This chapter deals with mental unhealth. For contextual background, see chapter 46. If you are feeling down, there is help to get. If you want to share a story of yours, do not hesitate to reach out.
Vienna, Austria to Częstochowa, Poland. July 17 to 22.
I wiped my tears. It was as if I had just waken up from a bad dream. Typically, for each second after the eyes open, you feel more and more relieved that reality is as you left it yesterday. Sometimes, it was in fact not a dream at all, and all the horrors are still there around you. This time, it was a muddy mix of both. The sun, the wind, the trees and the fields told me everything was alright, but I could not listen to them, for my nightmares were still with me.
It all seemed unreal to me at the time. How could something so beautiful, so natural, not be? How could it be that I felt so differently about it, about us, before? How could I willingly reject her only a few months back? How can emotion and attraction to someone fluctuate so wildly? How is it that she, who was crazed in love with me not long ago, could now walk away without a worry in the world? It was not just that I didn't want to face the truth, I could not see it, could not understand it.
Things were not made easier for me by the fact that the future seemed uncertain. Perhaps with a clear and final rejection, painful as it would have been, I might have had fewer worries about what was to come. Now things were up in the air, not in a blue and bright sky but in dark, ominous clouds. It was unclear what would happen, but it sure didn't look good for me. Surely, a healthy and constructive path for me would have been to act decisively and set clear boundaries that would protect and respect my emotions. To tell her, regrettably but firmly, that if we could not be together I would have to put my focus elsewhere, and that uncertainty was the most detrimental for me at the moment. Surely, that would have been the strong and wise thing to do. But neither strength nor wisdom was anywhere to be seen, not even a little bit. Now I was the one mad in love, with heavy emphasis on mad. There was simply no way I could readily let go of even the tiniest possibility to be with her again.
There are plenty of memorable quotes on this issue, but particularly I recall a scene in The Shawshank Redemption, where a pair of convicts serve life sentences. Andy, the visionary of the two, means that hope is a light within that is always protected, an unbreakable force for good to cling to even in the darkest of times. Red, the realist, thinks differently:
Let me tell you something, friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. It can drive a man insane.
I have never been able to relate to Red's position. Perhaps I always felt so secure, so much in control, that the risk of shattered hopes was unfailingly triumphed by the drive of daring to dream. Now, things had changed, and I was in no condition to take more blows. There is no denying I am a dreamer and a romantic at heart, and a dreamer and romantic who is too wounded to dream of romance is a sad thing to behold, worse yet to embody. A pale shadow of myself, a fractured soul. Perhaps the lesson is that hope is a double-edged sword, capable of protection and harm depending on how and what you hope for. The hope to be with her again was indeed a most dangerous thing.
Over 300 kilometres of Czechia went by without me paying any attention to my surroundings. I stayed first in Brno with a day of rest, but I tended only to the most necessary needs and saw nothing of the city, sought no locals or travelers. Instead I reached out to friends and family, as much as possible. Now, more than ever, I needed all the support I could get.
I increased the daily cycling distances. The next stop was in Ostrava, over 160 km away. The cycling was physically easy as my body was in full fight and flight mode, the uphill slopes were barely noticeable. Mentally, it was a much different story. Hour after hour with my own thoughts was certainly not what I needed. I practiced breathwork. At some point, I focused solely on breathing for two hours straight. Ever so slightly, it eased the constant pain in the chest and chilled my burning head. Nothing was really the best I could do. I don't have a single photo from Czech Republic.
In Ostrava I stayed with Couchsurfing host Jan. Before he accepted me I had warned him that I was having a tough time, and yet it didn't feel quite right. While saving money is always a major upside of staying by hospitality, I tend to see it more as a bonus than the goal itself, which would be to make meetings with meaning. This time though, it was pure freeloading as I had nothing to give him in terms of energy or presence. I took advantage of him, and of that I am far from proud.
The night in Ostrava saw the peak of my desperation. I have never been particularly curious about drugs as I never found external help to explore the realms of the mind to be neither intriguing, necessary nor worth the costs. I have been lucky not to go through such bad times that I would need it for coping. But that night when sitting on the bed with head in hands, rocking back and forth, the agony was at a level I thought I could not handle. Among all the messy thoughts spinning around, one was crystal clear: If there was something available, anything, to make the pain go away, I would take it at all costs. It was luck and luck only that there was no dealer around to capitalise on my desperation. From that moment on, anytime I hear of someone who escapes their pain with needles or pills, I know it fully that it could have just as well been me.
It might seem strange to fall to such lows so abruptly. Indeed, I was surprised myself how badly I was hit, likely being unprepared and unprotected made it worse. I suppose as well that there have been many burdens building up over long time, long before the cycling started, all coming together in my most fragile moment. I might like to write poetically , but I am not exaggerating the levels of my struggle. It really was that bad.
After Vienna, there were three days were both mind and body were active warzones, fighting themselves in lack of tangible threat. Once I reached Krakow in Poland after the third leg post Vienna, my resources were exhausted. I went from hyper desperation to solemn melancholia. There was no strength, no will to fight anymore. For the first and last time, I considered postponing the rest of the journey. Flights from Poland to Sweden are cheap. It would be simple, everybody would understand, no one would judge. But the only pain I would spare myself would be the lone hours of cycling. I had no home prepared for myself, and flying back would solve nothing of what caused my sadness, only add to it the regret of stopping when I had come so far. I was never truly close to quitting, but I was tempted.
Krakow provided a bit of an uptrend. It is truly a beautiful city that I will be sure to return to in better form, and I found good company there. At the Hostel I met Daphne, a Dutch girl on her Interrail trip. Cooking a meal together with somebody lifted my spirits, and the company motivated me to see something of the old town as well. I also shared good talks with the Brit Sam who are working with rebuilding efforts in Ukraine. It was immediately evident that we both are drawn to places that most are not, in part for that very reason. We shared book tips and for a few moments I was taken out of my depressive bubble and back to hostel life. It might not have been the ideal remedy and still I was in a bad spot mentally, but it helped then and there.
On the fifth day after Vienna, there was a minor breakthrough. Toward the end of a day of cycling from Krakow to Częstochowa, half of it very scenic and the other quite rough, it was as if the sky cleared up after a storm. The dark clouds that had filled my mind disappeared for a moment and a sun shone on me. It smiled and said: "It will be alright. It will be alright." Again daring to hope, I switched the music to upbeat disco, happily unaware that things would get worse before they could get better.
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