I've been thinking for a long time about whether I should even write this. I don't know who this text is addressed to or what I'm expecting from the people who read it. But I guess at some point you have to stop trying to deal with everything on your own and at least tell people what's actually going on.
I'm 40 years old. I'm from Russia, and I currently live in Argentina. I ended up here as a refugee because of my LGBT identity. I used to have a life of my own. Now, practically nothing of it remains.
My mother and younger brother have turned their backs on me. My middle brother has been at war since the first day of the war. I don't know what will happen to him, and I can't just go and be there with him. I'm in another country where I have almost no one.
I spent three years in a toxic relationship. It's both funny and sad that, at the end of that relationship, my partner told me outright: "You have to pay for having beauty by your side." Yes, yes, literally. You live with someone, you think it's a family. But in reality, it's a commercial transaction.
Over the past few years, I seem to have lost everything: my relationship, my home, my familiar surroundings, and the ability to feel like a person who has at least something to rely on. I have depression. Recently, I spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital. I'm very grateful to the doctors who treated me. No, not just the doctors, but the entire hospital staff. It helped me recover physically to some extent, but after being discharged, I returned to the same reality that was still there.
I don't have a permanent place to live or a job. I have no money. Sometimes the problem isn't that I can't afford something nice, but that I don't know how to provide myself with the bare necessities. Right now, I'm writing this post from a hostel, but tomorrow, most likely, I'll have to spend another night on a park bench, trying not to fall asleep.
Recently, I lost my phone. For some people, that's an inconvenience that can be solved by buying a new one. For me, it's another loss of a part of my independence. I found myself in an unfamiliar city where even the simple ability to open a map and figure out where to go matters.
I could go on listing all of this endlessly. But the point isn't even how many problems there are.
The strangest thing is that I've even stopped feeling alive.
I see people meeting up, talking, going home, spending time together. They have their groups of friends, families, familiar places. Even people who have ended up on the streets sometimes have acquaintances they stick together with.
And I walk the same streets and feel as though I shouldn't even be here.
Not in the sense that the people around me hate me or drive me away. No, sometimes someone will even smile politely. But I look at them and don't understand how to return to a world I was once a part of.
I've developed a very strange feeling that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't been through anything like this. It's as if my life has already ended, the book has been closed, and yet, for some reason, I keep walking the streets, talking to people, paying for a hostel, trying to do things. Physically, I'm here, but inside, everything feels as though the most important part is already behind me and no continuation is planned.
It's as if I'm not there, even though I exist.
I understand that this may be related to my depression. I'm not claiming that what I feel actually reflects reality. But understanding that doesn't make the feeling go away.
And the hardest part is that I can't simply resolve a few everyday issues and expect everything to pass afterward. I need a job, I need housing, I need to learn Spanish. All of that is obvious. But I no longer understand how solving these tasks is supposed to lead to a life in which there's a place for me again.
I'm trying to keep working on my creative project ā creating illustrations, coming up with scenes, building my own fictional world. Sometimes, while I'm working, I get some sense of meaning. But then I finish the work, publish the result, close the computer ā and return to the same place I was in before.
I'm no longer even sure why I keep working on this project. Maybe because it's one of the few things I still have. Maybe because I'm still trying to create something, even though I have absolutely no idea what's happening to my own life.
I've already reached out to people for help. Recently, I wrote a post in a local CĆ³rdoba community and honestly described my situation. People responded. Someone offered to help with food, someone messaged me privately, someone shared information about Spanish courses.
I'm grateful to them. I don't consider these responses insignificant. On the contrary, they reminded me that strangers are capable of showing concern.
But I also realized how difficult it is for me to explain just how deep things have gone. From the outside, my situation may look like the temporary difficulties of an immigrant who needs to find housing, a job, and learn the language. And all of that really is necessary. It's just that inside, I'm going through something much more complicated than a set of problems that can be solved one by one.
I don't know how to talk about this without turning my own life into a performance. I don't want to beg for pity, and I don't want to pretend that I have strength and confidence that I don't actually have.
I'm just trying to find some kind of point of connection with the world.
I really want to find myself among people again, people I can talk to, do things with, and gradually get to know.
I don't know exactly what I'm expecting from this post. Maybe nothing will happen. I understand that thousands of people share their stories on the internet every day, and mine isn't necessarily going to interest anyone.
But I decided to write it because I no longer want my drawings and messages saying that I need help to be the only evidence that I exist.
There's me behind all of this. A person who ended up in another country, lost almost all of his familiar connections, and is now trying to figure out how to keep living when his old life has been destroyed and a new one just isn't coming together.
I don't know how to get out of this state. I don't know where to find people who could become part of my life, or how to become part of someone else's life again.
I'm not promising that I'll fix everything soon. I can't say that this post is the beginning of my great comeback. I don't even know whether this story will have a continuation that I can imagine right now.
But I'm here. And I'm writing this.
