It´s all in your head

Depression, a word very well known to me. Throughout my life, I had symptoms that were always associated with this condition: imnsonia, loss of appetite, weight loss, heart palpitations, crying episodes, sadness, despair.  After years of  suffering, occasional treatments (mainly psychoterapy), I was diagnosed as dysthimic.
According to Wikipedia, Dysthymia is a mood disorder consisting of the same cognitive and physical problems as in depression, with less severe but long-lasting symptoms. And this term was coined by Dr. Robert Spizter  as a replacement for depressive personality.

I don´t know why Dr. Spitzer got to the conclusion that depressive personality was bad, I´m sure there are very good reasons, but that wouldn´t change much to me, be considered a dysthimic or a depressive person instead. I just remeber hearing from a very dear friend of mine, "Alex, (she calls me Alex), you´re just too heavy all the time". And she was right. I wanted to be myself, until I realized this is socially unacceptable. No one really wants to have a depressive (dysthimic) person around. We´re too heavy, we drain people´s energy, we don´t enjoy the "small pleasures of every day life". And I just remembered an expression a Beligian friend used, that I thought was lovely, not for the expression per se, but for the fact that he translated from his mother tongue (Flemish) to English and used ignoring if that was possible. I mean, I think it´s always a possibility, creating a new use for a word,  new terms. Languages change everyday, but I do remember his expression raised some eyebrows, "fishy", that´s what he said, in the sense that something wasn´t quite good, or that it called the attention for smelling bad.. So, that´s the case, dysthimics are kind of fishy. We don´t smell bad, but we dont fit quite well.
And all that came to me while I was reading an article about how cultural aspects can influence in the identification and definition of mental illlnesses (HERE). It starts with a discussion over the latest DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder), and the main point is whether  the DSM Comittee is not expanding the categories of mental illnesses too much, creating a "diagnostic inflation" .  I don´t know, and I can´t tell, but I always believed that the number of trully sane people has to be very low. Anyway, the point I wanted to highlight was that there´s a discussion on whether cultural aspects may affect on diagnosis, and there are researchers that do believe depression is a western-culture bound syndrome, since there´s not a consensus in psychiatry on either the definition or the symptons of the illness. In addition to that, no discrete genetic variation could  be linked to depression up to the present moment. There seems to be an overlap accrosss a range of mental illnesses. So, according to them, maybe what we call depression in our western cultures is not seen as such in the east, or maybe it´s not considered to be a desease at all. Well, it´s a possibility.
This cultural bias effect is a very interesting thing. The country of origin should play un important part in the formation of  the personality of an individual right? The culture were we are raised and educated. I would be inclined to believe in that. However, if I consider my personal case, something went wrong. I was born in Brazil, and Brazilians are seen as happy and optimistic, to the point of insanity I would add,  but that´s the way Brazilians are, always hopefull, even when perspectives for the future don´t seem bright, (as you can check on this LINK from The Economist). I think someone got my share of optimism.
Being heavy and sad would not go against my cultural identity if I was french. According to this other LINK, French people are taught to be gloomy. Amazing, huh? They have the best cuisine, great wines, haute couture, perfumes, the most beautiful language, and they will always have Paris, but they feel depressed because that´s the way French people are raised. An authentic French Paradox.
Well, I keep on trying to fight my gloominess and my heaviness. It´s a hard thing to do. One days are okay, others not, but I am seriously considering a séjour in Paris. I would love to be gloomy there. The only Paris I have at the moment is the one presented at a fantastic book. Paris seen from above. It´s called Above Paris: the aerial survey of Roger Henrard by Jean-Louis Cohen. It´s a personal attempt to change my perspective, seeing things from a different side. Coming from a person that tends to look down most of the time, it´s a good start.  

