Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Fluoxetine Journal 03.02.10

The more time I spend with my younger brother the more I realize I love him, and each day I happen to love him more, I would like to spend with him every hour of my life and I know I can´t; my love is unconditional and this is something I hadn´t experienced before, at least not this way. Everything about him makes me feel happy and even when I discipline him, I feel my love is still pouring, and why not say it, even criminals can love their brothers, can´t they? He gives me so many sources of joy, when he smiles, his questions, his hesitations, just to lay next to him, to tend to him. I also wonder about everything I missed in the years of my absence. This makes me so curious about something that I will most likely never find out: What is it like to be a parent? I assume it should be something a hundred times higher than what I feel for my brother, but then at the same time I can´t understand why anyone would be a parent like my father, or how does it happen along the way although most likely I do have the answer, but am unwilling to toy with it. I don´t know to which extent this has to do with my age, probably in nothing at all… In some respects I´m very immature for my age and in other respects, the total opposite is true. I remember my conversations with Levy years back about the kind of parents that we would both be, and hell, that´s another guy I love, a real brother of sorts and the companion of very important years in life; that´s of course from long before he came out, and that was a hell of a surprise to me although it just happened because I didn´t want to see it, all the signs were out there and they were crystal clear, it was perhaps my choice not to see any of it. I think there´s something deep inside Jewish society about being a parent, or well, inside every human being I suppose, but it´s much stronger among traditional Jews, but I suppose traditional Christians don´t divert so much from the idea. I dreamt too often about the house and the children themselves, their names, their schools and their education; their adult life and my later years. It was so beautiful the way I saw it, but then my own life at home with parents didn´t seem at all like what I thought or what anyone who knew me thought. This isn´t an official complaint about dissatisfaction with a service delivered, but more like a free-spirited statement about how usually things are not the way you would want them to be. Those parenthood dreams of course were from a time now lost into the past when I didn´t fall asleep several times a day because of neurological unbalance, when I could get up from bed without 20 mg of something, when I didn´t spend two weeks without being able to focus on a single page, when I didn´t stop seeing people all of a sudden for weeks. Again this is not a complaint, only because right now I seem to have the ability to live my own life acceptingly and that´s something that was so much missing in my life before and the source of so much helpless and useless anxiety. But as far as parenting goes, it seems I will have to be satisfied with being a good brother, even when I know so well that I will be away for most of his lifetime, even when I´m not away. I´ve been absent from my own for long periods, that´s how I know. Note: If I had known when I was 18 that this is actually what a chronic depression would come to mean at the age of 25, I would have certainly done something about it. But this is to no avail now, not that this is something terminal, without a possible solution; but the way back to cope normally, or at least to cope sober, is very difficult and I must accept it for the first time. To accept that this is a little big for me, the way I feel now, it is a little big for me. And what do I know, maybe I´m exaggerating because after a bath then always everything looks so normal, well that´s when I remember to have one. This is of course speaking only of the last weeks. I haven´t loved myself too dearly and this is completely consistent with a chronic depression, isn´t it? It´s not a bad time to start over, I guess that´s a great wonder about mankind: They can always create a new beginning.

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