"I will never forgive my parents for forcing me to study a 'meaningful' field," says a man who struggles with the everyday. "Czechs are destroying children's dreams," he adds
For this interview, we met during the fall. That, you told me, is always the most challenging time of the year for you. Why is that?
I've been treating depression for a long time. I'm on medication and I'm stable, but even so, fall is always a turning point when I'm more observant of my moods and I try to collaborate with my doctor and therapist that much more, because the shortening daylight hours and bad weather, that always sets off the fatigue and the sleepiness first, and sometimes, if we don't keep an eye on it, it escalates into a new intense episode of my problems. And I'm always worried about it beforehand. I don't want to go through what I've already had to go through several times. It's one thing to be sad, but then my thoughts are so dark that I'm sad even having to get up and go to the bathroom. When you're deeply unhappy about basically everything, it's not easy to get through the day, the night, and then the next day... It seems endless and pointless.
You mentioned the feeling of endlessness and futility in your e-mail. Is that something you've been struggling with for a long time? Something that scares you on multiple levels?
Infinity and futility are the scariest words you can say to me. Because if you're doing something in vain, you're living in vain, and yet it's forever, that's a disaster. Unfortunately, those are the two main bogeymen in my mind.
Everybody always told me I was doing fine. I did well in school, I behaved well, I did well in my final exams, and I'm doing well at work. Before that, I was good at all my part-time jobs and I was good to the people around me - that's still true today. I'm just such a well-mannered kid. But I used to be deeply, deeply unhappy. So much so that many times I didn't want to live anymore. Now, thanks to medication and therapy, of course, it's better, and I will never stop supporting the idea of therapy and the field of psychology and psychiatry in general, because mental health is hugely important. In all the bad luck, I'm glad I grew up as a generation for whom mental health problems are no longer a fool's errand and going to specialists a display of desperation. If I had grown up in my parents' time, I probably wouldn't be around anymore.
You're referring to your parents. The differences between them and you aren't just that you grew up in a different time. There's generally been a long-standing friction between you and your mom and dad, right?
My parents are both college educated people. They're people who are proud of their degree - they have it written on their doorbell and their door. I never would have guessed that. They're people who are nice, I would never say they're not. But their worldview is something so horrible and so traumatic for me as a person that I still struggle with it to this day, even in therapy.
My parents always encouraged me to behave myself - I understand and respect that. But they also encouraged me to live a decent life and have a decent job. I'm having a bit of a problem with that now, because what is decent? What's a proper job? Especially the last one, we never agreed on.
This brings us to your main problem. What did you want to be when you were a kid?
I was always an artistic, shy, quiet kid. I liked to paint. When I was older, I fell terribly in love with artists like Michelangelo Buonarroti. When I was about 15, my parents took me to Rome. I saw the Sistine Chapel. And I knew that's what I wanted to do. I tried to emulate his style, but it was never the same on paper. My parents bought me a canvas, but that's where their understanding ended. I could have gone to art school and painted after school, but when I came up with the idea of transferring from my school to art school, my parents talked me out of it. I was a freshman in high school at the time. But even though I was good at it and never had a problem with my grades, I wasn't terribly fond of it.
Did you keep painting anyway?
Less and less. It's discouraging when you keep hearing that painting is a nice hobby, but I don't make a living at it, and that there really aren't many chapels in Prague where I could spend four years shading little clouds on the ceiling. I kept hearing that I could paint in my spare time, but that it wasn't work. It's not something I can make a living at. Plus, with the competition that's out there. I mean, they say anyone can paint if they spend some time doing it, and everyone wants to be paid to fiddle with crayons. My idea of life didn't make sense to them. They said you had to find something that would pay the mortgage, food and family expenses. We argued about it a lot, I cried a lot, but in the end I listened. I think a lot of people know this from their families. The Czechs are destroying their children's dreams.
Do you think it's some kind of national emblem? That it's different abroad?
I think it's different in the West. There, children are encouraged to do what they're good at and what they enjoy. They have extra tutoring and clubs for that. Over here, the child is crammed into tutoring for the things he's not good at, and what he's good at is ignored because there's nothing to fix. So all the kids learn the same thing and forget what they were naturally good at. So I went to law school after high school. So I'm a lawyer. Hooray.
Don't you enjoy your work?
I'll never forgive my parents for forcing me to study a "meaningful" field. It's true, I can always find a job. Especially in the city. But I've tried so many, and I've never enjoyed any of them. They won't let me do creative work because I don't have the paper for it.
Do you think your depression is partly linked to the fact that your talent hasn't been developed enough? That you haven't found yourself as an artist?
It has almost everything to do with it. It's not enough that I'm gay, if I were a painter, I think my grandmother would've had a stroke. The only thing she'd acknowledge me as is a room painter, because she said that's always needed. (laughs) I stopped painting sometime in my junior year of college. I was studying for exams, moved into a roommate's apartment where others were concerned that the paint smelled and it was making a mess... And when it became clear that I no longer had not only support at home, but time, and even interfered with where I was supposed to sleep, you just couldn't keep that interest.
Do you paint now that you live alone? Have you gone back to it?
That's also a topic I address in therapy. Sometimes I sketch something to get me started. I've bought everything I need, but I can't get into it. As soon as I lay everything out, suddenly I get really tired and I don't want to do it anymore. I feel like the enthusiasm will never come back. That I have some kind of block. I'm just another kid not doing what I wanted to do. That's not a disaster, is it?
