Life Savior – My Best Friend

In March 2022, my friend didn’t want to live anymore. The self-destruction had been carefully arranged, yet the steady pissing had made him lazy. Before taking action, he gave himself one last chance and sought help in the emergency department of AIIMS Delhi. He spent the next few weeks in inpatient acute psychiatric care and a few months in an outpatient clinic.

After a long radio silence, I meet my friend in his small, sparsely furnished, relatively unadorned one-room apartment. It is in the Gleneagles Global Hospitals, near Unitech Cyber Park Gurugram. We sit at the small, rickety kitchen table on richly uncomfortable Ikea chairs, drink tap water and talk. It’s late summer 2022 and my friend has the worst of the last few months behind him. He seems tidy and full of life, wearing his favorite combination: gray jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt.

A little about myself

“You know, I always thought my own needs were irrelevant. I had learned early on how to get love and attention primarily by satisfying the needs and expectations of others, playing my role as a child properly: Just don’t bother. There was little to get from my father. He lived in his world of jobs and hobbies. I think his motive for fathering three children was the naive certainty: ‘Man must start a family’. Or maybe my brother was simply an accident and I then the compelling consequence. Also with my mother affection was hard to be gotten, the alcoholism absorbed it to a large extent. To the outside world, however, we carefully maintained the appearance of an intact family and functioned – as means of sanctifying this end – haplessly before us
My friend thinks. “I was unable to say whether my memory is playing a quick trick on me, but I can’t recall any confirmation that my people revered me. I think I know that they always did, but unfortunately, I rarely felt it. Nevertheless, I do not reproach them, I do not hold a grudge. They are not bad people; they just couldn’t do any better champ.”

Love

It makes me sad to hear my friend talk like that. At the same time, I am relieved that by now he sees through the causes that had made him this low self-esteem, quietly and reliably turning cog of society. A cogwheel that was usually only halfway happy when it was turning in a two-man gear. In partnerships, he had one person at a time on whom he could focus, whose needs and expectations he was allowed to satisfy. This provided him with the love, warmth, and closeness that had all too often been denied him as a child, his elixir of life, so to speak. However, he has now also internalized how excessive self-forgetfulness can result in a complete loss of self.

Success

My friend did not fall on his head. In elementary school, vocational training, and later at the University of applied sciences, he got very good grades without any substantial effort, but also any appreciation of his own. Professionally, he took one sensible step after another. Today he works as a project manager for a small software company and earns good money. So it is fair to say that he is successful.

“What does ‘successful’ mean? What good is professional success if you fail at being a person in your private life? I never had a plan for what to do with this strange life, either job-wise or off: Whereas in the working world, it’s relatively easy for me anyway. I’ve always been good with numbers and words, pretty quick on the uptake. With a background like that and a few diplomas, it’s easy to get a well-paid job in our economic system. But it never meant much to me. Somehow you have to pay the bills. My problem was that I didn’t know what to do besides my job because my own needs were a mystery to me.
I killed off the frustration about this mainly by smoking pot. As a result, the dark shadow became a cotton-soft emptiness and self-criticism fell silent. And so it was also quickly Monday again. I was allowed to get back on the hamster wheel and function.”

Happiness for life

I ask my companion what had eventually kept him from doing the arranged self-destruction and how it might have overcome much in any case. “Goodness, I’m a champion at covering negative sentiments; that is probably an effect of my surroundings. If you don’t get what you so desperately need as a child, then a survival mechanism probably kicks in that tries to straighten out the psyche. That is at least my theory. The disadvantage is that you don’t get much of what you’ve repressed – and at some point, the depressive barrel is overflowing and it just doesn’t work anymore.

For me, the tipping point was that last winter I was left in a rather nasty way by a person I liked very much and trusted completely. I found that so unfair that I concluded ‘Okay, that’s enough, I don’t like it anymore’. But now I am here after all. Ironically, thanks to the same trait that had led to the whole scandal in the first place. Yet again I put my requirements second, needing to save everyone around me from some way or another managing my self-destruction.”

Present day

How he is doing today, I asked.

He answered:

Once a writer said: ‘Happiness is a subtraction calculation. You have to throw everything out of your life that makes you unhappy. And what remains is happiness’ – I now try to follow this motto. I don’t do drugs and, if possible, I don’t do anything else that could harm me. I find happiness in singing, music, reading, and writing, playing board games and cards, in nature, in being with people who are dear to me. I’m still learning who I am and what I need, and sometimes there are lows, but the direction is right. My friend has finally turned the corner, and that’s a good thing.
I am my friend.

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