Back and Forth

By the spring of 2017, the anxiety had faded into little more than brief flashes of restlessness, subtle reminders of its presence lurking somewhere in the background.

The antidepressant I took each morning was doing its job, keeping it at bay while I prepared myself.

For a lasting solution—or perhaps just another pointless struggle?

I couldn’t really say.

I trusted my plan: after a year of treatment, I would be able to live without medication and without anxiety.

As if I were simply leaving a crutch behind.

Looking back, though, there was something else there as well.

A faint feeling in the background, as if I were nearing the end of a much larger preparation process.

Sometimes things like that only become visible in hindsight, from the distance of a few years.

This preparation may have begun as early as 2015, as anxiety started to take up more and more space in my life.

The injury, followed by knee surgery, slowly dismantled much of what I had built my identity around—especially the false versions of myself I had been carrying for years.

As the panic disorder intensified, it gradually confronted me with the unsustainability of a life built on unstable foundations.

At some point, this year-long struggle, marked by an overwhelming fear of death, tipped into something else. By the spring of 2016, it had transformed into a kind of inner presence that was difficult to put into words.

The symptoms, temporarily pushed into the background with the help of anti-anxiety medication, seemed to leave behind a sensitivity that felt both fragile and strangely resilient.

It was at this point that, after peeling away the first layer, I found myself face to face with a version of Dani that had been buried for a very long time.

From that point on, every significant event seemed to revolve around nurturing this unusually sensitive connection, right up to the first faint signs of an emerging artistic voice.

Despite all this, the anxiety itself had only been brought under control temporarily, with medication.

And yet, regardless of that temporary setback, I now look back on it as one of the most fascinating periods of my life.

That indescribable presence was simply waiting to unfold.

And then came 2017.

This year, for me, was about the conflict between opposing parts of myself.

One part wanted to rise, while another seemed determined to pull me back to a level I had only just managed to leave behind.

As the outer edge of my comfort zone became more visible, a growing inner tension emerged between the version of me that clung to the lifestyle I had maintained for years and the part that wanted to tear it down.

Before 2017, that opposing force had not been nearly as present.

As I mentioned earlier, I simply existed... without any real point of reference.

If someone asked how I was doing, I would usually answer:

"I'm okay."

And I thought...

No. The truth is, I wasn't really thinking anything at all.

Whether it was okay or not.

It simply was what it was, and I tried to enjoy it, especially when I saw the same attitude reflected in the people around me.

"You only live once."

"You have to enjoy life while you're still young."

I drifted across the surface, feeding myself as much stimulation and pleasure as possible to dull the growing sense that something wasn't right.

I simply couldn't see beyond the beliefs I held at the time. And although I felt that I was moving in the wrong direction, I couldn't imagine letting go of the life I had built around them.

That is precisely why letting go is so difficult.

On some level, we associate it with losing the life we know—or perhaps even with death itself.

It's difficult to see beyond that and believe that something far better may be waiting on the other side if we're willing to dismantle and release what no longer serves us.

Not that it's particularly easy.

Sometimes, when we refuse to do it ourselves, other parts of us seem to step in and do it for us.

That's what happened to me.

Something had to shake me out of the illusion I had been living in for years, where pleasure had become a way of avoiding an underlying sadness.That's what happened to me.

An accident helped.

So did the panic disorder that eventually took over my life.

The process was painful, and the struggle lasted far longer than I would have liked, but in the end it revealed something that reached beyond all of it.

It hinted at the possibility of growth—of a different path, perhaps even a happier timeline.

To get there, my old life first had to become impossible to maintain.

I had to experience a level of continuous fear so overwhelming that the only place left to turn for help was inward.

This kind of fear, the kind that follows you regardless of place or circumstance, leaves very little room for escape.

And somewhere within that inward retreat, a connection began to form.

A connection that gradually started rewiring the way I saw myself and the world around me.

And with it, an entirely different reality began to unfold.

In this world, the version of me that had always been rushing through life, constantly surrounded by people, began to find an increasing sense of safety in solitude.

It felt as though a protective, loving presence had freed me from the false roles I had been carrying for years and from the lingering guilt that came with them.

I could finally admit things to myself that I had spent years trying to hide beneath the constant stream of distractions that accompanied my restless pace of life.

Why I said and did certain things.

What intentions truly lay behind my words and behaviour.

And what it was that I might have genuinely been longing for beneath it all.

The feeling that something wasn't right, which had followed me for years, slowly began to transform into a sense of security.

As if I had finally found my path.

Slowly but surely.

At least for a while, the road ahead seemed straight.

Yet by 2017, that temporary sense of certainty began to falter as old patterns once again started demanding my attention.

All it took was the arrival of another summer...

After a winter marked by a quiet, frictionless retreat, the old habits I believed I had already left behind slowly began to reawaken.

As the weather grew warmer, memories of reckless summer drinking, festivals, and the pursuit of pleasure began resurfacing, quickly intensifying the conflict between my old mindset and the new one that had started to emerge.

No matter how distant one part of me felt those years had become, another part found them increasingly irresistible.

Even despite the fact that I had managed to hold my ground for a few months.

That was precisely the problem.

What I had achieved was only temporary restraint, not the resolution of the underlying cause.

At least not yet.

This is what I meant earlier when I said that letting go happens in layers.

Alcohol had been a part of my life since I was about fifteen years old. Every weekend without exception, and often during the week as well.

From reckless teenage stupidity to deeper conversations with friends in green parks, it somehow always seemed to be there.

I was an old-school kind of guy, with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other.

I genuinely loved that lifestyle. Yet after three or four years of excess, the enjoyment slowly began to fade, and what had once felt like fun gradually turned into a compulsive ritual soaked in guilt.

From that first shot of the night to the slow fading of the guilt that followed the next day.

After repeating the same cycle countless times, I eventually grew tired of it and decided to put an end to the whole thing.

About fifty times a year.

Of course, you could ask why I took it all so seriously.

Or why I couldn't just allow myself the occasional exception.

Partly because it felt completely unnecessary, and partly because more than one of the men in my family before me had their lives damaged by alcohol and drug addiction intertwined with depression.

And I felt that my family had carried that burden for long enough.

I began to notice that an older version of myself seemed to treat it as a basic requirement of life—much like most of the people around me did.

Of course, nobody ever said it out loud, yet it remained one of the unspoken foundations of our social gatherings.

By 2017, a part of me had started to see certain people and situations differently. Things that once seemed funny no longer felt quite the same, and that realization was unsettling. Relationships I had nurtured for years seemed to be slowly fading into the background.

But this layer—like so many others—didn't disappear overnight. It gradually peeled away as I moved back and forth, trying to find my place somewhere between the old and the new.

At the time, the false sense of calm provided by the medication was convincing enough to make me believe I was doing well.

A few tragicomic incidents from that year quickly suggested otherwise.