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May your mother’s and Iulia’s memory live with us for decades, so we can pass it onto the next generations. While you are optimistic about getting better, I find myself a bit more on the pessimist side (quite uncommon of me given that I daydream so much). My mother works in a psychiatry, a punitive institution in the Romanian system, that resembles first a prison than an institution where you can care for those that need it more. Subjects are treated as “crazy”, deviants, people that need to be kept away from society. There are psychologists, excuse me, there is a pyshcologist, but patients often get only one session during their stay. The emphasis is on medication, sedating them, triggering neural process we do not yet fully comprehend in order to render them “apt to be in society”. To be apt within our community means to stay away from it, to protect the artificially constructed balance that is in fact nothing, but a farce.

To reveal one’s problems in this community means to accept yourself as a deviant one and to expect being isolated by the others. Claiming depression during the times of Andrew Tates brings onto you a speech given by a sixteen year old yelling into your ear that depression is not real and that it takes only 50 push-ups to get over it. I put the pessimism on paper in order to address the material conditions at play, in order to identify them and fight as much as possible. As always, a pleasure to read your newsletter. Keep it coming!

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