Mom and I quarreled again, because she thought that I did not want to be cured, and I could not convey to her the thought of what I had found out. Maybe the truth was too easy for her, or she just didn't believe me. Later, when my father, my mother, and I drove home from the hospital where my mother spent a couple of days due to poisoning, I told her that we would no longer quarrel. Since then, every time she started grumbling at me, I just kept silent, and she calmed down, not getting any reaction from me. In the end, we completely stopped quarreling, and I tried to start every new day saying “good morning!” to my mom.
While looking through the comments of people on the site of Roman Snezhko, I read a review of a guy who wanted to remove not only the habit of talking in a hurry and trying to think about something during a conversation, but also all the other bad habits in his life. I liked this idea, and I thought to follow suit.
That night I went to bed and for the first time I was able to completely remove all thoughts and fantasies from my mind. Each time a new thought or fantasy manifested itself, I immediately and calmly noted this and continued to be focused on reality. Then for the first time in a long time I fell asleep calmly, full of joy and optimism about the coming day – because I had everything to finally get out of myself.
That night I had a dream where I was in the bathroom, standing right in front of the mirror. The picture seemed to switch from my point of view to the point of view of my reflection. The difference was that in one case my face was completely normal, beautiful, and calm, and in the other, it was very distorted and tense. That distorted face told me: “Я никогда не дам тебе выйти из себя” (I will never let you get out of yourself).
I woke up. It was a sunny day. I then immediately got up instead of lying a little more in bed, fantasizing and, possibly, masturbating, as I did before for many months, maybe years. I was focused on reality and inspirited. My mind was absolutely clear.
Having come to the bathroom, I was stunned when I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I do not know how in the previous years I did not notice that I began to go bald. However, this is not at all surprising, since in those years I did not look in the mirror at all, and if I did it was just for a moment, and my fantasies, which I was having by that time already constantly, almost completely covered the data that came from my sensory organs. My reflection also reminded me of the lip asymmetry, which I forgot about too, because in my fantasies I was completely beautiful and healthy.
This incident could not leave me untouched, since from my point of view my appearance changed in an instant, but I still continued to change the course of my life. To begin with, I needed to find my passport, as I fantasized so much in the previous months that I forgot my last name. Yes, as it turned out, this can also happen. Then I found the phone number of the labor exchange and immediately called them. I was invited to come to the employment center tied to my place of residence.
It seemed interesting to me that the center is relatively close to 2nd Vladimirskaya Street, where we often went to visit the clinic, in which doctors tried to cure stuttering with some little spherical medicines. Still very often I underwent an EEG analysis (Electroencephalogram). They put a cap with electrodes on my head and did different measurements of brain activity. Sometimes I needed to sit relaxed, and sometimes I needed to breathe heavily, which sometimes made my head spin. I walked down that street on my way back, thinking how the doctors tried to treat with drugs for 13 years that which was dispelled in three seconds that I read the words “Stuttering is not a disease! Stuttering is just a habit…”
Even though it was the end of January, there was no snow on the street, and it was quite warm for the winter.
In the building of the employment center, they gave me a list of vacancies that I had to call in search of work. Surprisingly, I was hired for the first courier job. I called them because their office was a twenty minute walk from my house, next to the Moscow City Court.
But I did not start working right away. I think that there was a slight misunderstanding on my part, and I told one of the bosses that I could work in a couple of days, as my uncle Vitya had died.
I never went to my uncle’s funeral. I do not think that one case that slightly offended me in the village had anything to do with it. Then I was still a boy, and Uncle Vitya, as if for no reason, told me: “I do not understand, are you a fool or something?” There was another moment when he and my friend were discussing me in a clearly negative tone in the attic of our Big House. Unfortunately, this is not the only case when my relatives were not averse to amusing themselves and the company, expressing something negative about me. I remember how we met my cousin when we rode scooters around the countryside near our village. I then drove a bit forward, and looking in the rearview mirror I saw how they mocked me, looking and nodding their heads in my direction. In some families family ties do not mean much…
Becoming to pay more attention to what was happening in real life, I immediately noticed the presence of something that I had not noticed before due to the almost constant stay in my head – it was a pretty loud noise from the air conditioners of a branch of one of the Russian banks which in those years was right under our apartment. Mom had already written complaints about them because of the loud noise, and once the bank really rearranged its air conditioners in order to lower them, but their annoying noise still continued to go to the apartment.
The first of February 2007 I went to work for the first time. My first day at work was training. I just walked with another young employee to various offices in Moscow. As I understand it, without a foot courier, the bosses often ordered him to deliver parcels and correspondence. Everything seemed normal. But when I came to the office the next day, the first thing I heard when I opened the door was: “What do you think of our courier?” – coming from that guy’s lips while he was leaving the front door. One of the young female employees quickly appreciated me and said that I was a very normal guy, albeit a little balding. Most likely, she changed her mind after a couple of weeks later when I looked at her awkwardly, still being shy, about which she immediately told the secretaries.
I have no purpose to shame someone in this book, but for subsequent events in my life, it will be important to mention that it soon became clear that some employees of the small company had sex with each other, but two still formed normal a couple. Then one new girl calmly told the secretary that she slept with the guy with whom I was during my training day.
I never liked the theme of one-night-stands, or when people who barely knew each other had sexual intercourse. There was a case in, if I remember correctly, the eleventh grade, when a guy who deprived of virginity the same girl who asked me if I wanted to be her boyfriend, boasted to two of my friends that he had sex with a “drop dead brunette” to whom he came to help with a computer, and then he asked them how things were in their “personal life”. Personal… It is funny and sad at the same time that that guy subsequently called the previously mentioned girl with a word starting with the letter “W”, since she slept with many guys during two years of study, and he did not want to be with her because of this… Of course, there is a chance that I was hurt that someone really has sex, because I envied them deep inside. But I think that an innate sense of morality also played a role in my sorrows.