that I learned to love myself.

Part IV to follow…

This isn’t my first blog.

That’s a bit of an understatement. My blog (in Polish) about my depression can still be found somewhere in the depths of the internet. My political blog (in Polish) used to attract hundreds of readers. My comedy political blog (in Polish) became so popular it got quoted by Polish press, except they haven’t noticed it was meant to be a joke; when I was accused of spreading hate-speech, I closed it down. I’ve had a blog on my portfolio site but I could never decide what to write about there, so it died a quiet death.

I still have three blogs, two of them in Polish. One is more or less on extended hiatus. Another, heteroseksualisci.blox.pl is me being really nasty towards poor little Polish heterosexuals and their funny problems. (Most of them along the lines of “is it normal if my husband sits down when he’s taking a pee” and “can I get infected with homosexuality if I saw Elton John on the telly”.) And now this one. Yes, I do have the attention span of a fruit fly and yes, I am a multiple dater. How did you know?

*

I decided to come out, so to say, and show myself as the author of this blog because my friend, Trekker, has been asked by a Polish paper to be featured in a webcast about a gay portal he is co-authoring and found the decision very difficult. Of course, I realise that living in Poland makes being out somehow more difficult (see part I of this post). On the other hand, the journalist writing the article was being understanding, so he offered to film Trekker in a dark room, with his voice electronically altered and face pixellated. The idea sounded awful. Yet I couldn’t really condemn him, because I remembered myself being interviewed by Newsweek Poland about being gay and not wanting my face to be shown next to the article either; at the end they picked up a photo where my eyes were obscured by a hat I was wearing. People from my old job recognised me… and congratulated me on being so brave. But was I really?

For the entire week the issue remained on the newstands I was constantly afraid of being recognised on the street and having shit beaten out of me. Nothing such has happened; the photograph was at least partly obscured and people who didn’t know me personally didn’t care who was on the picture. But I’ve had reasons to be afraid.

Fast forward to… yesterday, November 26, 2008. A gay couple — the first celebrity gay couple in Poland — gets an award for “Couple of the year” from Polish edition of Gala. Polish TV transmits the ceremony live. After the show a famous Polish journalist, Wojciech Reszczynski publishes an article in which he writes that showing a gay couple and giving them an award (voted by the readers of Gala) is against the law which states that programs broadcasted by Polish public TV need to respect the Christian value system. The executive director of the TVP2 channel is asked to explain the “promotion of deviations” in front of the director board of the Polish TV.

I’ll keep you posted about who gets fired and for what — and about Trekker becoming famous (or not).

*

Last night, for the first time in my life, I did something that straight people normally practise every other day starting from the age of 13: I made out with a boy on a busy tram stop. For 10 minutes we kissed (mmm, tongue piercings are… interesting). Most people ignored us; some boys beeped a car horn and whistled. Nobody called us names (unless they did it very quietly and only in languages I do not speak).

Most of my Polish gay friends will never see what the appeal of kissing in public is; mostly because in Poland you’d have to be suicidal to try that. I’ve had wood planks and beer cans thrown at me for holding hands with another guy; once my partner texted me, at 1am, 45 minutes after we split and went our separate ways, “don’t be nervous, everything is OK, but I got beaten up”. A group of football hooligans followed us when we walked through the city holding hands; they picked him as their target because my bus arrived first and I got in.

Yes, you might say that I am not proud to be Polish. And that for the first year here I felt like I was a political asylum seeker.

*

I am changing. It is a process which has started when I changed my name legally in May 2006. Then I decided to move to the Netherlands, found a job, moved here (this sounds so much simpler than it actually was), rented an apartment in the Red Light District (quite an eye-opening experience, that). Split with my boyfriend. Got a knee injury which kept me out of more or less any action for three months. Recovered. Dated. Broke hearts. Got heartbroken. Met people who were so fucked up I started feeling positively normal in comparison. Met people whose sex lives made me feel virginal and Victorian. Met people who became my friends.

The journey continues.

And I will be writing about it, but in much shorter posts, I promise.