           

Peripheral

I was thinking about that, because that´s what I am, peripheral, or how I feel I am for many reasons, but, on this particular case, because I come from a peripheral country, where we speak a peripheral language.
It isn´t a bad thing. I feel is quite the opposite. It forces you to push your cultural boundaries. When your peripheral, you look to what is in the center, you want to be there. And the first step towards this goal of belonging is by learning other languages.
So I started with English which is the global language. Some say Mandarin would become more important, but I doubt, since I´ve heard that even native speakers avoid having long conversations on the phone because they can get easily confused. English is certainly easier than Mandarin, and for sure easier than French, a language that I love and have been trying to reach an above ridicule fluency for years. And despite protests that every once in a while take place in France (for those interested, I added some links Here & Here), Helàs, that´s the way the world goes.
So I thought trying to write in English could be an interesting and challenging exercise. I have a blog where I write in my peripheral and lovely native language, Portuguese, but, in English, I could reach a different public, write about different things, certainly from a different point of view, because an interesting aspect of learning foreign languages is that we think differently when we´re using a language that´s not our native. Every time I wrote something in either English or Spanish, I didn´t start by using Portuguese. My way of dealing with the subject was different, the logic behind the text was also distinct.
So here, I would be a peripheral writer, from a peripheral country, trying to write in a dominant and foreign language. Let´s see how it goes.    

The unbearable lightness of being, in the search of lost time: two childhood memories

I have a plan of reading Proust someday. The Search of Lost Time is waiting for me on the top shelf of my bookcase. I keep on postponing though, and the main reason is that I´m afraid of giving up reading. Proust is considered one of the most important names in  the twentieth century literature altogether with Joyce, and since I couln´t make it to the end of Ulysses (in fact, I coulnd´t make it to the end of the third page), failing to read him as well would have a terrible effect on my self-esteem, so I am waiting to read it when I have some free time.

But I started this post using the tittle from a different book, The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera. What is the connection, one might think. Well, memories, I would say. Just like the Madeleine in Proust´s book, the tittle of Kundera´s novel triggered several of  my own memories. And, since the idea I had in mind once I started this blog was to tell a history, a version of my history, of how I became invisible, well, it seemed to me as a very interesting begining.

The unbearable lightness of being. I read this book a long time ago. A sad story, from what I can remember. I always enjoyed sad histories, they seem more real, more close to me. I never got to understand the tittle, though. As I said, many years have passed, I was young, but maybe what Kundera wanted to express was how fragile life is and how hard it is to deal with that.  Anyway, what I most remember from the book is a dog, a female boxer breed named Karenin. Boxers are the sweetest dogs in the world, and I know that because I had one when I was a child.

Our dog was a male named Calèche, the name of a French perfume. It is a strange name for either a dog or a perfume, and the dog didn´t smell like French eau de toillette at all, but that was his name. We could do whatever we wanted with him. He never barked or tried to bite. Once, he brought home a chicken. A living one. The animal was stressed with the situation, but not injured. I think my father took the chicken back to its owner. One of my oldest childhood memory is of Calèche trying to catch his tail and never succeding, but he kept trying over and over.


One day, I woke up to see my dog agonizing in our front yard. It seems he had eaten some rodenticide, but we never knew for sure. He died right in front of my eyes and that is a memory I have. I was probably three or four. The unbearable heaviness of not being, he left us. My first encounter with death.

Years have passed and I got seriously ill: Hepatitis. I spent the whole period of my summer vacation in bed. I felt terribly alone, don´t remember seeing other kids around for a long time. I had to go through blood exams to see if my liver was fighting back the virus. I hated needles, I cried of fear. I thought I was going to die. I was seven.
The unbearable lightness of being, I didn´t die.

After that, I had my first depression. But that is another story. 

The art of becoming invisible

Part 1

I came to the conclusion that I am becoming invisible as years pass me by. Time passes and leaves me empty handed. Or, better said, leaves me with memories of what I was, or, even worse, of what I dreamed to be and never got to be.

I will try to tell my story. I´m not sure if I´m going to succeed, and if that would be of any interest. But the only way to know for sure is by trying, right? Let´s see how it goes. But not now, not today. Baby steps. Today, the blog was created. Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, I will start.