I spent two weeks travelling in Bulgaria with my boyfriend. Our main purpose for the trip was to visit my uni friend in Sofia, who I haven’t seen since graduation. Other than that however, I needed mostly a getaway from  life in Germany, I love it, but sometimes my inner urge to escape from physically non existing limits catches up with me.

I started thinking on the train at sunset.

Having battled with depression since I was 13, I have had quite a few good years where I am mentally stable and thriving. During term time in uni life was a bliss in a sense because I was so busy, thinking about life wasn’t exactly something I had the time for. When holidays kick in, my old friend depression would sneak in through the backdoor in my head again. Summer after first year was the rock bottom, in scorching heat I lived alone in the tiniest room next to London King’s Cross, had nothing to do after I get off work, only one book sat quietly on my desk collecting dust.

Writing in most formats was a coping mechanism for the better days. I wrote diaries recording my mental state everyday, analysed those of previous days, scanning for traces of relapse. I stopped writing that kind of diaries after that summer. Then I met my boyfriend, who successfully drove my compelling thoughts away by relentless chattering. We are great together because of that, he worries a lot about practical things and people around us while I simply don’t give a fuck and when I have existential dreads and panic on the irrefutability and finality of death, he tells me what happens after death including death itself is non of his living business. It’s funny how I can absolutely peacefully agree with most philosophers such as Wittgenstein on their ice cold rational view on death, being that it is not a part of life and nobody lives to experience it, but at the same time feel the implication of death in terms of finitude of life itself all too harshly. Neither can I dissociate myself from pondering the death of solar system, when the sun’s raging heat engulfs what’s left of earth, what happens to humans? What happens to all the stories about humanity that had chimed through our history? The idea of eternity of nothing in the universe unsettles me, though it’s true that it’s none of my business.

In recent years I have gradually figured out a way to convert all the uneasiness into motivation for living harder. More concretely it translates to a stern principle of being true to myself and constant self reflection. In the book Man’s search for meaning a wise man says that people live their whole life searching for a meaning. I think people find meaning at different points throughout their lives, for me I find my life exactly the meaning if there is ever one to be found. I collect meanings as I live and I use all the past meanings that make up me right now to live some more.  I keep coming back to the last chapter of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in this light,

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

I find that there are a lot speakable in the world, and that mysticism does simplify the latter a lot, and to live harder, one must find their own speakables to not dwell on the unspeakable.