Ava Zvolenszky

If you’ve ever struggled with depression, you’ll probably fill my fridge with meat when you read the headline. But since I’m a rabid carnivore, I’ll consider it welcome. By the end, maybe you’ll try to get your meat back… or maybe not. I’m just telling you how I felt when I was depressed.

With a self-defense system set up better than the American pentagon, I went through life with smiles and trumpets, a lot of laughter, self-irony, and a baby’s sleep, which was activated when things got tougher. And they got tough. But I never wanted to feel that toughness. Because yes, it’s a choice, even when you’re doing nothing: to let it overwhelm you or stand up to it with everything you have and everything you don’t have. Although I sometimes felt it breathing down my neck, I stubbornly defied it with all the weapons I had. But that made me think I was losing my sensibility.

There have been and will be times when parents die, friends go their own way, blood or natural brothers brutally or, on the contrary, imperceptibly leave, lovers or spouses divorce, die, abandon or go to battle with unseen enemies and unknown to anyone but themselves, people with whom you saw yourself sitting on the beach old and wrinkled, laughing with all the muscles atrophied by years and common memories… pieces of you, with whom you thought you would grow old, are emaciated and take it in another direction and… you wake up naked. Stripped off of loved ones. Disabled. Surrounded by crowds, but alone. Belonging to no one. Suspended between heaven and earth. Not there, nor there.

Yes, sometimes even a bitch like me is fucked up. Sometimes big time! You didn’t think that everything is pink and fluffy or that these thoughts come from books or a beautiful dream. Most often, these are conclusions that come from far too tumultuous experiences.

From my relationship with snowboarding, my bottom has learned the most: how awful it is to fall from above, how hard it is to get up after its owner ate nonchalantly like it was the end of the earth, and how fast it can bruise.

It takes you 3 hours to choose a T-shirt, while I need 5 minutes and a good internet connection to move my whole existence on an island. You have 3 closets full of clothes, while my whole life fits in a suitcase and a laptop bag. And a bamboo plant. You keep a thousand things hiding in drawers; I throw away everything, except for what’s in my heart.

You have butterflies in your stomach, suddenly life turns pink, you feel that you can become a superwoman or superman and that you can fly or turn the world upside down now that you have found your foothold, you can no longer think about anything else but the proud one who occupies your days and the right side of the bed… the symptoms can be different. Still, the feeling remains the same: happiness all the way.

We’re all good at making plans about what we’d like our lives to look like. Usually for a 3-hour long coffee or a glass of wine, 7 cigarettes, and as many dreams. You get excited; your eyes twinkle; you’d start right now if you didn’t have one more sip.

They say there is a woman who never scolds her partner. But no one has met her, so she remains only an urban legend, just like the man who rides on a white horse and never forgets the toilet seat up.

The woman we all know is nagging her half. At least from time to time. The exact cause is unknown, but the British and not so British researchers have discovered a new theory that says she is nagging him out of misunderstood love and care. She, a kind of omniscient, he, apparently, only apparently, the fool of fools, since she has to educate him. Although he had survived properly until he came across her.

As my grandfather used to start “works,” that’s how we start “projects.” I swear, like a gypsy I am not, everyone has a “project” in their head or in progress. More in their head than in progress. And everyone is broken, but he can “fix” himself and evolve if he gives up “limiting beliefs.”

The 800m race… I hated it with all my heart as a child when I was an athlete. I was so good at the sprint and long jump events, but before I could go to the junior category and choose my events, in the “children” category, the regulations forced me to run the 800m race as well – endurance all the way.